CNN’s Wolf Blitzer seemed at a lost of words at the justification being used to bomb a refugee camp in Gaza.
The “it’s all so complicated” MFs have been quiet
Oh, I’ve seen them saying a bunch of things. Combinations of “Well, it’s not actually a refugee camp” and “the US also bombs civilians to take out military targets” and the long-used canard “they were warned to go south”.
“the US also bombs civilians to take out military targets”
Not wrong though.
IRC the initial shock and awe coordinated ‘surgical’ bombing at the beginning of the 2003 Iraq war cost the lives of up to 8000 Iraqi civilians. I remember watching it at the time, and American media were really gushing about that whole thing. Going on about how precise it all was. Apparently if you dress it all up in a bit of newspeak (collateral damage, precision bombing, surgical strike, …) you can convince most people that the pressure wave from a large bomb stops at the window of a building.
Maybe international law is too lax. Maybe the US is too powerful to face consequences for anything but the most egregious examples, but then again it’s not as if the world (including the middle-east) gives much of a shit when Assad barrel bombs yet another a hospital. And no one gives a shit about the thousands who died in Sudan this year, because they’re black, so they apparently don’t count.
In a deeply cynical way, it makes sense that the IDF and Israel think it’s unfair. Why should they get so much flack for war crimes, when others get away with it consequence free? China got to demolish ten thousand or more mosques, Russia got to demolish multiple cities and deliberately murder sheltering children, it’s only fair that Israel gets to commit a bit of genocide.
I’m old and tired, and please understand this is an angry and sarcastic comment, but I do wonder what people think war is actually like. Especially urban warfare. Because given history, it seems to me that this is what it’s always like. Thousands of dead civilians, razed buildings, and flimsy excuses and technicalities which allow countries to get away with (not so) accidentally murdering thousands. The world’s biggest and least funny joke.
Maybe international law is too lax. Maybe the US is too powerful to face consequences for anything but the most egregious examples
I mean, the US has a legal device to allow them to declare war and invade Hague if the ICC ever tries anything to them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members'_Protection_Act
Though my point in bringing it up is that it’s not even an actual excuse when Israel defenders use it. We Americans actively protested such things as well, as war crimes and violations of international law.
Trying to blatantly use illegal US actions as an excuse for one’s own illegal actions, such as Netanyahu in his speech trying to use the US response to 9/11 as a reason for Israel to do the same, is appalling at best.
Perhaps I would be more appalled if I was even slightly surprised by it. You know how there were protests in Israel before the war about the supreme court?
This is one of the reasons why:
From one old and tired person to another, thanks for adding context to what is usually context-less and naive platitudes around here.
I’m in the “this is not black and white” camp, but what Israel is doing now is indefensible, even when considering the inhuman atrocities Hamas committed on October 7th. Bombing a refugee camp in the hopes of killing a few Hamas terrorists is just crazy. Flattening a city full of civilians for the same reason is just crazy.
That said, I don’t know what the answer is. I honestly believe there’s no solution to this conflict. Proposing that Israel remove the border controls and let the Palestinians roam free, given the number of terrorists in their ranks, is just hopelessly naive. They should absolutely return the illegal settlements, but even if they do that (sadly they won’t), the terrorists won’t stop.
Fuck them both, is my view.
Fucking hell. IDF is doing an indefensible acts speedrun, I guess.
Weird that I would think “What sort of twat calls himself Wolf Blitzer” and then find out he was born in Germany and think “Oh that’s quite normal then”
WTF Germany that sounds like a blender for wild canines 😂
It’s actually a really cool name. Translate it’s Wolf Lightning or Flash. But a blender…I wouldn’t have thought of that.
I haven’t studied German for decades but I remember the suffix ‘er’ is someone who does that thing, same as English
So it’s even cooler, it’s Wolf Lightning Man
Er means that in English, Frisian, and Dutch too.
wolf lightning-er
I’m a native German speaker and when I hear “Blitzer”, I think of those cameras police use to enforce speed limits. You know, the ones with the red flash to let you know you’ll be getting a ticket.
It’s crazy that you can go on Reddit and see people claiming it wasn’t a refugee camp meanwhile the IDF has confirmed it was a refugee camp.
They’ve fallen for the Israeli propaganda machine so hard that they are more extreme in their defense of the IDF than the fucking IDF.
It’s not really israeli but US propaganda at this point. On reddit it’s clear what s the editorial line of most moderators
Their onboarding lie to the US citizens was very successful with the decapitated babies claim parroted by the president and those asinine 9/11 and Pearl Harbor references to the October 7th attack. Textbook propaganda by ripping open old scars to instill hatred and dehumanizing your enemy.
Bold of you to assume those are actual people on Reddit
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The confusing is from there being Jabalia city and Jabalia refugee camp nearby. The bombed the latter.
It seems like Hamas got exactly what they expected. Extreme insane reaction that shows the IDF for what they really are.
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The Times of Israel’s take on this:
The Israel Defense Forces says it has killed the commander of Hamas’s Central Jabaliya Battalion, Ibrahim Biari, in an airstrike in the Gaza Strip a short while ago.
The military said the strike killed Biari and several other terrorists and caused underground terror tunnels to collapse, bringing down several nearby buildings.
Palestinian reports said at least 50 people were killed in the strike and subsequent collapse.
According to the IDF, Biari was one of the Hamas commanders responsible for directing members of the terror group’s elite Nukhba forces to invade Israel on October 7.
The IDF says the airstrike in Jabaliya was part of “a wide-scale strike” on Hamas operatives and infrastructure belonging to the terror group’s Central Jabaliya Battalion.
According to the IDF, the Central Jabaliya Battalion took control of several civilian buildings in the area.
“The strike damaged Hamas’s command and control in the area, as well as its ability to direct military activity against IDF soldiers operating throughout the Gaza Strip,” the army says in a statement.
It says “numerous” terrorists were killed with Biari, and “underground terror infrastructure embedded beneath the buildings, used by the terrorists, also collapsed after the strike.”
The IDF says it also “reiterates its call to the residents of the area to move south for their safety.”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-says-jabaliya-strike-killed-top-hamas-commander-collapsed-terror-tunnels/So, they have no actual evidence they killed the guy.
And the move south rhetoric is clearly irrelevant, since if there are any Hamas people in the south, they’ll bomb the civilians there anyways. So why does the location matter?
True, it appears they will indeed hit Hamas targets no matter where they are:
“Wherever a Hamas target arises, the IDF will strike at it in order to thwart the terrorist capabilities of the group, while taking feasible precautions to mitigate the harm to uninvolved civilians,” the military said on Wednesday, reiterating previous statements.
The military has said the homes where militants live are “legitimate targets” even if civilians live alongside them.However, it seems like going south is probably still in civilians’ interests, IDF says there are more targets in the north and once ground forces go in they are going to consider anyone remaining north of the Gaza river to be a potential enemy combatant:
The military said the order was aimed at moving civilians away from “Hamas terror targets”, which it believes are concentrated in the north. …
Military spokesman Jonathan Conricus subsequently said: “We are preparing the area for significant military activity in Gaza City. That is the next stage. That’s why we are asking civilians to go south of the Gaza River.” …
Israel renewed its warnings on Oct. 22, saying that anyone staying in the north could be identified as sympathisers of a “terrorist organisation” if they did not leave.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/why-is-israel-attacking-south-gaza-after-telling-people-go-there-2023-10-25/“Go south or we’ll bomb you”
“Oops we bombed you anyway rofl”
Israel has already bombed the evacuation corridor this invasion, as soon as they’re done in the north they’ll go south and murder more innocent children.
as soon as they’re done in the north they’ll go south and murder more innocent children.
Unlikely, I suspect they will annex north Gaza and move the wall.
The location does matter for the ground troops since the can then sweep the buildings easier
the legitimacy of western hegemony is seriously tested here
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Zionist psychopaths.
So the argument here is that Hamas’ military commander, the commander of the raid that started this current conflict, set up his command and control network inside of a refugee camp. And Israel bombed it.
If the command and control center for the on the ground active military commander isn’t a valid military targets, what is?
It’s a refugee camp filled with innocent people. No amount of justification or propaganda changes the fact that this was a refugee camp and a high degree of civilian casualties was guaranteed. This is a war crime.
This is a war crime.
On the part of Hamas right? For placing valid military targets inside of otherwise protected Civilian areas.
On the part of Hamas and Israel. War crimes don’t stop being war crimes just because you’re fighting war criminals.
They sort of do in this case. The reason the strike would be a war crime is that a refugee camp is explicitly civilian infrastructure. Under the conventions of war, explicitly civilian infrastructure is suppose to be spared from attack. And attacking it is a war crime.
When you co-locate military infrastructure there it loses it’s protections as it’s no longer explicitly civilian infrastructure. And a strike against it ceases to be a war crime.
Ah yes, who can forget all the famous scenes in action movies where the “good guy” shoots 50 “human shield civilians” while attempting to get the “bad guy”.
Zionism is cancer.
Unfortunately the real world isn’t a movie studio.
You can send a strike group to kill them. Safer for civilians, but less safe for soldiers. Thus, they prefer to bomb it from a distance, and the civilians around are “acceptable collateral damage”.
You can’t when they’re not at the front. And as long as the c&c infrastructure exists, sending troops on the ground to take objectives is difficult.
Taking out control infrastructure with remote bombing has been a thing since the first artillery pieces.
According to the sentiment of many other comments, no targets are acceptable if there’s any chance of civilians getting hit as collateral damage. This essentially means no targets in Gaza are acceptable for air strikes, and the consequence of this would be sending IDF ground troops into a densely populated and well-prepared guerilla fighters’ den with extremely high casualties. It seems like most of the critics can’t accurately imagine themselves in Israel’s position, portraying them as cartoonish villains rather than people trying to keep themselves safe.
Yeah just people trying to keep themselves safe in that land they took that did not belong to them.
Before Palestinian forces declared war on them in 1948, Jewish settlers started out legally buying the land. and I believe those who did not flee and were not driven away in the Nakba retained their land. Certainly there were a lot of bad actors in this conflict though, lots of terrorist attacks and massacres by both Arabs and Jews once the cycle of violence got going. Many thinking they were temporarily fleeing danger only to later learn they cannot return.
Yeah just people trying to keep themselves safe in that land they their ancestors took that did not belong to them.
1948 was a long time ago.
