Israel - Hamas War X

[Darryk]

Really shocked and dismayed by his tweet.

[Zorral]

Why shocked?  It's not as if he's been hiding what he is, but rather reveling in showcasing it, particularly since he took the twit.

[Zorral]

The near-total communications blackout in the Gaza Strip continued Friday, after telecommunications companies said they had run out of fuel needed for generators to power equipment, and backup batteries shut down. No humanitarian aid is expected to reach Gaza on Friday due to the blackout and the lack of fuel, United Nations agencies told The Post. Phone calls to doctors in Gaza only yielded an automated message saying connections to the Strip had been cut off. The Israel Defense Forces said Friday its operations at al-Shifa Hospital “are ongoing,” though it did not confirm if troops were within the hospital complex or in the wider area.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/17/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news-palestine/

Quote

Not for nothing do myriad critics of Israeli policy fear that the nation is orchestrating a campaign of de facto ethnic cleansing. The majority of the territory’s population is already displaced, with no guarantees that they may ever return to their homes. In a statement Thursday, a panel of U.N. human rights experts reiterated that the “grave violations committed by Israel against Palestinians” since Oct. 7 raised “the risk of genocide in Gaza.” Omer Bartov, an Israeli historian of the Holocaust, recently said that the loud calls for Gaza’s destruction and depopulation coming from corners of the Israeli right display a “clear intention of ethnic cleansing.”

Quote

 

JERUSALEM — No humanitarian aid has been able to reach Gaza on Friday amid a lack of fuel and a near-total communications blackout, spokespeople from United Nations agencies told The Washington Post.

UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, which is coordinating the humanitarian response inside Gaza, said it received some 23,000 liters of fuel — the equivalent of half a tanker — on Wednesday, in the first such shipment Israel has allowed across the Egyptian border since the start of the war.

Israel cut off electricity soon after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, and fuel needed to power key humanitarian services and aid trucks has since virtually run out.

The initial delivery on Wednesday allowed UNRWA to bring some trucks carrying humanitarian aid across the border from Egypt into the Gaza Strip on Thursday, according to Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for the agency. But it was “by far not enough.”

After telecommunications companies ran out of generator fuel and backup batteries on Thursday, Gaza was plunged into another blackout, rendering aid delivery impossible. It’s the fourth such blackout since the start of the war, and if telecommunications companies don’t receive fuel, it could go on indefinitely.

“It’s extremely difficult when you don’t have phones, when you don’t have internet. We cannot coordinate. We lose contact with the vast majority of our staff on the ground,” Touma said. She was able to reach the agency’s head of office in Gaza on Friday morning via satellite phone, she said. But without normal communications networks functioning, the agency can’t deliver aid.

The lack of fuel “is basically crippling this aid operation,” Abeer Etefa, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program in Cairo, said Friday.

WFP needs fuel to transport desperately needed food aid inside the Gaza Strip, Etefa said, as well as to power bakeries to provide bread to people. Of the roughly 130 bakeries that used to operate around Gaza, many have been damaged, and nearly all are now out of service due to lack of fuel, she added.

“Bread, which is a staple food commodity, has become a luxury in Gaza,” she said.

UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency, has transported nearly 2,000 tons of water, hygiene, medical and other supplies into Gaza in recent weeks. The agency was in “sporadic touch” with some staff inside Gaza who have international SIM cards, Jeremy Hopkins, UNICEF representative in Egypt, said.

“We remain extremely concerned about fuel,” he said. “It’s essential for the running of social services to which many of these supplies plug in, especially the medical and the water supplies. Fuel is an absolute priority and we need to get that coming in regularly.”

 

~~~~~~~~
Though, judging by the stories linked to above, there will be nothing left to rule over, whether people or anything else.

Analysis: The Israeli right hopes not just for victory in Gaza, but also conquest

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/17/israel-government-right-gaza-endgame-conquest/

Quote

 

.... Perhaps the most articulated ideas on what should come next among Israelis are being voiced on Netanyahu’s right flank. And they also happen to be the most hard-line and extreme visions for what Israel should do in Gaza.

Consider the remarks of far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who, while inciting new rounds of violence in the West Bank, also suggested anyone who sympathizes with Hamas should be “eliminated.” Or those of Amihai Eliyahu, a far-right coalition partner of Netanyahu and Israel’s heritage minister, who said dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza could be an option. Or the call from Galit Distel Atbaryan, recently (but no longer) Israel’s information minister, to erase “all of Gaza from the face of the earth” and drive its Palestinians into exile in Egypt.

That rhetoric is not far from the extremist views of the sitting finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who said this week that Israel “would no longer be able to accept” an independent Palestinian entity in Gaza and called for the “voluntary emigration” of its people to countries elsewhere in the world. ....

 

 

Edited November 17, 2023 by Zorral

[Zorral]

As said previously, the US provides an umbrella of presumed safety from repercussion.

I Knew U.S. Military Aid Would Kill Civilians and Undermine Israeli Security. So I Quit.
Josh Paul, former director in the State Department’s political-military affairs bureau, which oversees U.S. arms transfers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/opinion/us-military-aid-war-israel.html

Quote

 

.... How can military assistance to Israel undermine Israeli security? This is a question I grappled with for many years in the State Department’s political-military affairs bureau and in a previous role as an adviser for the U.S. security coordinator, in which I worked across the West Bank. In that role, I commuted frequently between Ramallah and Jerusalem to advance the road map for peace that the George W. Bush administration truly believed would finally lead to a two-state solution.

The United States currently provides Israel with at least $3.8 billion in annual military assistance, the most to any country per year, with the recent exception of Ukraine. High levels of assistance date back roughly to the 1970s and reflect a longstanding American bargain with Israel of security for peace — the notion that the more secure Israel feels, the more concessions it will be able to make to the Palestinians. Since the mid-1990s, the United States has also been a major sponsor of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority Security Forces, providing training and equipment on the theory that as the Palestinians stand up, the Israelis can stand down.

In both cases, the rationale for U.S. security assistance is fatally flawed.

On the Israeli side, blind U.S. security guarantees have not provided a path to peace. Instead, they have provided Israel with the reassurance that it can engage in increasingly destructive efforts, such as the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank, without any real consequences. At the same time, Israel has become a global leader in weapons exports and boasts one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world. All of these factors have created a sense among Israeli policymakers that they can indefinitely contain — physically and politically — the Palestinian question. ....

 

 

[Zorral]

How to Define Genocide
A historian of the Holocaust examines Israel’s rhetoric and actions in Gaza

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-to-define-genocide

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.... What distinguishes genocide from crimes against humanity or ethnic cleansing?

There are clear differences in international law. War crimes were defined in 1949 in the Geneva Conventions and other protocols. They are serious violations of the laws and customs of war and international armed conflict, and they can be committed against either combatants or civilians. One aspect of this is the use of disproportionate force—that the extent of the harm done to civilians should be proportionate to your military goals. It could also be other things, such as the maltreatment of prisoners of war.

Crimes against humanity do not have a U.N. resolution, but they were defined by the Rome Statute, which is now the basis for the International Criminal Court. That talks about extermination or other crimes against civilian populations, and it does not have to happen in war, whereas war crimes obviously have to happen in the context of war.

Genocide is a bit of a strange animal because the Genocide Convention of 1948, on which it’s based, defines genocide as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” And this “as such” matters because what it means is that genocide is really the attempt to destroy the group and not the individuals in that group. It can be accomplished by killing members of the group. It can also be accomplished by other means such as starving them or taking away their children, or something that will bring about the extinction of the group rather than killing its individuals.

Yes, I was going to ask about the word “destroy,” and whether it is very clear that that means “kill.”

No, it doesn’t. Now, usually, not just in the popular imagination but also in law, often the association is with killing. When Raphael Lemkin was coming up with this term—he was a Polish Jewish lawyer who came to the United States during the Holocaust—he spoke specifically about a cultural genocide, which is when you really just destroy the group as a group. So let’s say there may be Jewish people around, but they don’t know that they’re Jews anymore, or you take all their children away and therefore there won’t be a continuation of that group. It doesn’t necessarily mean killing. In Australia or Canada, where there was removal of children from Indigenous groups, that has been defined as genocide.

The current example that people often use is what’s happening to the Uyghur population in China, even though as far as we know there are no mass killing campaigns.

Yes, destroying their culture.

Is the term “ethnic cleansing” used more to talk about removing people from a certain territory?

Yeah, so the difference between genocide and ethnic cleansing is roughly that in ethnic cleansing you want to move people from a territory that you want, and then they can go wherever they want. In a genocide, you target the group never mind where they are. But it should be said that ethnic cleansing actually does not have a clear definition in international law, and it comes under various other categories of crimes against humanity. There’s no convention on ethnic cleansing. And the last very important thing about it is that ethnic cleansing usually or often has preceded genocide. That actually happened in the genocide of the Herero, starting in 1904, and the genocide of the Armenians, starting in 1915. The Holocaust arguably began as ethnic cleansing, as removing Jews from territories controlled by Germany, and then when there’s no place to move them to, the Germans said, “Well, we might as well kill them.” So there is a connection between them.

The Herero were people in what is modern-day Namibia, and you are referring to the German behavior toward them, correct?

Right. The German Army is sent there to quell an uprising. The German general issues an extermination order. It’s the first modern extermination order. But what he’s basically telling them is that they should go to the Kalahari Desert, and obviously they are very likely to die there, especially because the Germans are busy plugging up all the watering holes there. So the genocide is accomplished by removing them from their territory into a desert. That is what the Ottoman authorities initially do to the Armenians. They just send them to the desert, through arid areas in what are now eastern Turkey, northern Syria, where many people die without being directly killed. That’s the overlap between certain genocides and ethnic cleansing.

Let’s say there’s a terrorist attack on a country and the country starts bombing the territory from where the terrorist attack originated, and where it was planned, and in the process of doing so starts killing a large number of civilians. What would be the things that you would look for to determine if crimes against humanity or, more specifically, genocide was taking place?

The first, most important thing is that the definition of genocide begins with the words the “intent to destroy.” You need to identify intent, so that if this army goes off to bomb that area from which the terrorists came and its intent is to destroy the group that attacked them in a terrorist act, and it says, “This whole group has to be wiped out because they are all bloody terrorists,” that is an intent that can be then added to the actions themselves to produce what might be genocide. Whereas if they go and they say, “O.K., these terrorists came from a particular group, they’re in a particular town, they have particular camps, and we are going to bomb that organization, and in the course of that, we may also kill a lot of civilians, but what we are interested in is killing those particular terrorists,” then it could become war crimes or even crimes against humanity, but it might not be genocide. ....

 

 

[kissdbyfire]

Mehdi Hasan asks Mark Regev many of the questions we've been asking here. Regev seems to be a bit more moderate than some of the extremists in Netanyahu's government, but he still dodges many of the questions, answers something different than what was asked and so on. He even begrudgingly admits to "mistakes" in reporting by the IDF, like the calendar that was presented as a terrorist roster that @TrueMetis posted about a while back. 

Another interesting one is the question that goes to the war crimes question: "would Israel bomb a school in Israel with Israeli children if Hamas was hiding there and using them as human shields?"

No, they would not. Ding ding ding. 

 

[Craving Peaches]

Quote

A BBC analysis found the footage of an IDF spokesperson showing the apparent discovery of a bag containing a gun behind an MRI scanning machine, had been taped hours before the arrival of the journalists to whom he was supposedly showing it.

In a video shown later, the number of guns in the bag had doubled. The IDF claimed its video of what it found at the hospital was unedited, filmed in a single take, but the BBC analysis found it had been edited.

Source: The Guardian

I am suspicious that it was planted. Combined with the fact that in the video, everything except the guns is covered in dust, and the location of weapons in an MRI scanner...

[Craving Peaches]

2 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

No, they would not.

That confirms what everyone suspected then.

[kissdbyfire]

9 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

That confirms what everyone suspected then.

Indeed. And according to the international law professor I linked  a few days back, that is one of several things that are used to evaluate whether war crimes are being/were committed.

[Ran]

He didn't actually say "no", I see, watching it. He basically said that the analogy didn't work because the scenario he puts forward is not at all reasonably comparable.

The scenario is Hamas holding hostages in a school in Tel Aviv. This is an area completely under Israel's control, there is no larger tactical or strategic danger than the holding of hostages, no hostiles popping out of tunnels or alleyways, etc. This is the stuff of SWAT or Special Ops, as Regev said.

But suppose a war has broken out and Hamas has overrun a large section of Israel, has dug into Tel Aviv, and the IDF is now fighting in hostile terrain, and they believe  there is some significant military advantage to be gained to hasten the end of the conflict... But it requires the significant risk of deaths of innocents forced to be human shields? Who knows. Again, the IDF would better answer that.

But Mehdi Hasan's question genuinely illuminated nothing.

[kissdbyfire]

"We would send in Special Forces and we would take out the terrorists" = no, we would not bomb our own children. 

[Ran]

2 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

"We would send in Special Forces and we would take out the terrorists" = no, we would not bomb our own children. 

Because it's not a comparable scenario, and Israel has -- as he noted -- done just that before.

But that is an isolated special forces operation in terrain you control entirely and where the only strategic goal is rescuing hostages.

It cannot be compared to the Israel- Gaza war in any way, and I'm not at all surprised you refuse to admit it.

[kissdbyfire]

1 minute ago, Ran said:

Because it's not a comparable scenario, and Israel has -- as he noted -- done just that before.

But that is an isolated special forces operation in terrain you control entirely and where the only strategic goal is rescuing hostages.

It cannot be compared to the Israel- Gaza war in any way, and I'm not at all surprised you refuse to admit it.

I have no idea why you say I refuse to admit both scenarios are entirely different since I have admitted to being wrong many times before, in these very threads. 

And here's another such instance, yes, the situations are very different indeed, you did a good job at pointing the obvious flaw in how the question was phrased and why the 2 situations can't be compared. 

At any rate, we do know how this Israeli government would act if they had their own people being used as shields of sorts b/c that's what the hostages are, and they're being bombed relentlessly. 

[Relic]

9 minutes ago, Ran said:

I'm not at all surprised you refuse to admit it.

Reductive, and can be said about anyone involved in these threads from day one. 

[Ran]

3 minutes ago, Relic said:

Reductive, and can be said about anyone involved in these threads from day one. 

Very true.

In other news, the body of IDF soldier Noa Marciano, one of the hostages, was also recovered, apparently in a building adjacent to Shifa. And I see Hamas says an elderly hostage died of a "heart attack" as well. Now there's a lot of talk that some sort of hostage release scheme is being considered, with numbers varying from 50 to 80-something, with Qatar serving as intermediary. Israel has some stiuplations, including not dividing families, and they want all women and children released from the get go.

[Kalbear]

6 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

At any rate, we do know how this Israeli government would act if they had their own people being used as shields of sorts b/c that's what the hostages are, and they're being bombed relentlessly. 

We don't know that either. And given previous information about Hamas holding hostages that Israel wanted back, there's a good chance that Israel has very good knowledge about where hostages are. Whether they're avoiding military operations or bombings there is not clear to me, but I don't think we can say it one way or another. 

I also think it's a bit weird to chide Israel about the notion that they'd treat their own people differently. Well, yes. A government has a direct responsibility to its own citizens. It has responsibilities that are not nearly as direct towards other citizens, depending on the circumstance. Why wouldn't Israel treat their own people differently? How is that a gotcha? 

If you want to do a gotcha, ask if they'd bomb French citizens being used as human shields or something like that. 

[kissdbyfire]

To your first point, is there area in Gaza that isn't being bombed? Because it would be sort of contradictory, wouldn't it? To say that you simply have no option but to bomb hospitals and refugee camps b/c hamas is there, hiding among the civilian population, but then not to bomb areas where your special knowledge tells you your own people are being kept as hostages. B/c then all hamas has to do is go to these areas untouched by bombings. 

7 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

If you want to do a gotcha, ask if they'd bomb French citizens being used as human shields or something like that. 

What are you on about? It feels like you didn't even read what I wrote. 

That example of bombing your own people isn't me going for a gotcha. As I've said in my previous post, that is one of several specific examples given by a professor of international law that I linked in one of these threads explaining what are war crimes and how to evaluate whether something is or isn't one. 

[Kalbear]

42 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

To your first point, is there area in Gaza that isn't being bombed? Because it would be sort of contradictory, wouldn't it? To say that you simply have no option but to bomb hospitals and refugee camps b/c hamas is there, hiding among the civilian population, but then not to bomb areas where your special knowledge tells you your own people are being kept as hostages. B/c then all hamas has to do is go to these areas untouched by bombings. 

There's a whole lot that isn't bombed, and there's only so many hostages. And hamas has other goals too. We probably won't know for a while in any case. My point is simply this is how Israel behaved with a hostage before - they deliberately avoided going into areas that they knew or suspected he was held.

42 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

What are you on about? It feels like you didn't even read what I wrote. 

That example of bombing your own people isn't me going for a gotcha. As I've said in my previous post, that is one of several specific examples given by a professor of international law that I linked in one of these threads explaining what are war crimes and how to evaluate whether something is or isn't one. 

That doesn't say much because Israel has famously been willing to go well beyond norms when it comes to protecting their own citizens. That's sort of my point - that this could be evidence of a war crime, but it's more likely evidence of the specific value of Israeli citizen life that Israel has. 

Hence why you should try some other nationality. 

[Zorral]

'The actual truth'
Antisemitism is rising, but not in entirely straightforward ways
JONATHAN M. KATZ

https://theracket.news/p/the-actual-truth?

Quote

 

.... Musk is a reactionary too. As I said, Musk’s endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory was not surprising: He grew up in Pretoria, the grandson of an openly fascist, white supremacist, Canadian antisemite who first admired European fascists, then blamed Jews after the war for having financed Hitler’s rise (you read that correctly), and finally moved to South Africa out of his deep personal admiration for Apartheid. He’s been ranting about George Soros and other antisemitic conspiracies for years. After affirming the antisemitic tweet, Musk spent the day boosting far-right posts celebrating “white pride” and blasting “progressive Jewish organizations for their anti-white policies.” (The idea that the Anti-Defamation League, which has borne the brunt of Musk’s ire for months now, is either a “progressive” or “anti-white” organization would be news to both Israel-critical progressives who’ve been smeared for weeks by the ADL, and the mostly European Jews who make up its leadership and base.)

This all might seem confusing, but it really isn’t. What is actually happening here is that Israel’s war is exposing fault lines in a host of political movements; fault lines that are always there, but get papered over when things are quieter in the Levant. The Democratic Party seems to be coming apart, as the base—including younger Jews—loudly demand a ceasefire, while leaders up to and including Joe Biden double and triple down on their support for Israel’s genocidal war. This has led to widespread disappointment on the left with Bernie Sanders, who has adamantly opposed a ceasefire even as the death toll rises; and even more dispiriting sights like Sen. John Fetterman—an otherwise progressive, pro-union candidate whom a lot of leftists went to the mat for in the aftermath of his stroke—openly mocking and waving an Israeli flag at veterans being arrested for protesting U.S. support for Israel in the office of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

On the right, as always, things are even darker. Tucker Carlson is taking advantage of the war to accuse rich Jewish donors of funding “white genocide.” (His guest, the pro-Trump Black conservative Candace Owens, agreed with him.) In fact, the antisemitic tweet Musk endorsed was itself a product of classic reactionary infighting: It was a reply to a post by a self-described Jewish conservative from Boca Raton, who challenged anonymous posters to say “Hitler was right” to his face. (That user posted it with a video ad making the same point, produced by the “Foundation to Combat Antisemitism,” an outfit founded by the pro-Trump, Jewish owner of the New England Patriots, Robert Kraft.)

Judging by “The Artist Formerly Known as Eric’s” other posts around the incident, it seems he felt that this Jewish poster was insulting white people by implying that they are all Hitler lovers; his tweet, it seems, was an effort to take pains to show that his particular brand of antisemitism was more boutique. (There is little that enrages your average white supremacist more than publicly pointing out that they are using the same rhetoric as the Bad Guys in Indiana Jones.) The original Jewish poster replied, to Musk, sounding hurt and confused: “The fact that so many people took this as portraying conservatives as antisemites is weird to me.” He got several more outright Nazi posts about the “Jewish Question” and Jewish backing for nonwhite immigration in reply.

This is all deeply disturbing for a lot of reasons, besides the obvious. One is that this is the kind of chaos in which Nazis and other violent bigots and antisemites thrive. Another is that the chaos could create a political opening for Donald Trump—whose overlapping criminal trials are now being shunted from the top headlines—despite, or perhaps even because, of his now even more openly fascist campaign rhetoric about “root[ing] out … radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” (Welcome to everyone, like Tom Nichols, who is belatedly—if petulantly—recognizing what people like me have been screaming about for the last eight years.)

But the biggest thing is that the root cause of this particular outburst of Jew hatred is not going away. You can attempt to turn a blind eye to it, try to rationalize it, but each passing day, fueled by Israel’s imperious actions and images of suffering and dying Palestinian children, the country with the Star of David on its flag is being increasingly isolated and discredited on the global stage. Poll after poll shows that U.S. public support for Israel’s war is declining. The latest revelation that the Israeli government may have exaggerated or lied during the seizure of Al-Shifa Hospital—specifically its claim that Hamas hid a sophisticated headquarters in the hospital’s Israeli-built basement—is only going to make it worse. You can rightly cite underlying antisemitic attitudes in Christian and Muslim culture. You can blame social media and the reactionary tech bigots behind it like Musk and Peter Thiel. But the simple truth is this: Every day the killing continues—every day without a ceasefire, in other words—the danger is only going to grow.

 

 

[Zorral]

More and more I'm reminded of the Vietnam era, when the country polarized over for and against, older and younger, with the older population generally, at least in the early years, supportive of the war, or maybe, mostly, not giving a damn, while the younger segments increasingly became anti-war.  And what a gob smack this was for the politicians -- so much so, that it destroyed LBJ, whose track record in other matters such as civil rights was so good.

Now this may be only the US, but again, like the Vietnam era, increasingly people across the globe had Opinions too, which were not favorable to the US.