This will be very interesting if they can conquer the distribution issue.
During the Hong Kong protests I recall several such solutions were created, but the dominant thing ended up being airdrop because it is what so many people already had locked and loaded.
You are right but as German if I made that point publicly in regards to Palestine I would get arrested. I am not exaggerating
It is crazy how we have dehumanized Palestinians to the point that just hinting on the fact that they might have a right to resist it completely taboo. Like you don't have to agree with their methods but expecting them to do nothing while Israel murders them and the world looks away is such a cruelty that is hard to comprehend.
I don't know about that, if settlers in the West Bank cop some violence then that's going to be considered well deserved.
Soldiers of 'a government' committing murder, rape and hostage taking on a music festival is going to earn you a bit of looking away to the consequences.
I don't expect them to do nothing, I expect them to come to a deal not sacrifice everything in an eternal and vain attempt to remove Israel from the map.
> I don't expect them to do nothing, I expect them to come to a deal
Well that is what they did. People like you told shite like "The war ends if they release the hostages".
They agreed to the first step of the peace plan. They released the hostages. They are keeping the truce. (Israel claims they killed a few soldiers but that seem to be a lie, they probably died from explosive that were already lying around).
So what did it gain them? Israels keeps murdering them. People are still starving in Gaza because Israel refuses to let food in.
> committing murder, rape and hostage taking
This is what Israel has been doing for decades. We just call the hostages prisoners.
While the Palestinians have treated their hostages as well as they could even when Gaza was starving, the bodies of the dead political prisoners Israel gave back were so mutilated from systemic torture that not even family members are able to recognize them.
As for the accusation of the resistance committing systemic rape, that is just racist propaganda. Same when they justified the lynching of black people in the US with saying they raped white women. We would have video evidence if something like that had happened.
The deal included remains of deceased hostages, most of which were not released at the agreed 48 hour point.
> they probably died from explosive that were already lying around
The source behind this theory seemed to be a tweet claiming "I’m told by a source familiar", and another tweet which was explicitly speculating ("most likely due to an explosive device ..."). No evidence was offered.
> While the Palestinians have treated their hostages as well as they could even when Gaza was starving
A UN envoy found "clear and convincing information that some [hostages] have been subjected to various forms of conflict-related sexual violence including rape and sexualized torture and sexualized cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment".
Evyatar David also appeared to be the most severely malnourished adult in Gaza, while being forced to dig his own grave.
It's either a gross ignorance or gross deceit to compare those numbers to the amount of civilians who have been killed during the Palestinian genocide. A terrorist attack doesn't give you the right to ignore human rights.
The international criminal court has an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. He is a war criminal. Get your facts straight.
You're not going to justify colonial genocide with whataboutism. It wasn't OK when the US did it and then called natives savages as a defense for our inhuman treatment of them, and it's not OK now that Israel is doing it. No amount of whining about Hamas will change that, especially considering Netanyahu openly funded Hamas through Qatar. You act like this conflict hasn't been perpetuated for decades. It's manufactured consent, plain and simple.
Hamas' actions are easily condemnable and doesn't need a mention, the only people who can't seem to understand that are the same people who seem to have a problem condemning Israel's actions. It is extremely easy to condemn both of them at once, if you start from an ethical, secular foundation.
Lol. This same mentality is professed by those you wish to condemn. You reveal yourself to be no better than the monsters you seek to destroy. You're willing to kill civilian women and children and men in order to do it.
You're willing to blame a people for the actions of a terrorist government that Israel/Netanyahu themselves propped up, something you didn't even bother to deny.
You're an absolute joke. Your consent is manufactured, and you're so lazy and brainwashed that you don't even care that you're a pawn.
Israel has zero justification for its colonial occupation. Colonial occupation is unjustifiable. I don't care what cult religious "right" Israel thinks it has that allows it to occupy and genocide a group of people, and then dare to call those people the violent savages.
America did the same thing. It was called Manifest Destiny. Americans were convinced they had a God-given right to subjugate, colonize and genocide the native American people.
How do I know my understanding of the situation isn't manufactured? I have the capability to research history and have independent thoughts. Your attempt to patronize and belittle me is a poor stand-in for an actual rebuttal. All you've offered me is , "b-b-buT WhAT iF uR WrONg?".
I also don't know what you're talking about "fatherless homes", I was indeed raised without a father and still seem to be a much better representative of what it means to be a man than someone who justifies the mass killing of innocent women and children over a manufactured terrorist strike. You speak from a place of privilege and ignorance. You should be ashamed of yourself.
I don’t know what you think it’s trying to say, but I will admit that my own ideological bent probably makes it read a lot differently to you.
I have a half-non-serious idea that these small scale wars (compared to WWI / II) that pop up around the world from time to time occur to maintain at least some state of force-readiness and to make use of ordnance with a limited shelf life. Everything else is just a ruse, and people like you and myself are unwittingly divided over meaningless conflict in far off lands, and would probably get along really well as colleagues or friends.
Thanks for continuing the conversation and not getting triggered by my probably immature responses. I do think Jesse Lee Peterson does have a point though.
> I have a half-non-serious idea that these small scale wars (compared to WWI / II) that pop up around the world from time to time occur to maintain at least some state of force-readiness and to make use of ordnance with a limited shelf life.
That's a key pillar of the Western Military–industrial complex.
> Everything else is just a ruse, and people like you and myself are unwittingly divided over meaningless conflict in far off lands, and would probably get along really well as colleagues or friends.
Sometimes, but energy/resource wars are real. Wars and regime changes to get access to specific resources or ensure labor/resources stay dirt cheap for first-world countries at the expensive of meager to destitute quality of life for those living in such areas, producing the goods we consume. The neoliberal imperial economic machine.
A good current example is the situation in Venezuela, where Trump is suddenly pretending to care about the quality of life of their citizens, and lying about the volume of drugs produced there, when the real story is the gigantic oil deposits that Trump's benefactors want to regain access to.
The other problem is that innocent people have died, and at scale, and the checks and bombs are signed by the US. It's not even just Palestine. There was Cablegate, if you remember, the infamous helicopter video, public documentation of the way that civilians are treated in these proxy wars.
Just in the last month, in Darfur, we've seen so much bloodshed that you could see pools of blood and dead bodies from orbiting satellites. An amount of people rivaling entire body count of the number of people killed since the recent Israeli invasion of Palestine, killed in less than a week, slaughtered like pigs... and various Western governments have their fingers all over this war, too, funding and arming factions both directly and indirectly.
And Netanyahu is no different here. He knew exactly what would happen. We'd all watched what happened when the US funded rebel groups that ended up seeding what became Al-Qaeda, our refusal to address real concerns levied by the group, to ignore increasing threats of action draw attention to the international crimes of the US. Then, even when faced with evidence that something like 9/11 was likely to occur, we just continued business as usual and let it happen, immediately pulled out the Patiot Act, which was promoted by Bush but based on earlier legislation penned by Biden himself, because one should never waste a good tragedy. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/andrewkaczynski/surveil...
Then we invaded the Middle East and for what? Oil. It took 25 years for us to disengage, and the Taliban took over Afghanistan once we left, so we've only increased the level of fascist governance in the world.
Netanyahu's war is a mockery of human life, and there is a reason the International Criminal Court has a warrant for his arrest, and why the Imperial US continues to cover for him.
> Thanks for continuing the conversation and not getting triggered by my probably immature responses. I do think Jesse Lee Peterson does have a point though.
I don't know much of him except that he's a religious zealot white nationalist conservative, what point do you refer to? Was it something he said about Palestine, or about conflict?
Would you not try to resist if you were to live in an open-air prison like Gaza?
What if you lived in the West Bank and someone came to knock on your door and tell you that settlers were now taking over your land your family has lived in for hundreds of years and the bulldozer was coming the same afternoon to destroy your house, how would you react?
I never condone attacking civilians, but i can't reasonably understand what those people had to live through for decades while their neighbour get to go to the beach every weekend.
> Udi Raz, 34, is sitting in a cafe in Berlin, where he lives, reflecting on a turbulent six months. Since Israel’s war on Gaza began following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October, Raz, an Israeli Jew raised in Haifa, has been fired from his job and had the activist group he’s part of labelled antisemitic by Germany’s official antisemitism commissioner.
> Last Friday, German authorities arrested Raz, a board member of Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, after they cancelled and then banned the group’s three-day conference on Palestine.
Ok so the Irish guy got punched in the face after doing that:
> as O'Brien is seen calling officers 'genocide supporters' and accusing one of 'acting like a Nazi'.
If you scream
at peoples faces and insult them, you risk getting punched in the face. Police or not. Would be more professional to ignore that. But this is not a state systematically coming after you for voicing opinions. If you want to see a real example of that, look no further than Hamas.
The UN pays for schools for children to be brainwashed into suicide to kill as many Israelis as possible via UNRWA - it is not a reliable source of information.
Sadly most repressive states and apartheid systems control who has a gun.
You can see that in Russia (as one example of many more, mind you), where officials search through your apps on the smartphone, or worse, people being carried away by cops merely for holding up a blank piece of paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbzV1it1YPY
Exactly when a group like Hamas controls your home and brutally executes any dissidents or even suspected dissidents in public on a routine basis it’s difficult for any individual to fight back [1], almost worse is torture and maiming of anyone who even hints at “disloyalty” [2].
In such situations though encrypted messaging becomes crucial, but it’d be hard to hide.
Yeah, it must suck to get brutally JDAM'd (along with your whole family [0]), sniper-droned (seeking to main and kill [1]) and mown down by "gaza humanitarian foundation" machine-gun fire (while queueing for food) [2] in Palestine, just for disagreeing with israel's position that your land now belongs to them. If you're lucky, you won't be thrown into one of israel's rape-and-torture-camps [3][4].
But anyways, great submission and great work. Remember though, your cell phone signals will earn you a JDAM, because you might be a terrorist for using a cell phone. So stay on the move.
Hamas supporters like you really make my skin crawl. Remember when they massacred hundreds of people at a concert and paraded the body of a young German woman they murdered like a hunting trophy? Is that what you support?
If you're criticized by someone who supports israel's terroristic raping, torturing, killing, and genocide of innocent civilians, that's a strong indication that you're in the right, since they're in the wrong.
The critic can pretend to be as offended as much as they want, but since they're supporting israel's terroristic raping, torturing, killing, and genocide of innocent civilians (an act far worse than the one they're criticizing), the criticism rings hollow: they don't actually care about innocent civilians, only about their "side" getting everything it wants.
No sane person is "pretending" to be offended by the despicable actions of Hamas on Oct 7 2023. Even if Israel is committing war crimes (a reasonable position to argue), that doesn't make Hamas not a totalitarian theocracy that kills its opponents. These facts can coexist. Refusing to acknowledge Hamas's nature while condemning Israel's actions isn't moral clarity it's selective blindness.You're claiming moral authority to dismiss criticism by asserting I support worse actions committed by Israel, while simultaneously excusing far worse actions by Hamas. This is just "whataboutism" and it just attempts to silence criticism through tu quoque reasoning. This means neither side's conduct gets properly examined.
Massacring concert-goers, taking civilian hostages, and using rape as a weapon of war are either categorically wrong or they're not. If Israel's killing of civilians delegitimizes its supporters' moral standing, then Hamas's deliberate targeting of civilians on Oct 7 2023 equally delegitimizes yours. You can't claim the moral high ground while excusing incredibly evil actions when they are committed by Hamas. You remind me strongly of Trump supporters who support him when he does exactly the same things they criticized Obama and Biden for doing.
> No sane person is "pretending" to be offended by the despicable actions of Hamas on Oct 7 2023
Interesting how your memory starts and stops at that very moment, ignoring israel's terroristic hostage-taking, raping, torturing, killing, and genocide, which happened before and after that date, in greater numbers.
To me, that sort of whataboutism when deflecting the criticism of israel which was the original topic, indicates the speaker doesn't actually care about innocent civilians, unless they are israeli. Indeed, refusing to acknowledge israel's nature while trying to redirect to someone else's actions is selective blindness.
Massacring children, taking civilian hostages, using rape as a weapon of war, engaging in war crimes, engaging in crimes against humanity, and engaging in genocide (all of which israel did and is doing) are either categorically wrong or they're not, regardless of what you think of hamas or any other 3rd party.
You can't claim the moral high ground while excusing incredibly evil actions when they are committed by israel (actions which are even more incredibly evil than those of hamas). You remind me strongly of trump supporters who support him when he does exactly the same things, and much worse things, than those they criticized Obama and Biden for doing.
Hamas's explicit goal is the destruction of Israel and creating an Islamic state to replace it. Do you support this? What is your ideal solution to the conflict?
Hamas is essentially a less ambitious ISIS. Hamas similarities to ISIS:
-Sunni Islamist organizations seeking Sharia-based states
-Totalitarian control in their territories
-Systematic killing of political opponents and "collaborators"
> [person complaining about whataboutism proceeds to make a post consisting entirely of whataboutism to distract from the topic of israel]
Considering israel is guilty of everything you listed and worse (including genocide), and in greater amounts, this isn't even a good 'whataboutism' from you. Indeed, no amount of whataboutism, nothing hamas has done or can do justifies israel's crimes. Either way, try to stay on topic (israel) rather than engaging in whataboutism (deflecting from israel with 'whatabout hamas!?') and spreading anti-jewish slurs.
By the way, I think our fellow poster is still waiting for an answer from you here:
Please stop ignoring everything I say about Hamas with "Israel bad too". Do you or do you NOT want Hamas to replace Israel with a ISIS style Islamic state, as that is their goal. Have you ever read their insane rant of a Charter?
First, I ask that you please stop ignoring everything everyone is saying about israel with "hamas bad too" [0][1][2][3].
Remember, israel was the topic until someone engaged in whataboutism w/r/t hamas. 'But hamas' here, on the topic of israel's bad behavior, is a tu quoque fallacy. Someone's bad behavior cannot be solely defended on the basis of 'but so and so did X', and israel's behavior in particular (oppression, civilian kidnapping, rape, torture, mass killing, collective punishment, crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide) is indefensible, period.
Do you or do you NOT want israel to continue their campaign of oppression, civilian kidnapping, rape, torture, mass killing, collective punishment, crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide?
Have you ever heard the insane rants of their leaders about Palestine and innocent Palestinian civilians [4]? It's the same language hitler used to describe jews like myself, and advocate for our extermination: "human animals"; "it is an entire nation out there that is responsible"; "they should starve to death"; "we must make sure that Gaza is empty of Gazans". That's bad!
As a kid visiting Holocaust museums, I was taught the lessons of "never again", and recognized that it meant for all people. Let's all learn from that horrible genocide, and stop this one being perpetrated by israel.
Are you sure you aren't looking for stormfront or elmu's twitter, rather than HN? It's not nice for you to comment on my jewish faith (or anybody else's) in such a negative manner.
But I didn't interpret your posts as irrational anyways. You are pretty coherent, just disagreeable in your religious discrimination against jews.
[READER NOTE: parent "UltraSane" edited their post after I replied, above is UltraSane's original antisemetic post to which I replied]
Irrational? That's like saying the Allies response to the Nazi's was irrational.
Come to think of it, maybe that's the solution. After WW2 the Allies "DeNazified" Germany by dismantling Nazi organizations, removing Nazis from public life, and trying prominent war criminals.
It also included symbolic actions like changing street names, as well as re-educating the German population in democratic values.
I'm keenly aware that there are significant sections of Israel and non-Israeli Jews who stand shoulder to shoulder fighting against what is happening in Israel.
But it's not enough. Israel should go through a process similar to DeNazification.
I live in Germany and I can tell you German denazification was a complete failure. Yes they're not run by a party calling itself NSDAP. Yes there haven't been concentration camps. Yes everyone knows you have to protect Jews. But the underlying feelings are still there - they're just directed towards different groups. Germany is inching closer to doing it again with Muslims.
Interesting perspective. However (and give me some rope here), I'd still argue that, somehow, Germany emerged from WW2, eventually, as a relatively sane and democratic country compared to where it had been during and prior to the war. So it wasn't a complete failure.
All countries, as we're sadly finding out now, have a nasty undercurrent. Particularly now, but nothing compared to Nazi Germany in terms of its ideological underpinnings.
However, the indiscriminate hatred, dehumanisation, and, yes, genocide on display from Israel echoes what I've studied in Hitlers Germany.
And so, again, I'll argue Israel needs a similar program of DeNazification. I don't know how you get there, because they haven't been "defeated" and are in fact being supported. But that is what is needed in Israel.
The use of the term Nazi is deeply stupid. But Israel does need to chill a bit and care more about their global PR. But they are surrounded by countries that really DO want to destroy them so I can understand why they are so trigger happy. The way they destroyed Hezbollah was brilliant. The Hamas charter is a giant Islamist Jew-hating rant.
It’s hard for me not to have a “black pilled” view of this region. They’ll never have peace until they actually want it. There’s too many nuts on every side whose whole purpose for living is to see anyone who isn’t just like them dead.
Unfortunately the regular civilian who live in this region suffer for it. The only way out I can see would be some kind of cross border cross culture mass uprising against all the fanatics and those who fund and enable them.
It should also serve as a warning for us. We can have peace and prosperity because we have, as a culture, managed to restrain these kinds of impulses. We flirt with hyper polarization and fanatical ideologies at our own peril. Those who promote this stuff for short term political or economic gain should be compared, maybe, to people playing around with dangerous gain of function research on disease organisms. This stuff takes hold and our countries will look like the war zones of the Middle East.
People really like to gloss over how deeply rooted Jew hatred is in Islam. The Koran contains blatant hate speech against Jews and this is the primary reason why Muslims resent the existence of Israel so irrationally
Because it isn't symmetric at all. Mohamed added all the of hate speech about Jews because they sensibly didn't believe he was a prophet. It is remarkably similar to how L Ron Hubbard taught his followers to hate Psychologists because they rightly called him out for his bullshit.
> Particularly now, but nothing compared to Nazi Germany
This statement is copium, and part of the problem. The first half of Nazi Germany was nothing compared to the second half. Hitler was chancellor for 11 years, and every year was worse than the one before. The war and the Holocaust only happened towards the end. And the trajectory the USA has been going on so far is not dissimilar to the first half of the Nazis.
It’s different situation in Gaza tho, unlike protests where you might need to hide your identity going there to participate so having that app will expose you, in gaza it’s more of a concentration camp where the main resources are controlled but on the ground, not really, so no police will stop you there because you have an app, bitchat might be the perfect solution.
I think in these kinds of places they beat you dead for being the wrong skin colour if they're in a bad mood. I'm not sure how much your installed apps are relevant to the decision.
The "wrong skin color" is projection of western ideologies to Israel/Gaza conflict.
Israelis have lighter skin Ashkenazi Jews, darker skin Mizrahi Jews(majority of hte jews in Israel now) and black Ethiopian jews. And of course 20%+ Arabs living in the country.
Gazan Palestinians skin color varies as well, some have light skin, while others
have darker skin tones.
For example, does this woman have the right skin color or the wrong one:
Zionism was what pushed Jews to accept the Partition Plan[0], and later the disengagement plan[1], both rejecting the idea of Gaza as an Israeli territory.
The colonization of Gaza is entirely driven by Hamas's attack on Israel.
Acting like the dominant political stream in Israel has not been interested in occupying Gaza since at least 1967 to this day is a bald faced and shameless misdirection.
First, as the other comment mentioned, that political stream you're talking about was literally the one the left Gaza.
Second, that political stream is the opposition of the Zionism stream that established Israel. Picking and choosing the last two years as a proof for what Zionism is all about is like saying "Americanism is all about taking over Greenland". Somehow, when it's Zionism, people will not notice how ridiculous that sounds.
Sure. Just look at how they're doing now: they have the full support of the world to re-invade Gaza, and this can be justified by the fact that no Jews live there (Just look three comments above yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45932249 )
If there were Israeli Jews (I am not referring to the religious group, but by which side of the conflict people are on) living in Gaza, such arguments wouldn't work, just like they don't work for the West Bank (which is also getting genocided but we're not talking about it, so maybe that strategy works too).
1) Hamas started a war with Israel by invading it, slaughtering and raping hundreds of civilians at the music festival and in their homes as well as taking hundreds of civilians hostage, including as we all know an toddlers, womens and elderly.
2) Israel in order to rescue its citizens as well as protect them from future attacked invaded Gaza and attacked Hammas and its infrastructure
So yeah, it makes sense to support the country trying to rescue its hostages from an enemy government.
We can debate how Israel prosecutes the war, but its a war that Hamas started and yet in your accusation of Israel above there is no mention of role Gazan goverment -- Hamas -- played in this war.
I doubt that my country -- the US -- would prosecute the war any better, had it been invaded by thousands of Mexican federales killing 42,000 people -- an equivalent of population the city of Cupertino where Apple is headquartered -- while kidnapping 9,000 of our citizens. I doubt any country would do better as a matter of fact.
> Hamas started a war with Israel by invading it, slaughtering and raping hundreds of civilians at the music festival and in their homes
Could you provide conclusive evidence for that? Could you provide even cases of formally filed rape allegations? [1] Yes I know that a lot of Israeli media people made the accusation, but there's no reason to repeat something that no proof was given for.
I find middleeastmonitor.com an extremely biased anti-israeli propaganda piece that makes BBC seem like an unbiased news organization.
If you search for the name "Moran Gaz" used in this article to conclude
that "Gaz stated that her department has found no evidence of sexual violence" is actually not true and is Moran's statements were quite nuanced:
"
In the end, we have no complainants. What was presented in the media compared to what will ultimately emerge will be completely different. Either because the victims were murdered, or because the women who were raped by them are not prepared to reveal it. We contacted women's rights organizations and asked for cooperation. They told us that they simply did not contact them. There were parents who contacted the organizations and asked what to do if something happened to their daughter, but they did not disclose the abuse...I know there is public expectation and understand the need to address the horrific sexual crimes and sexual assaults that have been committed, but the vast majority of them will not be able to meet the threshold of proof in court, and the criticism will ultimately come to the prosecutor's office – unjustly.
"
>> Either because the victims were murdered, or because the women who were raped by them are not prepared to reveal it.
>> We contacted women's rights organizations and asked for cooperation. They told us that they simply did not contact them.
This reads entirely different that what that article from MiddleEastMonitor.com leads you to believe. The way its titled and the way you interpreted is there were no sexual assaults, only slaughter, only murders.
Im not going to engage in "Hamas slaughered festival goers on camera, killed a father in front of his kids, while blowing out one their eyes and kidnapped toddlers, but we will question the sex crimes being committed".
Is protecting the killers of families, babies and kidnappers of toddlers from accusations of sexual assault really the proverbial "hill you want to die on"?
Lets focus on order of operatons:
1) Hamas started a war
2) Israel responded in order to free its citizens and protect from future attacks.
> Could you provide conclusive evidence for that? Could you provide even cases of formally filed rape allegations?
It's pretty crazy how far the Overton Window has shifted on Jews. We went from it being prima facie evidence of antisemitism to even "notice" their disproportionate influence on, or over-representation in, certain American institutions, like the Supreme Court--as shown when Pat Buchanan got soft-canceled for noting that Kagan's confirmation would make Jews a full 1/3 of Justices, despite being only 2% of the population--to it now being acceptable to outright deny war crimes committed against Israelis.
It is important to distinguish between Jews and Israelis, as there is a significant portion of Jewish people who are leading the fight for truth about what Israel is and what Israel does.
To address your comment, Israelis have been caught lying so many times that now when they make a claim, it is on them to prove that the claim is correct, rather than on others to prove that it is not. Just a few examples off the top of my head include:
- The killing of medical workers in a convoy of ambulances and burying them in shallow graves, then lying about doing it until someone dug the bodies up and found footage confirming that they lied on the phone of one of the buried aid workers. [1]
- The hunting down and killing of World Central Kitchen aid workers via multiple air strikes [2]. This was repeatedly denied by Israelis until too much evidence was stacked up and they settled for "it was a grave mistake".
- The high profile case of killing of Hind Rajab [3] who for a brief period of time was the sole survivor of a tank attack in a shelled vehicle filled with her dead family members. Aid workers were dispatched to rescue here, coordinated with Israelis. Neither the girl nor the aid workers were ever seen alive after that. Israelis repeatedly insisted that there were no troops in the area, until too much evidence was stacked again.
Asking why there are no filled allegation is as ignorant as suggesting that no Palestinian home was destroyed because no Palestinian appealed to Palestinian court suing Israeli soldiers for destroying their home. You clearly don't understand how the system works.
Hi, your mention of the UN report made me look at the actual report in an effort to find the truth of the matter. So let's go deeper into the UN report as it's often cited as a proof of rape, but as we'll see by the end of it, there isn't actually any evidence for it other than "people said" (for more context of why I'm dismissing this, look at the points below and especially at the end of this post). Please do double-check and correct me if I reach a wrong conclusion somewhere. Here's the link to the full report by Pramila Patten published around early March 2024: [1].
The key points based on which I say that there is no proper evidence are the following:
> 34. The mission team, specifically the forensic pathologist and the digital analyst, reviewed over 5,000 photos, around 50 hours and several audio files of footage of the attacks, provided partly by various state agencies and through an independent online review of various open sources, to identify potential instances and indications of conflict-related sexual violence.
So there is plenty of photo and video material from surveillance devices. Good. But, we have a few lines mentioning something very similar to this:
> 16. [...] With respect to the latter instance, while the forensic analysis reviewed injuries to intimate body parts, no discernible pattern could be identified, against either female or male soldiers.
Further searching of the word "forensic" reveals nothing conclusive about rape. Just notes that there were injuries to intimate body parts, which is expected when bodies are blown up by tank and helicopter fire (which was confirmed to have happened during the fighting). The report does not comment whether the injuries were inflicted specifically by hand-to-hand combat weapons and small personal arms.
Now, searching for the word rape, it appears throughout the report, but only ever to point out that "there are reasons to believe that it happened", but no proof is ever given, only statements by other people. A reminder that there is a lot of surveillance photo and video material, but none of it supported the claims. For example:
> 74. In the medicolegal assessment of available photos and videos, no tangible indications of rape could be identified. Further investigation may alter this assessment in the future.
And an example of rescue teams' statements that are used as sources for the accusations:
> 13. At the Nova music festival and its surroundings, there are reasonable grounds to believe that multiple incidents of sexual violence took place with victims being subjected to rape and/or gang rape and then killed or killed while being raped. Credible sources described finding 5 murdered individuals, mostly women, whose bodies were naked from their waist down – and some totally naked – tied with their hands behind their backs, many of whom were shot in the head.
Please let me know if you find something in the report that represents credible evidence of rape. I'd like to see it because I care about the truth. We know that Israel rapes Palestinians in their torture prisons because we have not only victim testimonies (that we ultimately cannot take as solid proof even if they are true), but we have actual video evidence that was released of them doing that to a prisoner on surveillance camera footage. And there is an ongoing trial where the rapists are parading around the media in Israel and proudly defending their rights to torture prisoners, including via rape. And unfortunately they have a lot of support in the country. So if Palestinian resistance fighters did the same, I want to know. But we'll need proper evidence.
One final question remains to be answered here -- why don't I think that Israelis making these claims should simply be believed? Because they lied so many times that now when Israelis make a claim, it is on them to prove that the claim is correct, rather than on others to prove that it is not. Just a few examples off the top of my head include:
- The killing of medical workers in a convoy of ambulances and burying them in shallow graves, then lying about doing it until someone dug the bodies up and found footage confirming that they lied on the phone of one of the buried aid workers. [2]
- The hunting down and killing of World Central Kitchen aid workers via multiple air strikes [3]. This was repeatedly denied by Israelis until too much evidence was stacked up and they settled for "it was a grave mistake".
- The high profile case of killing of Hind Rajab [4] who for a brief period of time was the sole survivor of a tank attack in a shelled vehicle filled with her dead family members. Aid workers were dispatched to rescue here, coordinated with Israelis. Neither the girl nor the aid workers were ever seen alive after that. Israelis repeatedly insisted that there were no troops in the area, until too much evidence was stacked again.
As for your video of an alleged pPlestinian fighter admitting to atrocities with an Israeli flag behind him, we obviously cannot take seriously a statement made in imprisonment, highly likely obtained under torture, given the vast evidence of torture (including actual rape) being conducted in Israeli prisons.
No, you are spreading lies. I won't engage any further but I'll just say that there is absolutely no video evidence, not even one, showing a rape of a Palestinian by Israeli soldiers. What there is is a video that shows Israeli soldiers standing around and beating a Palestinian prisoner, that happened to be a Hamas police-officer. The video is very unclear.
The vast majority of the discussion in Israel isn't around the the right to torture prisoners (I have actually never heard anyone argue that). That's also a lie. The discussion is around whether or not it happened.
The main difference is that in Israel, people who are suspected in doing such things would be trialed, and if found guilty, sent to jail. That's true by the way not specifically for rape, but also for harming a Palestinian in any other ways. Trails against settlers violence, for example, take place all the time. Yes, much more needs to be done, but it happens. On the Palestinian side, however, I cannot recall a single case of Palestinian facing legal charges for ever harming a Jew, and it's not because it never happens.
Does Israel have a perfect legal system? Absolutely not. But it has a system that has put many Israelis behind bars, while the Palestinian Authority usually pays compensation for those who blew up civilian buses when I was child.
Israelis live in Palestine though - it's just that any area they live gets renamed from "Palestine" to "Israel", usually accompanied by heavily artillery fire and drone strikes, to clear out the natives.
I wish more people were upfront with the truth like you are.
A very sensible interpretation of your words is
a) All land between Jordan river and mediterranean sea should be called Palestine
b) only Arabs are natives of that lands.
Here b) is plainly wrong -- Both arabs and jews continuously lived in that area for hundreds and for Jews -- thousands -- of years.
and a) implies that the state of Israel does not have a right to exist.
This basically a two sentence version of "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" slogan where its clear that we are not talking about West Bank and Gaza, but rather the entire land including Israel.
I didn't say Jews. You said Jews. I said Israelis. I don't care what their religion is - bombing all the hospitals and universities in a region and drone striking little babies is terrible horrible no no very bad stuff.
By the way, if we're talking about tribalism, the distant descendants of the Jews who lived in that area thousands of years ago, are (largely) the Palestinians. The modern Israelis are (largely) an entirely separate group of white Europeans that immigrated from Europe after WW2.
>> usually accompanied by heavily artillery fire and drone strikes, to clear out the natives.
You clearly juxtapositioned Israelis vs the natives -- who did you mean by natives if not the Palestinian arabs?
Regarding descendants of Jews being Palestinains -- I find the way you present this interesting genetic fact quite misleading, making it sound that modern day palestinians have exclusive genetic connection to the land, whereas all genetic studies done in modern years show that modern day palestinian arabs AND ashkenazi jews AND mizrahi(middle-eastern) jews have clear genetic ties to people who inhabited that land in the bronze age(aka Moses era).
Lastly, its not true that modern israelis are LARGELY a group of europeans migrated from europe. Mizrahi jews(middle east and north africa) are the largest ethnic group in Israel. Not descendants of Ashkenazi europeans. Thank Iraq and Yemen for ethnically cleansing their countries of jews in 1948 for that.
And from Wikipedia: > The Israeli Security Forces use racial profiling at military checkpoints and during some of the duties they perform. In August 2017 Haaretz reported that security guards working for a company which provides security at Tel Aviv's Central Bus Station said they were instructed to demand ID from people who look Arab and detain those who do not have an ID with them.
OP said that Israelis beat people up for having the wrong skin color. The one I replied to said that is wrong and is a projection of western ideology. But it does not appear to be wrong in reality - OP was correct.
Too often the results of these efforts (like the HK protests just using Airdrop) are never really called out anywhere so these tools become nerd catnip and nerds continue to build solutions that nobody ends up using. It would be cool to maybe collect a list of situations where comms infra was disturbed and what ended up being used (if anything) in those situations to help guide future efforts.
This is a great point. Being able to run in a browser with airdropped code makes sense. Using Bluetooth and no central server does this mean getting messages out to a world wide audience isn't possible with the app?
During the Hong Kong protests I recall several such solutions were created, but the dominant thing ended up being airdrop because it is what so many people already had locked and loaded.