Israel, Palestine & the Levant rolling events: Oct 23 on

BREAKING: Next week #Israel is to approve #Jerusalem periphery #E1 South and East spatial plans, which would allow for the addition of 3,401 settlement housing units and the transfer - in grave breach of international law - of an additional 14,500 settlers to the heart of the… pic.twitter.com/rTJK551hd4

— Itay Epshtain (@EpshtainItay) February 24, 2024

Why does Hamas keep forcing Israel to do this?

On the demo today it was pointed out that if the Israelis were killing children in the UK at the rate they are in Gaza we'd be at around 300 000 dead now.

Sorry to ask but how does that work? If the rate is the same why would the number be different?

I mean the number of children murdered is already unthinkable without this kind of thought experiment but I’m confused

Hundreds of aid trucks being denied entrance to Gaza, and sometimes being bombed once they get in. People are eating their horses and stewing leaves for nutrition. But sure, it's the UNRWA schools that teach young Palestinian children to hate Israel.

Sorry to ask but how does that work? If the rate is the same why would the number be different?

uh, because uk has 30 x the population.

whatever, it is the highest rate of civilian murder of a population of any post ww2 conflict.

Oh ok, that’s proportion rather than rate I think. Apply that to say china, or earth, the number would be even higher

whatever, it is the highest rate of civilian murder of a population of any post ww2 conflict.

Yeah that’s the point and worth making again & again, just seemed like a weird way to make it

ok. my bad on the arithmetic terminology.

It’s not a terminology issue really I just don’t think “if we multiply this number by 30 it’s 30 times bigger!” was necessarily a good way to communicate the actual horror of the number’s reality: it causes confusion in dopes like me and leaves room for bad actors to nitpick the finer points of massacring kids

yeah that is meaningless

maybe to you but it's not meaningless at all; it was absolutely not meaningless to the people protesting today. it had a visceral reaction. it really got across to a very large number of people there the scale of the atrocity.

nitpick away though, why don't you.

whatever, it is the highest rate of civilian murder of a population of any post ww2 conflict.

This is wrong right? Like if we're talking conflicts then the US has killed more Iraqi civilians with their post 9/11 affairs than what Israel has done so far? Then there's Afghanistan + surrounding countries to count as well...

I'm not posting this as any defense, there's no "better" amount of civilians to kill in a conflict; just don't want false facts to "leave room for bad actors". If I'm wrong please correct me

Like wins says, I think this muddled fact is rate(proportion) rather than rate(over time).

ah okay makes sense, skimmed over "rate", my bad

“If Gaza had 100 times the population there would be over a million dead in this conflict”

I’m sure getting across the scale of the atrocity by making up an imaginary atrocity of a completely different scale got a lot of ppl fired up in the moment, but written down on a forum it’s bad not good because it doesn’t really bear scrutiny

Cambodia is probably the highest, but I think comparing and contrasting these things is difficult

I think it illustrates to people the relative proportionate size of population loss. What percentage of the people of a place are killed is a meaningful metric for understanding scale.

I'm not sure why you think that it doesn't stand up to scrutiny given that translation to matching scales is generally how comparisons of proportion work (e.g. percentage). One wouldn't say that 33% of 60 is a meaningless figure as it illustrates proportion.

Given the population of the UK is so large in comparison I can see why scaling this up would be a meaningful illustration of what the proportionate impact to another population would be. People derive their sense of scale from their own context. We know from experience that people often find the scale of things like number of deaths and casualties difficult to keep from becoming abstract in their cognition. Ways of illustrating scale can be helpful in order to understand the enormity of the loss. In this case proportion seems an important metric to understand the impact of this amount of death to a people and their networks of community and memory. This may require some translation.

I've heard Israeli spokespeople using it constantly with regard to the death toll on October 7.

Ico otm. I work in a school. I've told friends that Israel has murdered the equivalent of my school's worth of children every 3 days for 4 months straight. Giving a real world comparsion has allowed myself and others to get a better sense of how totally evil this all is

Right, you’re using a familiar context but also comparing like with like, the numbers are the same. Using your school as a comparison point is better than starting with the population of the United States, keeping the percentage the same & then saying “look how high that number is”; that would technically be correct but it’s rhetorical inflation, it’s misleading & confusing imo. Even when comparing proportions you should start with like numbers otherwise you’re trying to convey scale by *literally changing the scale* to be much bigger & there are loads of ways to do so in a uk context & be immediately understood (have seen Birmingham used as a comparison point eg)

Real numbers are enough. How could they not be?

There's better things to stride the high-horse on re: this war wins. Proportions, rates, percentages, all exist and are useful for communication. No need to be indignant at their use if they are used with clarity. And where it's not clear, still no need to get indignant, you can just ask for clarification and all is right again.

xps myself: "others" wasn't rhetorical, I mean real world people I talk to about this, not some wanky royal "them".

Point taken, not dying on this hill

<3

Israel has struck a target in eastern Lebanon, apparently killing two people because an unmanned drone was taken down by Hezbollah.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/26/israeli-jets-bomb-eastern-lebanon-for-the-first-time-since-gaza-war-began

UN experts have accused Israel of deliberately starving Gazans.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-gaza-starvation-un-netanyahu-isolated-biden-rafah-offensive/

And of course, polls show a majority of Israeli citizens support the ongoing starvation of Gazans, as well
as pushing the war further into Lebanon.

Biden saying in public he expects a ceasefire by next week, comes as a surprise to me -- hard to say whether he's saying that because a deal is really near, or because he's trying to leverage public pressure to will a deal into existence. I hope to hell he is right.

I think it's just going to be a temporary Ramadan ceasefire, and it could fall apart

If there’s going to be a ceasefire why do this?

The costs of delaying a vote on the bipartisan national security supplemental rise every day.

This bill would arm Ukraine, invest in our defense industrial base, help Israel defend itself against Hamas, and get more humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians.

Let's get it done.

— President Biden (@POTUS) February 27, 2024

'defend itself against Hamas'

Once again, where the fuck were you guys on Oct 7th?

funding Hamas, duh

If there’s going to be a ceasefire why do this?

Because Biden is explicitly rejecting Netanyahu's line that Israel is helpless to defend itself against Hamas and faces murder and expulsion of its population unless it re-occupies Gaza. (I don't think that's a line most Israelis really believe, I'm not sure even Netanyahu himself believes it, but he's put himself in a position where he can't abandon it.) Biden is saying: don't bullshit me you can't survive having a Palestinian state on your borders, you can and you eventually will, the question is what happens on the way there.

(I don't think that's a line most Israelis really believe,

I'm already seeing reports today that the ceasefire isn't remotely likely with the WH clarifying that Biden's comments were "optimistic" rather than based on anything real (https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/27/israel-hamas-talks-no-deal-00143731).

Seems like the genocide-supporting status quo will continue without meaningful pushback from the US, and the chances that US weapons are used to slaughter Palestinians in Rafah are quite high. If the Rafah invasion happens, will Israel pay any price vis-a-vis US support? Doesn't look like it to me.

"More than 100 Palestinians have been killed and some 700 others wounded after Israeli troops opened fire on hundreds waiting for food aid southwest of Gaza City, health officials say, as the besieged enclave faces an unprecedented hunger crisis."

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/29/dozens-killed-injured-by-israeli-fire-in-gaza-while-collecting-food-aid

unbearable news

Unforgiveable, now and forever

yes but do you condemn hamas

So out of character for the most moral and ethical army the world has ever known.

we've also passed 30,000 killed now. and I just read that aid has dropped by 50% *since* the ICJ ruling

Biden says killing of more than 100 Palestinians near aid trucks will complicate ceasefire talks

He's all heart this guy.

The US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, said earlier today that more than 25,000 women and children had been killed by Israel since 7 October 2023

I think this is actually more than Hamas claim. Has he told Biden this?

Really moved by these photos

Palestinians performing Friday prayers on the ruins of "Al-Farouq Mosque” in Rafah that was destroyed by the occupation pic.twitter.com/UxVXTaPRiA

— deeeeeee (@revolutionaryem) March 1, 2024

https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147217

The UN has found “clear and convincing” evidence of sexual violence both against hostages and on October 7. I don’t really want to keep revisiting this except that the denialism still runs strong, including the recent focus on the Times reporting as a way of discrediting the actual events. I continue to find this tendency disgusting and revolting.

It’s horrible but I’d be surprised if there wasn’t any sexual violence. Soldiers have been this way for thousands of years. e.g. https://m.jpost.com/israel-news/article-691641

Not that it makes it “better” but that report was primarily about sexual assaults within the military (as opposed to as a weapon) which, unfortunately yes you find in ever military.

maybe I didn't make it clear in my posts, but the reason I focused on the Times reporting is because absolutely bungling reporting on sexual violence makes it harder for good reporting on sexual violence to break through

So the UN are good now?

This is like a web comic

Seems like a solid, detailed thread on the UN report. This thread notes a number of gaps in evidence, testimony, and two unfounded allegations. Alongside other allegations with reasonable grounds.

U.N. report on Oct. 7 sexual violence finds reasonable grounds to believe that victims were raped in at least three locations that day, all related to the assault on the Nova music festival and the attempt by victims to escape: https://t.co/tikVuiveTx pic.twitter.com/SnZjxTEaQf

— Evan Hill (@evanhill) March 4, 2024

I can only see the first post so I don’t know what the purported “gaps” are.

from the report:

"55. As a result of the aforementioned challenges, it must be noted that the information gathered by the mission team was in a large part sourced from Israeli national institutions. This is due to the absence of United Nations entities operating in Israel, as well as the lack of cooperation by the State of Israel with relevant United Nations bodies with an investigative mandate. Nevertheless, the mission team took every step, in line with UN methodology, to mitigate issues of source reliability before drawing conclusions within the scope of this report."

Sorry, this doesn't pass the sniff test.

Basically Israel did not allow them to interview victims.