The Middle East Thread

Away End - General Chat
2377

You understand some of the problems in US policing when you see this and connect it to how much involvement the IDF has in providing training to our forces.

https://x.com/DanielSeidemann/status/1735652887991144863?s=20

2378

Unfortunately Israel is increasingly being seen as associated with a lot that is wrong with the world.

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2379

Fuck IDF :person_facepalming:

2380

There’s something really fishy going on. It’s almost as if they don’t really care about the hostages and are using them as pretext for ethnic cleansing of Gaza in preparation for a land grab.

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2381

https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-troops-mistakenly-open-fire-and-kill-3-hostages-in-northern-gaza-battlefield/

Don’t buy it as a mistake.

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2382

Sounds like they witnessed something that the IDF don’t want shared with the rest of the world

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2383

Is it not mental that they’ve admitted it already?

2384

I’m not exactly sure what’s being suggested here but I don’t see the Israelis deliberately killing their own , for any reason.

An Israeli commander was being interviewed on CNN last night and said the Israelis were wearing typical Palestinian civilian attire and were mistaken for possible Hamas fighters. The conclusion I drew was that the IDF has a shoot to kill policy for combatants and non-combatants alike. Otherwise why not call out to them first ? And they’d have known immediately they were Israelis.

This is the kind of shit that happens when you ignore the rules of war , and it’s entirely their own fault.

2385

It’s war, friendly fire occurs all the time. It doesn’t mean that their shooting was deliberate and if it was, they’d be sure to lay the blame on Hamas. Not that the hostages’ well-being ever appeared to be high on Netanyahu’s priorities but still the implication seems far-fetched.

2386

It already is a land grab, and has been since day one.

“Move south; you’ll be safe there. No, further south. Oh we meant further south than that. Ah fuck it- we’ll bomb you there anyway.”

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2387

Oh, Bangladesh too, a country that doesn’t have diplomatic relations with Israel, bought surveillance equipment from Israel.

2388

I could only laugh, hysterically :laughing:

2389
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2390

:man_facepalming:

2391

I think you are reading way too much into it. The combat has to be a chaotic nightmare, an urban hybrid of guerilla warfare and heavy-handed police actions. The Israeli forces are fighting an opponent who has no other choice but to use ambush tactics, and doesn’t wear uniforms. They are deploying at scale, so the forces in Gaza are not elite units trained for special operations, some of them are mobilized reservists with just standard training. I am not getting a sense that their rules of engagement are particularly cautious, they are likely instructed to open fire as soon as they perceive a threat. Friendly fire incidents are practically inevitable, as are incidents where civilians are fired upon. These hostages fit somewhere in between those two, depending on what happened in the moment.

Edit: the details available today are somewhat shocking. The death of the first two fits easily into the kind of incident I noted above, the third is a WTF?

2392
2393

We killed them because they looked like Palestinians is a hell of an excuse.

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2394

Few details have come out in the recent hours.

The men were bare-bodied and were waving a makeshift white-flag. However, that could be taken as deception by Hamas. Two men were gunned down immediately while a third ran into a building shouting in Hebrew. He was gunned down too.

Even then, I wouldn’t say that Israel killed them intentionally. But there’s clearly a lack of awareness/attention for the hostages.

Edit: I see your edit :blush:

2395

I haven’t watched the video yet but I read the essay , which is a stunning piece of work and I recommend to anyone.

There’s so much in it just to pick one bit out … but ;

“Throughout the Polish Holocaust-memory wars, Israel maintained friendly relations with Poland. In 2018, Netanyahu and the Polish Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, issued a joint statement against “actions aimed at blaming Poland or the Polish nation as a whole for the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators of different nations.” The statement asserted, falsely, that “structures of the Polish underground state supervised by the Polish government-in-exile created a mechanism of systematic help and support to Jewish people.” Netanyahu was building alliances with the illiberal governments of Central European countries, such as Poland and Hungary, in part to prevent an anti-occupation consensus from solidifying in the European Union. For this, he was willing to lie about the Holocaust.”

Netanyahu is fast approaching a reckoning anyway , but when finally an account is drawn up he is going to occupy a very special place in history , and for all the wrong reasons.

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2396

The account I read said a unit went into the building and killed him.