No clean hands here. The whole situation is garbage. The particularly salient point is that Israel, as the nation-state actor and a liberal democracy is expected to act more responsibly and with a higher moral character. Bibi's a trash human being, but the longer this goes (and has gone) on the more and more of the culpability is shared by everyday Israelis.
In a sense, Hamas had to have known that what they were going to do was going to have a HUGE military response from Israel. Govts are like the Mafia, they can’t just let any disrespect go unpunished. Hamas planned on indiscriminately killing civilians and taking hostages. I’m not sure any government in the world wouldn’t have had a predictable military response of some kind.
Hamas seems to have misjudged the extant to which Israel was willing to go (all-out war and extermination of Hamas), but they still knew at some level that Israel was going to come in shooting and killing civilians. Israel shoots at kids for throwing rocks, of course Hamas knew civilians were getting killed from their actions. Add in that Netanyahu has his own unrelated troubles in Israel and he needed a disaster like this to distract the public. Plus, Israel would take any excuse it could to further erode Gaza, so they basically handed Israel a gift-wrapped war.
Does that absolve Israel’s military from indiscriminately killing civilians? Absolutely not, they have their own issues with systemic racism towards Arabs that’s built up over decades and a military that’s apparently given up on professionalism and following the rule of law. I think their calculus is total extermination of Hamas and further encroachment into Palestinian lands, to them that’s more than worth whatever civilian casualties and international condemnation they get for a few months of conflict.
Aye stop killing civilians Abraham you cunt
I'm not sure but isn't Hamas the governing party so it'd be like whoever is in rule in Israel.
Hamas started the war. Hamas took hostages to force a ground campaign. Hamas spent huge amounts of resources building an underground tunnel network. To say they dug in within the civilian population of Gaza is a massive understatement. Hamas does not wear uniforms when they fight.
Those are facts that oversimplified cartoon memes can't change.
8000-9000 dead combatants, 20,000 civilians. Hamas isn't even doing a good job of using human shields. One of the Lord's was before parliament yesterday putting the perspective of that ratio out there. Kudos to Israel for their hard work in protecting civilians in the Urban warfare they're engaged in was essentially the summary. 2:1 is apparently much better than the 6:1 typical of situations like this. Still too many people dying. The rockets need to stop ASAP.
