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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Honestly, shit happens during the war. Yes, the mistakes should be investigated, guilty punished etc., but it is a big picture which is important, not a few incidents that are easy to use for propaganda and internet points.

    In my mind there are 3 questions that needs to be answered

    1. is war justified?
    2. what is civilian to military kill ratio (basically to see if civilians are killed without care)
    3. what are the goals of the war, what are post war plans

    For the first question, I do not know how anyone with straight face can say that the war is not justified when a neighbor attacks you and purposely and barbarously kills 1300 people and takes about 200 hostages.

    For the second quested, it is urban warfare, and if anyone cares to check, the ratio of 10 to 1 (civilian to military) is quite typical. In this war, Israel achieves ratio of better than 2 to 1, which says to me that IDF is really careful not to kill civilians unnecessarily.

    It is the question (3) where I have problem with right now. Mostly because it is right wing government in Israel and there is no clear out of war path suggested after Hamas is destroyed. But here we can wait and see. Israel is a democracy and I hope her people will make right decision.




  • I have not seen anyone with reputation claiming that. Hamas itself does not object against these claims. And at this point even if they are inflated by factor of two, it would be still good ratios.

    Also, the ratio of civilians killed versus military fighters killed was good for Israel in the past. And nobody objected that either.

    As for clearly civilians being killed - of course they are. But IDF is not Hamas - they do not target civilians on purpose, and as numbers show, they are quite accurate in killing fighters. Are there IDF fuck ups who actually want and kill some civilians? Most likely. In any large scale military such things exist, but they are exceptions which are investigated. IDF is no different than any other military in that respect, including US.

    I understand that echo chamber exist here on fediverse, but the more I study the actual facts more I come to conclusion that the citiation is quite different as most here trying to paint. People react on videos that a) difficult to understand without context b) in terms of statistics are exceptions, not a rule. The overall situation is different and you can’t make conclusions by couple videos.




  • I understand that lemmy behaves as if Israel is completely reckless and even has as his goal to kill as many civilians as possible. This is not the case if you look at the numbers. If you look here: https://civiliansinconflict.org/our-work/conflict-trends/urban-warfare/ then you see that typical ratio of civilians killed in urban conflicts is 90% or 1:9 (military:civilian).

    If you go with 14000 Hamas fighters killed and 35,000 total killed, that means that 21, 000 civilians killed (this number, by the way includes natural deaths and death from Hamas rockets malfunctioning and falling inside Gaza). This is ratio 1:1.4. If you go with Israeli civilian casualties estimations, then the ratio will be close 1:1. But even with Hamas reported numbers, the ratio of civilian deaths is 6 times better than in typical urban warfare. Far from general perception that Israel being reckless.

    It is quite possible that it is partly due to precision bombing and that removing this resource from Israel arsenal will have negative effect on civilian to military death ratio.







  • When people shout “Free Palestine” they conveniently forget that if there is no check on Hamas, and if Hamas achieves its goal (and destroys Israel and its population), there would be tyrannical Islamist theocracy in its place. I do not know if there is better way to remove Hamas, I am not a military specialist. Biden advocates for precision strikes, but it might be just the election year maneuvering. But I know for sure, that Palestinians will not be free with Hamas in power. And if Israel lives situation as is and removes its troops, the same thing will be repeated again in future with blood on all sides.