Its worth understanding that if there is no hope of rescuing or releasing the hostage, all you are doing is giving them time to regroup. This is why, particularly in the 70s and 80s, many countries (famously the US) took a "we don't negotiate with terrorists" stance. It was determined that the terrorist groups had no intention of ever releasing the hostages and your option was to attack immediately or wait, watch a few hostages get executed, and attack a fortified position.
But, under those circumstances, you have troops on the ground seeking out the hostages. And the IDF have no signs of having done this so...
They're literally saying "you still not be forgotten" while bombing the shit out of Gaza even though most are still alive and some have been released. They're nothing more than a casus belli. Israel doesn't give a shit.
Get the fuck out here with the "don't negotiate with terrorists" shit. Had Israel not negotiated with terrorists then they wouldn't have exchanged 1000 Hamas fighters, including the current head of Hamas in Gaza, sitting 4x life-long, for a single IDF soldier.
That shit only works if it's doctrine and you don't ever the fuck blink. Which is the right way to go about things, but also not what Israel did, especially Likud governments: Instead they've been sappy and emotional about it, milking it for votes.
Also right now the families of hostages are the #1 critics of Netanyahu's government.
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.
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.
“But even if that Hamas commander was there amidst all those Palestinian refugees who are in that Jabalya refugee camp, Israel still went ahead and dropped a bomb there attempting to kill this Hamas commander knowing that a lot of innocent civilians—men, women, and children—presumably would be killed?” Blitzer asked. “Is that what I’m hearing?”
Dude, Wolf Blitzer gets it. Don't let yourself seem like the less reasonable party when Wolf Blitzer's involved.
He actually says in the clip, "I'm having a hard time hearing you" after the long pause, so it's also kind of inaccurate. The response was still horrifying but reporting the information correctly would still be cool.
You've got it backwards. Israel has never been the victim in this conflict. There's almost a century now of Israel oppressing Palestine to take their land. Hamas is just responding to Israel. If Israel backed the fuck off this would all go away. Or at least it would have; not so sure if anyone in Palestine will let Israel be after what they've been doing in October...
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 😂
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.
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/
Dam! who are the Nazi now? They literally have people locked up behind walls and are denying the food and other resources. They cant even fish for food unless allowed.
Nazis are defined by their focus on white supremacy with an emphasis on "aryan" whites. Jews and Arabs were very much a target of their regime.
Not all fascists are Nazis. The Israeli government has become increasingly fascist over the past decades and the IDF has a long history of war crimes and crimes against humanity with an emphasis on ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Please don't trivialize "Nazi" when they are still a very active threat in many different nations.
They're literally doing final solution shit in front of our eyes. Comparing them to the Nazis (a fascist ethnic supremecist nation on their genocide arc) absolutely stands.
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.
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".
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.