What's frustrating to me as a person who's generally against violence is that Israel has a pretty elite secret police force and pretty elite special forces that they (apparently) haven't used at all to deal with the actual perpetrators of the October 7th massacre & kidnapping.

They just started bombing thousands of civilians to kill dozens, maybe hundreds of Hamas militants.

Like, surely they could have cut the head off the Hamas Snake with surgical strike teams infiltrating Gaza, probably the West Bank, and international locations in Qatar or wherever the leadership is.

Reasonable people could conclude that Israel had to respond to Oct 7th, and that the best target would be Hamas. I can't fathom how any reasonable people could conclude that bombing groups of people with 90% or more innocent civilians and the rest possible militants is a good response.

I can imagine that UNreasonable people might conclude that all Palestinians are guilty by association (because Hamas is their Netanyahu-supported elected government) and they're all militants (even the babies). Or those unreasonable people might believe that Palestinians aren't people worthy of protection.

So goddamned frustrating.

[–] SaniFlush@hexbear.net 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Israel could simply have not starved the people living in the Gaza strip to death over the course of decades while occasionally flicking airstrikes at them, which they were doing long before October.

[–] Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I often wonder how people can forget this considering Isreal has been commiting genocide, ethnic cleansing, hate crimes since it's inception like wtf ?

[–] Limitless_screaming@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It's actually surprising that Hamas didn't get more votes in the election, when the other option was getting ruled by Fatah. Who would want the enemy's puppet governing them?

[–] Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

What's the point of voting when you could have your entire family obliterated at any instant ? Women in palestine have said that their only wish when their children dies in a strike is to find their bodies intact and not pieces by pieces. Just remembering these words is making me sick and They're living it. Fuck Isreal and anyone that defend it.

[–] Heir_Of_Isildur@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

There was an IDF representative who said that they were not going for accuracy. Which means that they are intentionally killing civilians.

[–] SeedyOne@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

Actually, weren't they severely embarrassed by those recent attacks, having been totally caught off guard? Maybe we're overestimating just how good their forces really are.

[–] stewsters@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think you are overestimating the value of special forces. We kind of mythologize them with our media, but they are not action heroes. You arnt going to send them into a hostile city where Hamas is not in uniform, planned for the retaliation, had time to prepare, and expect them to come out with low casualties.

For example of what this looks like with the US, refer to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mogadishu_(1993)

Even the US after 9-11 didn't just send in spec ops after Osama, they went in whole hog. And that was estimated at about 4.5 million casualties all around.

It sucks, but Hamas isn't going to start wearing uniforms and abiding by the Geneva convention any time soon.

[–] Meowoem@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

What you're saying is during an active war they haven't heavily publicised what their special forces and secret agents have been doing?

I say heavily because they have mentioned various success their covert units have had, one example is them sneaking into a tunnel while everyone was busy firing rockets at Israel then taking all the secret documents revealing the location of other tunnel networks and fighters.

Of course Israel wants to find the kidnapped people and free them, of course they want to kill or capture the Hamas leaders, and of course they don't want to kill innocent people. Those aren't easy things in the situation they're in.

The leader of Hamas assuming he's back from his recent trip to Iran is at home in Doha, the local commanders are in their bases deep under hospitals, the fighters are dressed as civilians and of course get added to the civilian casualties lists - especially the teenagers fighting for Hamas...

People act like Israel is in an easy position but that really isn't close to reality.