Israel will stop working with the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) in the Gaza Strip, a government spokesperson said yesterday, accusing the aid agency of “perpetuating conflict”, Reuters reported.
Israel has long sought to have UNRWA closed as it is the only UN agency to have a specific mandate to look after the basic needs of Palestinian refugees. If the agency no longer exists, argues Israel, then the refugee issue must no longer exist, and the legitimate right for Palestinian refugees to return to their land will be unnecessary. Israel has denied that right of return since the late 1940s, even though its own membership of the UN was made conditional upon Palestinian refugees being allowed to return to their homes and land.
You don’t have to agree but it’s my opinion on the matter and borne out by facts. There would be a ceasefire today if Hamas surrendered the hostages and the tunnels. But they won’t because Israeli hostages and dead Palestinians is their leverage. Also, I don’t find claims of genocide to be credible. They don’t call you on the phone and tell you to evacuate before killing you, in a genocide. The daily casualties increase month over month, in a genocide. The mass famine hasn’t happened. Aid has been flowing. There been plenty of war crimes on both sides. The ones by Israelis might actually be punished. The ones by Hamas get rewarded.
I keep seeing you roll into these discussions acting like “it’s just the facts, dreamer” makes you the only adult in the conversation, and you repeatedly fail to recognize the non-kinetic impacts and repercussions of Israel’s/IDF’s/Likud-Coalition’s/Netanyahu’s course of action.
The US is very publicly putting Israeli leadership/Netanyahu on notice that they are evaluating the scope and depth of the relationship - that is huge. A US non-veto was played off as a ‘stab in the back’ despite Bibi and crew being well aware of US red lines over their shitshow of a war and the total absence of plans for after the war. Israel’s duplicity over aid inspections and crossings has worn down diplomats and NGOs across the world, the UN special rapporteur has directly stated that any famine that occurs is a direct result of Israeli policy.
You also keep pushing this idea that Palestinians want/accept death as a political tool to gain freedom, and that somehow frees us from trying to avoid their deaths? That speaks far more to the depth of humanity and how you value human life, than anything else. Accepting your base realpolitik approach, if they want martyrdom deaths to made Israel look bad, why grant them their wish? Why play into it?
Hamas needs to be destroyed. They’ve absolutely ruined Gaza since taking power. They cancelled all elections and have continued their suicidal violence.
Palestinian people ought to rebel against Hamas, but Hamas is as popular as ever, at least they were until October 7. Not sure how the public feels, now.
Hamas, ISIS, Jihad, Houthis, it’s all the same shit with slightly different flavors.
I disagree with the UN reporter. Any famine in Gaza is the fault of Gaza’s leadership (Hamas) which led Gaza and its people directly into a seige without having adequately prepared. Well, Hamas prepared for themselves. They have plenty of food and are hiding in tunnels. They’re just leaving the public to suffer and die while they go hide and retweet Al Jazeera articles, which is par for the course for Hamas, which uses entire cities as human shields. They had their chance to grow up and they utterly failed.
Great yes let’s end Hamas. That will totally and 100% solve the security situation across the region. Because as history has clearly shown, Israel spending decades assassinating leaders, marginalizing Fatah to blunt peace talks, killing the Fedayeen in the 60s and 70s, and a ‘weapons free’ policy outside Israeli borders DID IN FACT prevent October 7th. Sound policy, clearly no reason to reexamine or revise.
It is a farce to pretend that constant violence will bring Israel permanent security, unless genocide is part of the plan. You cannot attack a people, deny them a pathway to live with dignity, and be shocked when they don’t like you and fight back.
You’re joking right? You seriously expect them to come out into the streets and pick up weapons to expel Hamas? The starving people who were bombed from their homes?
No. Not remotely, unless you only see ‘Islamist’ and ‘Iranian supported’ and then ignore every other aspect that makes their motives and ideology different. ISIS is actively beefing with the Taliban, they just sent two suicide bombers back to back against Taliban collecting their paychecks. PIJ and Al-Quds only this last year started limited operational cooperation, and that’s over now. Lions Den don’t work with anyone else in the West Bank, and the Houthis are actively fighting multiple factions.
Rapporteur, not reporter. An expert appointed with a mandate to investigate, not a friendly/hostile journalist. Big difference in the weight you should give her words, and the seriousness of the allegation.
False. Israel ratified the ICESCR in 1991 which includes “physical and economic access at all times to adequate food” as a basic human right.
Not so much anymore. The top leaders in Doha, sure they’re living good. But the recently escaped and released hostages all spoke of rapidly deteriorating conditions with less food each day for themselves and their captors. The blockage of food is hurting everyone - civilian, militant, hostages too.
You completely missed my question so I’ll repeat it - If they want martyrdom, why help them in the information war? Why give your opponents ready-for-press psyops? Why would you ever permit the civilians to starve to death, because you didn’t cooperate with aid inspections, or force the shitheads body-blocking the crossings to move?
You are puppeting IOF propaganda about hostages, tunnels, and “fair” warnings about exiting hospitals and buildings before bombing the hospitals and people evacuating. Gaza is an open air prison, where people are guilty merely due of living there before 1948, they cannot leave, cannot get access to water, get sniped if they have a peaceful protest at the walls, constantly under threat and action of military incursion, against a US funded military, in a place where the UN has repeatedly said that Israel is committing not just war crimes, but definitional ongoing perpetual genocide, and you want to talk about facts. Hamas is elected officials of a caged people without a country, who can’t “live” where they live and cannot flea to live elsewhere, even if they want to. Most want to stay and fight for what the UN states is theirs, as Israel takes more and more against the UN treaties. How can you not expect a group of people so oppressed to not try and break free with violence? We collectively view the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as heroic and understandable, but many somehow cannot and will not see Palestinians as people deserving to fight for their lives. That somehow the decades of genocide will stop if they stop fighting and take the scraps that Israel gives them, knowing that they will always demand more. Settlers gobble up the shelled remains of Northern Gaza RIGHT NOW and you want to talk about facts. Ok genocidal sympathizer.
There’s plenty of room in Gaza to force out Hamas. But the people there love Hamas. If 100 of them want to pile into a building to be shields for a Hamas commander, ignoring the evacuation order, ignoring the warnings, then they’ve chosen their fate. I don’t have sympathy for them. I also don’t have sympathy for people that approach troops or borders and get shot. Everyone knows not to do that. It was the first thing Israel said after October 7, ya know, when Hamas launched thousands of rockets at Israel and approached the wall 1,000 soldiers strong and crossed the border to do a bunch of mass shootings of civilians, police, and EMS. You know, when there was actual indiscriminate targeting of civilians. No sympathy for that. Fuck them and anyone that helps them. They had their chance. Chance after chance. What did they do? They chose far right religious terrorism and hard-line Sharia law. It’s incompatible with modern life.
And it would be fine, if they want to live like it’s the dark ages. But they want to participate in international financing of murdering Jews. That is the goal of Hamas and their foreign financiers: to genocide every Jew and Christian in the middle east and have their own fascist ethnostate of religious law.
How many chance would you give Hamas? How many suicide bombings would you let them do in your town?
JFC you are a Nazi.
What a ridiculous hot take. The Nazis murdered millions of people. It’s utterly stupid to compare anything to do with Israel to what the Nazis did. And for the record I’m a left wing two time Bernie alum.
You use IDF propaganda as your ‘facts’ to form your opinion on justifying ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Hamas began twenty years into an Occupation enforced with direct and systemic violence, with the goal of ending the occupation. Collective punishment has been a deliberate Israeli tactic for decades with the Dahiya doctrine. Violence such as suicide bombings and rockets escalated in response to Israeli enforcement of the occupation and apartheid.
People Claim a Majority of Palestinians in Gaza Elected Hamas — Here’s Why It Isn’t That Simple
Hamas founding charter and Revised charter 2017
This is a brutal occupation that is an apartheid regime, uses martial law, and military courts, the theft and extortion of water, the exploitation of Palestinians as a workforce without rights, state-backed settler violence, the deprivation of human rights for Palestinians, the destruction of schools, the destruction of hospitals, the destruction of homes, the starvation of children, the execution of women and children, the inhuman torture and abuse of Palestinians and yes even children in Israeli prisons.
Hamas is an ideology that’s hundreds of years old. It’s called Islamism and it’s nothing new. It’s a far right religious order in search of an empire. And they actually will genocide all the Jews and Christians if they get the chance. Does that even register with you? If Israel wanted to do a genocide it would carpet bomb Gaza into a pile of rocks in about 30 minutes. Instead we are five months in and the daily death tolls keep dropping. The aid keeps flowing. The catastrophic famine that’s been imminent for three months hasn’t happened. And 1.3 million people evacuated safely to the 30,000 did not. Some genocide that is. It’s a fucking insult to everyone that caught actual Nazis, that fought actual genocide. You got tricked by fake news from Al Jazeera.
In Myanmar they were using helicopter gun ships and just stafing crowds of refugees with machine guns. Zero distinction. No excuses given. Just straight murder.
In Gaza the IDF strikes military targets and sometimes gets a little loose with weighing the lives of people who refuse to evacuate versus the military value of their targets, after warning the civilians to evacuate.
Stop citing Al Jazeera articles like a fool. Stop repeating unfounded “reports” by people whose job it is to lie about Israel. Do better with your life. They are actual accomplices to terrorism.
All your ‘opinions’ are not based on fact, and are easily debunked. Funny how I didn’t even link any Al Jazeera articles, not that their news reporting isn’t credible.
It’s clear you don’t know anything about Hamas, for one they started in 1988.
What Is Hamas? - Council on Foreign Relations
What Does Hamas Actually Want? - NY Mag
Israel was founded on Settler Colonialism and ethnic cleansing, both fundamental to Zionism
The Concept of Transfer 1882-1948 culminating to Plan Dalet in 1948, more details here.
Are you talking about these reports?
Amnesty International Report
Human Rights Watch Report
B’TSelem Report with quick Explainer
Year before Oct 7 - Jewish Voice for Peace
Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel) and Summery by the International Court of Justice
Law for Palestine Releases Database with 500+ Instances of Israeli Incitement to Genocide – Continuously Updated
Or maybe these news outlets on whether it’s genocide: AP News, Time, Reuters, Vox, CBC
Dude, stop spamming me with all these bullshit links.I have read all of these articles. I have read the same things that you have read, including South Africa’s bullshit complaint to the UN filled with circular reasoning and unattributed sources, and “reports” made by literal terroristd. When an article ends with “these reports could not be verified,” it’s not persuasive. It’s persuasive for you, that’s great. Apparently your entire worldview is based on whatever corporate media tells you it should be. All this fake concern you have for genocide you can look to Hamas. Their first goal is genocide, their second goal is a far right Islamic ethnostate in which people who say nice things about representative government or constitutional government get stoned to death in front of everyone.
I’m sorry Hamas made the news so sad for you. They should stop using civilians as shields. I don’t care how Israel was founded and nobody alive today should, either. Since it was founded, and for literally centuries before, extreme rightwing pan-Islamists wanted to genocide all the Jews and Christians in the mid east. They want a global Islamic caliphate where one religious dude has absolute rule. They want the Holy Roman empire. It’s literal imperialism.
The only reason there is no pan-islamist caliphate today that controls the whole middle east under strict religious policing, is that all the different imamates can’t agree on who should be in charge and where the caliphate should be seated.
You can try to gloss over those facts, like the UN special reporter (that’s how we spell it where I’m from instead of the French spelling) does, you can gloss over why she is banned from entering Israel. You can gussy this up however you want, but that is the reality of the situation as it has been for hundreds of years.
Guess what? Jews are there. Christians are there. Your strategy is to do what, exactly? Let Hamas run free to do the genocide that they want to have, another century of suicide bombings and mass shootings, because lying Palestinians made the news too sad for younto bear? Maybe you can let them dig tunnels under your house to launch rockets and shootings at your neighbors? Maybe there’s a nice coffee shop or concert hall near your house you could help them blow up.
No. Hamas had chance after chance and they blew it. It’s a terrorist organization. What terrorists want is irrelevant because of how they’ve chosen to go about getting it.
They can surrender or die and if they are content to take their families with them, that’s all the more reason why they must now be stopped before their anti human rights ideology can spread. I find a lot of the rhetoric coming out of Israel equally disgusting, but whereas the identical rhetoric coming from Nazis all those years ago was based on nothing more than hate and gullibility, Israel is actually surrounded by enemies and has been barraged by tens of thousands of indiscriminate strikes over decades, launched by Hamas. The rhetoric of a few Israeli extremists isn’t reason to turn on Israel and forfiet the only democratic foothold in the region. And my belief is this: only a democracy can protect human rights in the long term, a religious zealot whose whims are law cannot do it. You want to talk about human rights in the middle east? Start with abolishing Islamic law.
I’m sad for you that 900,000 people in Gaza have Stockholm Syndrome and instead of either evacuating or joining the fight for human rights, they are content to stick around and have their cities used by terrorists human shields, and spinning listen the whatever media will listen to them.
Ask anyone in Gaza, nobody in Hamas has been killed, no warnings have ever been given before an airstrike, and despite Hamas’s own claim of having built 500 km of tunnels, not one building that’s been destroyed has had a tunnel underneath it; rather, it’s all been “indiscriminate” and “intentional killing of civilians.” 🤡
The numbers speak for themselves. 1.3 million people evacuated safely. Daily death tolls are still decreasing. The mass famine has been “imminent” for four months and hasn’t happened.
Someone is clearly lying.
It’s very obvious you haven’t read any of those links or reports yourself. Israel is the one that has repeatedly and constantly lied with fabrications and disinformation, it’s well documented.
‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza
GAZA STRIP: Famine is imminent as 1.1 million people, half of Gaza, experience catastrophic food insecurity
I’ve read them, I just don’t find them fully credible. Like when Hamas says something isn’t a military target, it’s just not believable because they always lie. I’m going to go ahead and believe the people that sometimes lie versus the people that always lie. You do you though.
Food insecurity caused by the consequences of one’s own actions isn’t the same thing as famine and starvation. Hamas should have packed more food before they started a seige. They obviously don’t give a fuck about anyone in Gaza, as if that wasn’t evident from the tunnels they built under everyone’s homes (with or without permission, do any of your links say?).
Hey, maybe they could give up themselves and the hostages in exchange for a ceasefire and Gaza can build itself a port and start partaking in some global shipping; if my neighbor was holding my family hostage and shooting at us, I certainly wouldn’t let Door Dash bring them food. You can’t take a bunch of hostages and then be like “nah you can’t come in to get them or we’ll kill you, oh and also you have to still let all our deliveries through!” That’s now how it works for anyone, why should only Jews have that standard? Again though if you think you can use someone as a human shield that means they care about you, do you. Just don’t start crossing borders with your dark ages bullshit!
What are you talking about, Israel has controlled all imports and exports in Gaza and the West Bank since 1967.
Israel has let in only minimal food into Gaza leading in food insecurity for the majority of the population since before Oct 7th.
https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/OCHAGAZAAM_220223.pdf
https://gisha.org/en/gaza-policy-forum-summary-experts-agree-that-israels-dual-use-policy-causes-acute-distress/
More things I already knew.
I’m sure you think Israel started dual use policy out of cruelty and malice, right? You sure it has nothing to do with Gaza choosing corruption and terrorism again and again?
Hamas had two airports. Could have done some trading, had some commerce, and had all the food they could muster right now. That requires respect for other cultures. I’m sure you’d overnight some, right now if they still had an airport. Hamas closed one after starting a war and swearing to murder all of the Jews, and then Hamas abandoned the other one and let it go to shit until it was unusable and people built over it.
They had a water port, until they elected Hamas to power (I guess the election slogan was “more suicide bombings of Jews!” or something to thet extent (and upon taking office they promptly cancelled all future elections because they knew how best to focus Gaza’s resources on building out the tunnel system and expanding the number of rockets they could launch at the Jews)).
Yes, Gaza has rightfully been under a blockade pending the demise of Hamas. Instead of rejecting Hamas, Gaza has further empowered and entrenched them. Apparently the people of Gaza will pay any price for the Hamas-run theocratic dictatorship they believe their God has ordained for them (once they genocide all the Jews (you just go on ahead ignoring that little detail before you start sending aid (aid is only conditional when it gets sent to Jews according to your ruleset))).
People like you make me lose faith in humanity.