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I think its inarguable that Hamas instigated the conflict that flared up on October 7 (I think its fair to call it a war, just to put it in the same bucket as o

I think its inarguable that Hamas instigated the conflict that flared up on October 7 (I think its fair to call it a war, just to put it in the same bucket as other high-level conflicts in the region, and in contrast with the lower level conflict that's defined everyday life in Palestine/Judea since at least 1948). Whether or not that instigation was justified, and whether or not Israel was justified in its response, are more complicated questions I don't want to address here. I'm not super interested in having that latter discussion here, since it will primarily trigger an upvote/downvote cycle, without adding to the discussion about urban warfare. I am only highlighting that deriding Hamas' current tactics as a cynical new low is pointedly ahistoric (even in the context of Palestine/Judea), and that its sort of hypocritical to only criticize the side using human shields, and not the side shooting at/through the human shields.

immibis 2y ago
There's a not entirely dissimilar event in history: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Germany kept a bunch of Jews locked in the (at the time) world's biggest open-air prison, and built a wall around it, and shot everyone who came close to the wall. The Jews started smuggling weapons into the prison, and when the Germans came to collect them for murdering, they murdered a whole lot of Germans instead. No doubt if Germany hadn't been totally defeated by the Allies shortly after, if they'd won the war and gotten to write history, they would have called it an unprecedented and unprovoked terrorist attack.