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The IDF actually can avoid the vast majority of civilian casualties - they are the ones choosing to drop a huge number of bombs. They can do their job of defend

The IDF actually can avoid the vast majority of civilian casualties - they are the ones choosing to drop a huge number of bombs. They can do their job of defending Israel by actually protecting the border, and go after Hamas in a much slower & more precise way. See this article from Israel for an in-depth examination of IDF tactics: https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/ https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-cal...

CydeWeys 3y ago
> They can do their job of defending Israel by actually protecting the border They can't. Hamas launched thousands of rockets on October 7th, and Israel has no way of stopping something like that again short of what they're doing now, a massive bombing campaign and land invasion to take out as much of Hamas' built-up stockpiles and war infrastructure as possible. There is no workable defense here that doesn't require significant offense.
- nico 3y ago
  > They can't. Hamas launched thousands of rockets on October 7th, and Israel has no way of stopping something like that again The Iron Dome stopped pretty much all the rockets What didn’t stop Hamas on Oct 7th was Israel not paying attention to their own intelligence and the tips of neighboring countries, as well as an insanely slow response time If they wanted to, they could definitely only defend themselves They could also stop the illegal settlers and occupation in the West Bank (instead of using the IDF to support them) And they could make an actual effort in working towards peace But instead Israel has pretty much created this situation and has a president openly calling for the extermination of Palestinians (re: Amalek)
  - evandale 3y ago
    > What didn’t stop Hamas on Oct 7th was Israel not paying attention to their own intelligence and the tips of neighboring countries, as well as an insanely slow response time. Wait, you can't possibly be blaming October 7th partially on Israel's insanely slow response time, can you? What is that sentence even supposed to mean?
  - CydeWeys 3y ago
    > The Iron Dome stopped pretty much all the rockets The Iron Dome wasn't and isn't capable of stopping thousands of rockets. Also, each Iron Dome interceptor costs around $100k whereas each Hamas rocket costs only a few hundred dollars. It simply doesn't pencil out; Hamas can spend Israel down this way. But the whole idea that Hamas can shoot rockets at Israeli civilian areas with impunity by the thousands whenever it wants, and all Israel is allowed to do is merely attempt to shoot down some of the rockets, is utterly absurd. It's a fantasy world. In the real world, if you wage war like that, you get struck back, and that's exactly what Israel is doing. You don't seem to understand what war is, or how and why it is fought. What is currently going on is a WAR between Israel and Hamas, and it's absurd to expect one of the combatants to unilaterally disarm themselves while still under attack. That isn't how war works or how it has ever worked.
    - nico 3y ago
      You said Israel can’t defend itself, it clearly can, even if it’s expensive to them But instead, for whatever reasons, it’s choosing to attack To me it’s clear the end goal of their attacks is not peace but rather domination and eviction Also, this is not a war. This a genocidal massacre brought on by Israel on the Palestinians, and has been going on for decades all over that area. Gaza is just the main focus right now, but they are still slaughtering people in the West Bank Israel has always chosen that path, and they probably feel it’s served them well, they’ve gained plenty of land. But they also kept the conflict alive, including Netanyahu and his party explicitly supporting Hamas to undermine peaceful Palestinian political movements
      - CydeWeys 3y ago
        This reply just restates all the same falsehoods and doesn't actually address any point in my comment. You don't understand the limitations of Iron Dome, you don't understand the nature of defense (it means killing the people launching rockets at you, not merely shooting down some of the rockets in perpetuity while some get through and kill your civilians), and you don't understand the nature of war. Let's try a really simple metaphor. I'm repeatedly shooting at you. I'm a shitty marksman, so many of my shots miss, and you're wearing body armor, so some of the shots that do hit you don't penetrate. But I'm going to keep shooting until you're dead. Are you going to just stand there and let me take shot after shot after shot until one connects with your flesh, or are you going to do something about it first? Oh, and you're holding a much better and more accurate gun than I am, and I'm unarmored. You can drop me with a single shot at any time.
nvm0n2 3y ago
It's a ground invasion in which they tell civilians to evacuate beforehand. How much slower and more precise do you want them to get, given that Hamas is maybe 10% of the population (so their supporter base is clearly much larger) and there's no clear distinction between fighters and the rest deliberately? It's hard to imagine specifics. Israel can't simply let them launch rockets forever. Iron Dome isn't 100% effective and more importantly there's a massive, orders of magnitude cost differential between attack and defense. Eventually Israel would run out of intercepter rockets (or the ability to afford them), and then Hamas can simply bomb Israel at will.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > It's a ground invasion in which they tell civilians to evacuate beforehand. As required by international law reaching back to the Hague Convention in 1907 (and with precedent earlier.) > given that Hamas is maybe 10% of the population Hamas is closer to 1% of the population (20-25,000 [0] out of 2.4 million population of Gaza.) [0] https://www.dni.gov/nctc/ftos/hamas_fto.html https://www.dni.gov/nctc/ftos/hamas_fto.html
  - asylteltine 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > And international law also prohibits human shields and launching rockets from hospitals but guess you missed that one. No, I didn't. But no one here was arguing that Hamas should get credit for doing more than is minimally necessary without actually providing any reason to believe that, whereas they have for Israel. > Laws only get brought up when talking about Israel huh? Only Israel's defenders on HN call for it to get a clap on the back for the unusual morality and restraint of its actions.
- metta2uall 3y ago
  The vast majority civilians are getting killed & buried alive due to the aerial bombings where the IDF is trying to assassinate members of Hamas - they obviously don't give any warnings for such strikes. And the current offensive isn't a response to the rockets, which have been fired for years, but to the Hamas ground invasion, which the IDF should have been prepared for 24/7 & could have completely defeated.
asylteltine 3y ago
[flagged]
- metta2uall 3y ago
  I certainly don't excuse Hamas - they are a despicable & evil terrorist organisation - and more evil than the IDF. This is quite obvious and uncontroversial though, so people often don't bother pointing this out. If you launch a rocket from your kitchen on the 12th floor, I am allowed to defend myself, but not by flattening the entire building and killing a hundred innocent children, when you have probably gone to another building or tunnel. There are many reporters in Gaza who are documenting the thousands of dead & injured children..

CydeWeys 3y ago

> They can do their job of defending Israel by actually protecting the border They can't. Hamas launched thousands of rockets on October 7th, and Israel has no way of stopping something like that again short of what they're doing now, a massive bombing campaign and land invasion to take out as much of Hamas' built-up stockpiles and war infrastructure as possible. There is no workable defense here that doesn't require significant offense.

nico 3y ago
> They can't. Hamas launched thousands of rockets on October 7th, and Israel has no way of stopping something like that again The Iron Dome stopped pretty much all the rockets What didn’t stop Hamas on Oct 7th was Israel not paying attention to their own intelligence and the tips of neighboring countries, as well as an insanely slow response time If they wanted to, they could definitely only defend themselves They could also stop the illegal settlers and occupation in the West Bank (instead of using the IDF to support them) And they could make an actual effort in working towards peace But instead Israel has pretty much created this situation and has a president openly calling for the extermination of Palestinians (re: Amalek)
- evandale 3y ago
  > What didn’t stop Hamas on Oct 7th was Israel not paying attention to their own intelligence and the tips of neighboring countries, as well as an insanely slow response time. Wait, you can't possibly be blaming October 7th partially on Israel's insanely slow response time, can you? What is that sentence even supposed to mean?
- CydeWeys 3y ago
  > The Iron Dome stopped pretty much all the rockets The Iron Dome wasn't and isn't capable of stopping thousands of rockets. Also, each Iron Dome interceptor costs around $100k whereas each Hamas rocket costs only a few hundred dollars. It simply doesn't pencil out; Hamas can spend Israel down this way. But the whole idea that Hamas can shoot rockets at Israeli civilian areas with impunity by the thousands whenever it wants, and all Israel is allowed to do is merely attempt to shoot down some of the rockets, is utterly absurd. It's a fantasy world. In the real world, if you wage war like that, you get struck back, and that's exactly what Israel is doing. You don't seem to understand what war is, or how and why it is fought. What is currently going on is a WAR between Israel and Hamas, and it's absurd to expect one of the combatants to unilaterally disarm themselves while still under attack. That isn't how war works or how it has ever worked.
  - nico 3y ago
    You said Israel can’t defend itself, it clearly can, even if it’s expensive to them But instead, for whatever reasons, it’s choosing to attack To me it’s clear the end goal of their attacks is not peace but rather domination and eviction Also, this is not a war. This a genocidal massacre brought on by Israel on the Palestinians, and has been going on for decades all over that area. Gaza is just the main focus right now, but they are still slaughtering people in the West Bank Israel has always chosen that path, and they probably feel it’s served them well, they’ve gained plenty of land. But they also kept the conflict alive, including Netanyahu and his party explicitly supporting Hamas to undermine peaceful Palestinian political movements
    - CydeWeys 3y ago
      This reply just restates all the same falsehoods and doesn't actually address any point in my comment. You don't understand the limitations of Iron Dome, you don't understand the nature of defense (it means killing the people launching rockets at you, not merely shooting down some of the rockets in perpetuity while some get through and kill your civilians), and you don't understand the nature of war. Let's try a really simple metaphor. I'm repeatedly shooting at you. I'm a shitty marksman, so many of my shots miss, and you're wearing body armor, so some of the shots that do hit you don't penetrate. But I'm going to keep shooting until you're dead. Are you going to just stand there and let me take shot after shot after shot until one connects with your flesh, or are you going to do something about it first? Oh, and you're holding a much better and more accurate gun than I am, and I'm unarmored. You can drop me with a single shot at any time.

nvm0n2 3y ago

It's a ground invasion in which they tell civilians to evacuate beforehand. How much slower and more precise do you want them to get, given that Hamas is maybe 10% of the population (so their supporter base is clearly much larger) and there's no clear distinction between fighters and the rest deliberately? It's hard to imagine specifics. Israel can't simply let them launch rockets forever. Iron Dome isn't 100% effective and more importantly there's a massive, orders of magnitude cost differential between attack and defense. Eventually Israel would run out of intercepter rockets (or the ability to afford them), and then Hamas can simply bomb Israel at will.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> It's a ground invasion in which they tell civilians to evacuate beforehand. As required by international law reaching back to the Hague Convention in 1907 (and with precedent earlier.) > given that Hamas is maybe 10% of the population Hamas is closer to 1% of the population (20-25,000 [0] out of 2.4 million population of Gaza.) [0] https://www.dni.gov/nctc/ftos/hamas_fto.html https://www.dni.gov/nctc/ftos/hamas_fto.html
- asylteltine 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > And international law also prohibits human shields and launching rockets from hospitals but guess you missed that one. No, I didn't. But no one here was arguing that Hamas should get credit for doing more than is minimally necessary without actually providing any reason to believe that, whereas they have for Israel. > Laws only get brought up when talking about Israel huh? Only Israel's defenders on HN call for it to get a clap on the back for the unusual morality and restraint of its actions.
metta2uall 3y ago
The vast majority civilians are getting killed & buried alive due to the aerial bombings where the IDF is trying to assassinate members of Hamas - they obviously don't give any warnings for such strikes. And the current offensive isn't a response to the rockets, which have been fired for years, but to the Hamas ground invasion, which the IDF should have been prepared for 24/7 & could have completely defeated.

asylteltine 3y ago

[flagged]

metta2uall 3y ago
I certainly don't excuse Hamas - they are a despicable & evil terrorist organisation - and more evil than the IDF. This is quite obvious and uncontroversial though, so people often don't bother pointing this out. If you launch a rocket from your kitchen on the 12th floor, I am allowed to defend myself, but not by flattening the entire building and killing a hundred innocent children, when you have probably gone to another building or tunnel. There are many reporters in Gaza who are documenting the thousands of dead & injured children..