On Wednesday, the UN aid coordination office, OCHA, said in its latest update that Israel’s ban on entry of aid has continued for nearly a month and that no aid entered the enclave throughout this period. All requests by humanitarian agencies to coordinate access with Israeli authorities have been denied.
Helles recalled when the blockade was imposed. The shops were empty within hours, and what was left was too expensive, she said. Even the charity distributions, which once offered a variety of meals, have dwindled, now providing only small servings of rice at the time of Iftar.
After days of eating little more than rice, Huda couldn’t sleep at night, suffering from severe stomach pain and colic. She was diagnosed with a stomach infection two weeks ago.
They killed and kidnapped civilians which isn’t excusable. It would have been excusable to attack the military, not civilians.
I don’t like to get into this debate because it’s pointless this late in the game, but here goes:
1-If you’re going to fight apartheid, you will have to play dirty. Yeah yeah hostages bad, but Palestinian detainees (which are, to be very fucking clear, also hostages) won’t be freed by vague platitudes and appeals to the rules of war. They can be freed by hostage exchanges, which need hostages on your side to exchange. Those who make humane revolution impossible make inhumane revolution inevitable.
2-The deaths on October 7th are not solely deliberately Hamas-inflicted. There’s a whole host of people who died in the crossfire, either by Hamas or Israeli fire, and many who were killed by Israeli friendly fire. Look up the Hannibal directive.
3-They did attack the Israeli military. 33% of people killed during the attack were military or security forces, and if you look up the towns they attacked on October 7th (which isn’t hard to do; there’s a list on Wikipedia) you’ll see that almost every one has an IDF base. I can’t tell you how much because nobody involved cared to run that sort of analysis and Israel had unqualified people do work that was crucial to that sort of analysis (these are the same people who made later disproven mass rape allegations).
Understandable, yes.
Predictable, yes.
Deserved, yes.
Effective, perhaps.
Excusable? No.
Are we really debating whether it’s okay to rape / kidnap / slaughter civilians?
For the rape* and slaughter part, obviously no. I’m not denying the actual atrocities that Hamas committed during the attack; they did rape and murder civilians and heads need to roll for that.
For the kidnapping part, the question still remains: What else were they supposed to do? Under the assumption that all lives are equally valuable, I see no reason to denounce taking hostages unless there was another effective way of gaining leverage to negotiate with Israel. Otherwise the only options left for the resistance are to give up or fight fire with fire.
Edit: *Apparently the rape part is completely made up.
Hamas did not rape any civilians. This is recently been fully debunked. The Israeli october 7 investigator said there was no evidence of any rape happening.
Any rape at all? I thought they’d only confirmed that no mass rape happened? If I’m misremembering that’s great.
Absolute zero. Everything was made up.
Lmfao lemme just go cry for a second. More seriously what the fuck Israel? I mean we all know the answer to that question but still, what the fuck Israel?
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Palestinians heartily agree with your “what else are we supposed to do” notion and long since stopped waiting for the world’s moral courage to come to their rescue. When they did that they also said that they no longer cared what anyone thought of the morality of their actions. They don’t need them to be excusable by us and frankly they aren’t. I’m past excusing anyone involved in this conflict.
Do you really tjink the October attacks gained them any “negotiating leverage?”
Given how thousands of detainees have been freed since October 7th, I think the answer is yes. That said I’m pretty sure even they didn’t expect the Israeli reprisal to be this big, so this whole thing is in a way one big miscalculation.
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More than 33% military without counting all Israelis as IDF reservists which they have proven to be over the last year.
And the kidnapping is done becsuse it is the only way to get their own people free. Israel has been kidnapping Palestinians for decades in far larger quantities. Hamas doing to same thing back should not raise eyebrows.
Israel killed a Palestinian child they kidnapped recently. Did not even make the headlines.
These the same civilians letting genocide happen right next to them? They have just as much blood on their hands.