.
It appears that playing the victim card to get a carte blanche to commit offences yourself doesn't work so well for Israel any more. They're so much used to it that they don't seem to be able to follow a different approach, though.
The death toll of the October 7th attacks by Hamas appears to be roughly 1/3 combatants (I'm not sure whether this includes deaths among those who were taken prisoner by Hamas fighters and other Gaza Strip inhabitants).
This compares very unfavourably (for Israel) to the ratio of civilian to non-combatant deaths in Gaza Strip by the counteroffensive.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/fight-keep-counting-dead-gaza-2023-12-21/
Moreover, Israel keeps producing evidence that its armed forces are intentionally destroying the real estate in Gaza Strip, including all universities.
The demolitions were actual demolitions, by a long shot not all damage done during combat. Many already swept buildings were destroyed by demolition charges, which is hardly ever justifiable.
The conflict in the levante is a conflict of counterviolence to counterviolence. Any claim that a particular action is a response to an original aggression is laughable. The people who started the conflict were already disposed of by biology. There's little point in trying to figure out who is more at guilt than the other in such a cycle of counterviolence. Words don't matter much, either - actions matter. Israel is killing way more civilians, and has been doing so for decades already. It couldn't have come this far without playing the victim card so effectively for so long, and it won't get much farther if that doesn't work any more.
Israel should stop being drunk on its perceived power and mind the fate of the crusader states: They didn't collapse because the Arabs beat them in battle; they dwindled away when the overseas allies lost interest in supporting them. Their overseas allies lost interest in supporting them because they lost confidence in that crusades were a worthy cause.
S O
.
Netanyahu knows his career probably ends when the fighting does. Mossad's control in America is also weaker in the post-Epstein era. Israel is in a milder version of Russia's situation: they have one last gambit in this generation and need to milk it for everything they can.
ReplyDeleteWhere do you find reliable numbers on people killed in Gaza and what ratio of them are combatants?
ReplyDeleteThere are no fully reliable figures by or about either side.
DeleteThe available figures are plausible to the point that it's implausible that the true figures are very much different.
This creates a certain margin of error for the figures regarding both sides and in the end I'm confident that my lines
"The death toll of the October 7th attacks by Hamas appears to be roughly 1/3 combatants (...) This compares very unfavourably (for Israel) to the ratio of civilian to non-combatant deaths in Gaza Strip by the counteroffensive."
are spot on.
IMO reasonable people do understand that certainty is almost always absent and consequences have to be drawn based on somewhat uncertain information rather than to wait for certain information.
Even the civilian casualty on Oct 7 is mixed with bullshit. When a reservist defends their kibbutz home with an M4 they laud them as a hero. When they get killed they were civilian victims of evil terrorists. Which is it? Make up your mind ffs.
ReplyDeleteMeh. Hamas uses "meat-shield tactics", you cant kill Hamas terrorists without collateral damage.
ReplyDeleteEven assuming that explains all the civilian deaths and assuming that civilian deaths were excusable (tricky thing actually), it would not justify at all the demolishing of buildings that were already cleared.
DeleteThat smells like ethnic cleansing effort or like a systematic effort to destroy the livelihood of a people.
This may meet two criteria (only one necessary) of article II Genocide Convention (even without taking into account direct killings):
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml
https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/welt/osteuropa/politik/ukraine-krieg-deutschland-milliarden-kosten-energiepreise-100.html
ReplyDelete