I remember when folks here were shilling the "Israel promises they'd never bomb a hospital" and "Hamas is lying about the death toll" lines.
All the hospitals are now rubble, and the IDF quietly let it slip that the death toll is legit recently. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.p...
There's damning video of this specific incident, recovered from the dead. I suspect subsequent massacres made a policy of finding and destroying all the phones. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
It's pretty clear that Israel is ethnically cleansing so that they can live in a pure Jewish state.
You know who reminds me of that? Fucking Serbia and they got bombed for it.
You really have no idea what's going on over there, do you?
I don't know why you're using the past tense here, I was still trying to talk some sense into these people barely two days ago. It's hopeless at this point.
If you have 3 hours, there's a documentary you can watch, about a man who was sanctioned by the government to kill a lot of "communists" in 1960's Indonesia: The Act of Killing (available at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q ).
It's sort of understandable why the defenders of the genocide have to keep defending it. Stopping doing so today would mean admitting that until yesterday you've been defending utter inhumanity.
A review:
> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.
From: https://docthisway.com/2024/09/23/the-act-of-killing-review/
It's one of my favourite documentaries, almost as good as The Death of Yugoslavia.
For whatever reason YouTube has put age limits on some of the uploads of it, here's the start of one without it:
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I linked to an article from an Israeli news outlet citing the IDF considering that death toll to be accurate.
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And the IDF?
They're hardly the only ones reporting this.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/30/middleeast/israeli-military-g...
> Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted military officials Thursday as saying, “We estimate that about 70,000 Gazans were killed in the war, not including the missing.” Kan 11, the country’s public broadcaster, attributed the information to the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT) and said there is now an effort to analyze how many of those killed were civilian or militant.
And the IDF ain't contesting it:
> “The IDF clarifies that the details published do not reflect official IDF data,” the spokesperson said. “Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels.” The spokesperson did not answer if the IDF held data about the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza or if such information would ever be released.
1. Says the IDF accepted the fictitious 0-militants 100%-civilian death toll claim.
2. Links to a news report that has literally no source on its claims. Just says "IDF accepted" and that's it.
3. Links to another news report which does nothing but report on the previous news report as if this makes it credible.
4. Says IDF isn't contesting the report.
5. Proceeds to provide the only official, verifiable, sourced IDF quote about the report, contesting it.
The logical fallacies you're willing to accept in order to feed your hatred is impressive.
1. No, it doesn't.
2. "Kan 11, the country’s public broadcaster, attributed the information to the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT)"
(That's a state-owned news outlet, to be clear; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kan_11)
3. See above.
4. Accurate.
5. Re-read that statement. At no point does it contest the toll.
> All the hospitals are now rubble
Hospitals may have been used for retaliation [0], but it is unclear how many & in what capacity (according to accepted conventions, using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target, for example; but hiding weapons or personnel would).
[0] One such recent report: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Israel did not have a habit of drastically overstating their case and quietly walking it back after they end up killing more journalists and toddlers than active combatants in hospital bombings. Also if reports didn't deliberately conflate 'armed man' with 'Hamas militant' and euphemize about the 'Hamas-run Interior Ministry' like that one does.
A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Hamas did not have a habit of not putting uniforms in combat
> Israeli forces dressed in doctors’ scrubs and women’s clothes have killed three Palestinian militants in an undercover operation in a hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/30/israel-forces-...
Hmm.
Do you understand the difference between being not in uniform in order to infiltrate enemy territory and being not in uniform in your own territory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidy
> It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy… The following acts are examples of perfidy… The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status...
(Assassinating a paralyzed patient in a hospital is also not typically - ahem - kosher.)
The israelis must stop the occupation regardless of whether the al-Qassam brigades wear uniform or not.
They should also pay reparations, and send their leaders to the Hague.
Not sure I understand the mass downvotes on this one. I didn't take it as endorsing the action but summarizing the rationale.
People have had good reasons for downvoting the above, but it's unclear how many and what those reasons might be.
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It's not at all an uncommon scenario to have to deal with in war, especially asymmetrical conflicts.
IMO, Israel stepped very clearly over the line, repeatedly, in how they handled it, but the parent post is a pretty reasonable summary of the considerations.
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We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. You can't attack others like this here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
The rules aren't written by plucky revolutionaries, but the big powers. They, thus, fairly often favor people who fight like the big powers.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/17/can-hospitals-...
> Article 8 of the Rome statute, which established the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague, defines a long list of war crimes including “intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected”.
> But it makes an exception if the targets are “military objectives”. Philip-Gay said that “if a civilian hospital is used for acts harmful to the enemy, that is the legal term used”, the hospital can lose its protected status under international law and be considered a legitimate target. Nevertheless, if there is doubt as to whether a hospital is a military objective or being used for acts harmful to the enemy, the presumption, under international humanitarian law, is that it is not.
Again, I think Israel committed war crimes here and throughout Gaza. But the parent poster has a point that using a hospital for combat purposes risks its status.
(There are still rules to follow in that case, that weren't followed. Again, war crimes.)
> Truth: Mass-destroying a country's hospitals, murdering the doctors, nurses, workers & patients, mass-executing aid workers ... is Israeli. And only Israeli.
This is the same mistake many made about Nazi Germany; convincing themselves that the Germans were uniquely evil. It stops people from having to examine themselves.
Steven Sinofsky (ex Microsoft, and was also in the Epstein leaks), has been running cover for the IDF for the last few years. One tweet that comes to mind where he alluded that just because a building may have a few first aid kits, it's not a hospital.
> according to accepted conventions
Who accepted those? And did they have a right to do so on behalf of _all_ of humanity?
The conventions are a guideline. To use them as a blanket moral justification for your actions after the fact is extremely disingenuous.
You mean the hospitals where hamas were storing their weapons and fighters in the big underground tunnels?
Yes. You can't blow up entire hospitals and kill patients just because someone's storing stuff in the basement.
> You can't blow up entire hospitals and kill patients just because someone's storing stuff in the basement
I believe hospitals lose much of their protection under international law when they’re dual used like this. (There is still proportionality and morality.)
"Much of" and "all of" are very different things.
I don't know how much weight the legalist argument holds here, seeing how the IDF has been acting extra-legally for a long while now, but anyway, I seriously doubt that each destroyed hospital and each destroyed school held terrorists. We've seen the IDF target civilians, aid workers and journalists too many times to believe them so easily.
I don’t like it but it was a war. October 7 was a declaration of war. I heard almost no one complain about the “war on terror” and I’m sure similar collateral occurred.
For some reason people forget the pearl harbour event that happened before it all kicked off ?
Not trying to say it’s fine to bomb a hospital, but it doesn’t seem fair to single out the IDF. Do you whine about Hiroshima ?
> I don’t like it but it was a war.
I don't disagree.
There's a reason we have a thing called "war crimes". (In fact, much of the concept stems from a conflict very significant to Israel.)
> I heard almost no one complain about the “war on terror”
I don't think you were listening very ahrd.
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