World News
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News [email protected]
Politics [email protected]
World Politics [email protected]
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
view the rest of the comments
Yes exactly, that was basically my point, that Israel is actively attacking civilians almost exclusively (it feels like to me anyway).
If that were actually true, deaths would be several orders of magnitude higher. They have the munitions and capability to kill significantly more people.
Bottom line is that anytime you conduct war in a dense urban area, or conduct a ground assault in a populated area, civilian casualties will be high.
Bombing refugee camps, hospitals, schools and just plain carpet bombing districts does not seem like the IDF gives a shit about trying to minimize civilian casualties.
We have tons of footage of Russians and Ukrainians engaging each other in battle. There's no such footage from IDF, and whatever we got from Hamas looks like guerrilla fighters doing hit and run strikes on mostly armor. You know why? Because Israel is not engaged with "Palestine" in a war. Nor with Hamas. Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing in their own ethnostate.
You can say that - but seemingly also can’t explain why the death count isn’t stratospherically higher if that was their goal.
Asymmetric warfare always sucks for civilians. The whole point is knowing who a civilian and who’s a combatant is intentionally difficult.
Hamas doesn’t wear uniforms, because they’re terrorists and not a government or regular army.
You also can't prove how much higher the death toll would actually be, because we're all just speculating fools. You are using an argumentative fallacy, which is "you can't explain why this hypothetical thing isn't occurring" when it doesn't really have to be occurring. Can't remember which that is. Red herring? Straw man? Ah, I can't remember.
Anyway, we're going by what we're seeing, which is the bombing of innocent civilians. Terrible, terrible state of the world right now.
I can’t say exactly how many people they could kill if they were targeting civilians, but I can with certainty say it would be significantly more than have currently died.
They could drop many more bombs and shell the entire strip for weeks. These aren’t hypotheticals - we know they have the armament to do that.
There are around 20,000 people dead - out of almost 800,000 in Gaza. If their goal was a maximizing death, they could have killed significantly more. They certainly have the ammunition and means to do it - and that’s not a hypothetical.
You're phrasing it too black-and-white. If the "goal was maximizing death" they'd just nuke the site, right? But doing so has other consequences. It's probably much more complex than that. You can't just go all in even if you have the means, even if it accomplishes one of your goals. It's obviously the goal of both sides to exterminate the other, as they openly say so, but there's a process if you want to accomplish your other goals, whatever they might be. Or not cause unnecessary unrelated problems to the land itself if they want to conquer it, etc.
Sure - but I’m saying they can do it without nukes. They could have easily ratcheted up to 30,000 or 50,000 with conventional weapons - they could actually carpet bomb the strip.
My point is if they were trying to maximize death they could have kill many more people indiscriminately.
Assymetrical warfare in a densely populated area always is going to have a lot of civilian casualties.
Please, would you explain to me what your analysis would be of their actual point of the war, then? Both sides have explicitly claimed that they want the other side exterminated. That's what I see as the point of the war from both sides at face value. But if you know more, please educate me!
If you otherwise agree with that, then surely you could agree that there's a lot of strategy going into warfare, and that maximizing death doesn't have to mean that it has to happen as quickly as possible, because that might not be as efficient, or it might damage things that they value as spoils. Infrastructure, buildings, fertile land... "Maximizing death" doesn't have to be the same as "having one of the goals be to exterminate the people". Because they might have other goals beside that one, e.g. taking over the land, as they have been doing already.
Their stated goals are to rescue hostages and regime change by eliminating Hamas. If the goal is to kill maximum civilians they’re doing a really poor job.
If you just want the land, you just need to move people forcibly or buy it (it’s not like they’re particularly wealthy) and a plan to keep it. If your goal is genocide which so many people suggest, you kinda have to kill them no?
This is part of my problem with all the reactionary takes here - they aren’t consistent with what we’re actually seeing behavior wise.
Again, you're focusing on it having to be executed in minimum time, and on that being a single goal, but as you say, there are more goals, and some of the goals may need to be accomplished before the others (like rescuing hostages), hence it not happening immediately or... as fast as you personally expect, or something. I also think some goals could be political bullshit, no offense. Just going by how racist both sides are towards each other, and hearing them both say the other side needs to be exterminated... 🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️
Fair enough. There’s a lot of animosity there. But it feels like all of the reactions here are focused on calling it and framing it as a genocide at all costs.
Your downvotes remind me of the Reddit hive mind. But you are obviously 100% correct and anyone over the age of about 25 knows it.
It has been almost 3 months since the Hamas terrorist attack. If Israel was trying to kill as many civilians as possible, as you said, the death toll would be orders of magnitude higher.
So many people commenting here have no sense of historical perspective at all. I see people using words like "astounding" and "world record" and "genocide" to describe the death toll in this conflict. It's hard to know where to start with that level of historical ignorance.
I should know better than to get sucked into this. But you’re right. I’ve been repeatedly told the most complex and longest lasting conflict in history is “simple”. Should stick to Israel bad / Palestine good, communists good / capitalists bad, no one likes nuance or shades of gray here.