Ok, the big problem in this whole thing is assymetrical nature of the thing. The Israelli military is a military funded and shaped by the US one, and it’s a mammoth in all the ways that matter.
Hamas, after years of being supressed, is a group of militants with handguns.
The Isrealli response to those terrorist with guns killing and abducting some of their people, was to flatten and impose collective punishment on the whole country that those people came from.
I have no issues with them defending themselves, but I do with the disproportionate nature of what has been happening.
It’s especially ironic because the jews are one of the few people in the world that should have learned that lesson.
Exceptionally well put. I had to comment that this is exactly my take on this and I couldn’t have put it better in such a palatable few sentences.
Check out Israels geography. If those "militants with handguns" hadn't gotten themselves distracted massacring people at a festival, they may well have reached Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in a couple of hours. As it is it's practically a miracle there wasn't a mass uprising of armed palestinians in the West Bank and Israel proper.
Your "assymetrical" point is especially bizzare. Palestinian terrorists have shown nothing but tremendous willingness and enthusiasm for attacking jews with literally anything they can lay
their hands on including screwdrivers and vehicles. The total imbalance of forces doesn't deter them at all. Why would they having more weapons or Israel less change anything?
The main reason large portions of the strip has been flattened is because Hamas built tunnels underneath it.
You say it's disproportionate, but spend a couple of hours reading up israels history and geography. You might arrive at some conclusions about the nature of Palestinian terror (if the parent story wasn't enough). I doubt you could come up with literally any other solution. The only one i can think of is a mass evacuation of the gaza strip. It would have prevented a huge amount of deaths.
I think the main lesson jews learnt from the holocaust is not to rely on the rest of the world to help them when they are in trouble. I have absolutely no idea why you would think they must prioritise the moral lessons they learned above their own safety.
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The thing with Gaza is that HAMAS there had 20 years of unlimited power, wholly funded by the UN/US/Qatar aid. Gaza literally has no other significant income streams.
HAMAS spent this time to build a network of tunnels below the streets, and to stockpile ammo/explosives. They could care less about the people, using them only as human shields. They also actively brainwashed the population: https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/b1fjucpdgg https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/b1fjucpdgg
So what would be a "proportional" answer from Israel? They don't have any good options.
> The Isrealli response to those terrorist with guns killing and abducting some of their people, was to flatten and impose collective punishment on the whole country that those people came from.
To give you the sense of scale, HAMAS murdered 1195 people, and they also took 250 people as hostages (somehow pro-Palestinian protesters almost never knew about this!). And 1500 people is a HUGE number for a tiny country like Israel (Jewish population of 7200000). Scaled to the size of the US, this would be aroud 70000 people, many times the size of 9/11.
Not to mention that as soon as the IDF pulled out, Hamas immediately started dragging Palestinians out into the streets and publicly executing them for “collaboration” crimes real or imagined. The #1 killer of Palestinians is Hamas itself.
It’s pure cowardice that they fight the way they do, mixing all their military equipment with civilian infrastructure like hospitals and schools, and they rely on propagandizing gullible Western liberals (as well as anti-semites) to get support for their murderous cause.
There is no way to fight them that doesn’t endanger civilians. And there’s no way for Israeli Jews to continue breathing without fighting Hamas. Anyone who doesn’t believe that is living in a fantasy.
They executed them due to treason, a law that the USA also has.
The number of Palestinians executed is far less than those killed by Israeli aggression. Don't minimize the war crimes of Israel.
How far is the IDF office from civilian infrastructure?
Your comment reeks of propaganda - or severe misinformation at the least.
Hamas was an aspiring near-peer military force with a conventional order of battle and a multilayered supply chain. It obviously was not "militants with handguns".
(It hasn't been militarily meaningful for over 18 months; you could call it that today! If what you are, principally, is angry about war crimes in Gaza, you have ample evidence to muster without telling fairy tales about what the situation was in 2023.)
You can avoid a lot of trouble by avoiding sentence structures where the subject is "Jewish people" and the verb is "should (x)".
> Hamas was an aspiring near-peer military force
This is beyond ridiculous. Israel is a nuclear-armed regional power with tanks, a modern navy, a state of the art air force, the best missile defence system in the world, and one of the best counterintelligence operations. It can project force thousands of kilometres away into Iran. Hamas is none of that.
Even on sheer manpower, sources from 2023 put Hamas at 3 to 30 times smaller than the IDF, depending on who you trust and how you count reservists. [0]
If Hamas had been a near peer to the IDF, the October 7th attackers wouldn't have been shootings and stabbings within 5 miles of the Gaza border, they would have been successful missile attacks on Tel Aviv or tanks rolling down the streets of West Jerusalem. Or do you think Hamas just wanted to start a limited war with border skirmishes and kept its real military might in reserve?
Perhaps "small arms" or "light weapons" would be more precise than "handguns", but Hamas's capabilities have always been closer to the latter than to Israel's.
[0] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231016-the-israel-hamas-military-balance https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231016-the-israel-ha...
> they would have been successful missile attacks on Tel Aviv
--- start quote ---
In January 2008 the border between Gaza and Egypt was breached by Hamas. It allowed them to bring in Russian and Iranian-made rockets with a larger range.
In the first half of 2008, the number of attacks rose sharply, consistently totaling several hundred per month. In addition, Ashkelon was hit many times during this period by Grad rockets.
...
In 2012, Jerusalem and Israel's commercial center Tel Aviv were targeted with locally made "M-75" and Iranian Fajr-5 rockets, respectively, and in July 2014, the northern city of Haifa was targeted for the first time
--- end quote ---
> Perhaps "small arms" or "light weapons" would be more precise than "handguns"
Where "light weapons" are literally thousands of rocket launches against various targets in Israel.
Iron Dome exists due to "small lightly equipped militia" in Palestine.
> Hamas, after years of being supressed, is a group of militants with handguns.
I can't believe people still peddle this bullshit. Hamas are a well organised and a well-funded terrorist organisation that is also the governing body in Gaza.
So anything from "back alley" support from Iran to fingers in hundreds of millions in yearly humanitarian aid. I wouldn't be surprised if Hamas had total funding near the same level as IDF.
You don't get a separate "rocket attacks on Israel" Wikipedia entry with "just guns": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_... You don't get to fire Russian- and Iranian-built Grad, Katyusha, or Fajr-5 and pretend "it's just a group of militants with guns"
I'm assuming that bit you're quoting 'militants with handguns' was hyperbolic, but it serves its purpose to compare and contrast the two.
How much damage has those Russian and Iranian built rockets done in Israel?
How many tanks do Hamas have?
How many fighter jets do Hamas have?
How many nuclear weapons do Hamas have?
The fact is, Hamas is a product of being a military in a territory that is subject to blockade by Israel. You can say Israel left Gaza in [insert year], but the fact of the matter is that a blockade has been there up to now.
And so if Hamas was a democratically elected government of Gaza, with the opportunity of becoming a 'Singapore' of the Middle East and having full agency (as Israel claims), why is it outside the bounds of reasonableness that they do acquire weapons from Russia and Iran, just like any other country in the world does for their own military needs?
> How much damage has those Russian and Iranian built rockets done in Israel?
Enough for Israel to build Iron Dome. Iron Dome literally exists because these "poor militants with handguns" were firing hundreds of rockets per month at targets in Israel. From Wikipedia:
--- start quote ---
In January 2008 the border between Gaza and Egypt was breached by Hamas. It allowed them to bring in Russian and Iranian-made rockets with a larger range. In the first half of 2008, the number of attacks rose sharply, consistently totaling several hundred per month.
--- end quote ---
The rest of your message is a non-sequitur on top of non-sequitur.
Hamas is not, and never has been "militants with handguns". They are, and have always been, a well organised organisation with huge funding.
Agan. Wikipedia.
--- start quote ---
Hamas has reportedly accumulated over $12 million per month from taxes on goods imported from Egypt into Gaza as of 2021. Iran provides some $100 million annually to Hamas and other Palestinian groups
--- end quote ---
These are just some estimates. Actual numbers are likely to be significantly higher.