Stuck outside in the car park at an airport in southern France… seems to have been a bomb threat. Am annoyed and at the same time feel my annoyance is completely indulgent in the face of the broader picture.
They massacred 1400 people, tortured them.
kidnapped 200+ people.
Imagine its your family,your kids - what do you expect from your country to do, how to reply? not to open war?
In war - bad things happen to innocent people. its unavoidable. no one in israel asked for this, and if the IDF was out to do as much damage as it can there would be much more disasters out there (and the hospital incident was hamas fault anyway)
The said rocket was one of Hamas largest, aimed to reach to the north.
There is the possibility that hamas used the hospital to hide weapons and rockets as well
No. But I’m not someone who believes in an eye for an eye. Civilised people don’t. Here’s an article expressing why Israel’s reaction is wrong, not that it’ll register with you.
Stay safe
European Countries would do better to ramp up the security. This violence often encourages IS sleeper cells to be activated.
This sort of says it all.
Cheers - am sure all will be ok here. I’m just annoyed as I was on my way to Liverpool (conference) and have connections from Stansted that I probably won’t make….
I am not convinced of that. Firstly, I’d be surprised if they have many of those left after that initial launch. I can believe they have umpteen thousand of the smaller ones manufactured in Gaza, but the larger payload models have been blockaded for a decade. It seems wildly improbable that they would have a large cache of them to fire off in a single salvo at a time when the interception rate by the Iron Dome system would be very high - and we know from that footage that the problematic missile was one of a salvo of missiles all travelling in the same speed range in the first few seconds at launch, meaning they were almost certainly all substantially the same models.
Haven’t watched the video but if there were two explosions, a small primary and a very large secondary, it stands to reason that the warhead wouldn’t need to be large to cause a massive secondary explosion. It depends on where the initial impact was located and what it hit. Also, the Israelis are claiming as proof, the absence of crater which isn’t consistent, as far as I am aware of, with any of the ordinance they have been using to bomb Gaza to smithereens.
That’s not to say that I am convinced either way. There is no compelling evidence pointing to one side or the other.
Yeah, my initial thought was a ‘bunker-buster’ type bomb that hit the hospital instead of a nearby target - but there really isn’t much of a crater. All of the damage in the photos is above ground.
The payload of the rocket might have either hit a Diesel Generator or a Oxygen Tank. By all accounts, the impact of the fragment was next to the hospital.
There might have been something flammable there which caused the damage to the hospital.
The more I see of it, the more I’m inclined to believe it wasn’t an IDF bomb. Joe Biden has gone all-in with his outrage. IDF spokespeople are saying that there’s no evidence of a crater etc… So why would I take Biden or the IDF’s word on this? Because they have an absolute shit-tonne to lose if they are lying about this. And all that needs to happen is that Palestine shows evidence of a bomb crater. Which will inadvertently show in one of the horror images or videos from around the hospital.
So far, no crater. Why is a car bomb being discounted,? Certainly would cause the devastation talked about.
Maybe there was a fuel stockpile to keep hospital generators running or something along those lines, who knows. I’m not sure I’ll believe either side of it with any confidence.
The ugly thought that crossed my mind was that Hamas might have had a truck full of ordnance parked near the hospital, which was then hit by sheer bad luck. But some other civilian-use fuel or the like might have been what made that massive above ground blast.
Either way , if Hamas remains silent on this incident going forward, it will in all likelihood mean acceptance that it’s their missile gone wrong.
If it’s evidence of Israel using bunker Busters, they won’t be waiting this long to show the evidence to the news media.
Oddly, no one is saying it was a Hamas missile. Hamas may have as little hard information on the firing of that missile as we do at this point.
Definitely wasn’t a bunker buster, the hole in the ground would be massive.
I think the missile was claimed to be launched by a group called Islamic Jihad , an affiliated group but not specifically under control of Hamas.
That’s what the narrative is at any rate.
And I think there’s a very good reason for that.
Most of the posters contributing have shown themselves to have a pretty good understanding of the issues and the history of the conflict. Anyone with that knowledge is alive to the absolute injustice of the situation and the ongoing hopelessness and desperation of the Palestinians , and no matter how awful the events that triggered this firestorm , their sympathies will inevitably lie with those who are the victims of the ever increasing cruelty practised by the Israeli State.
Dare I say , that the ones more prone to engage in the yah boo rhetoric are those least informed and most susceptible to Israeli propaganda.
I hope that if anything good is to come from this it’s the long overdue realisation that things cannot continue as they were. Israel’s oft-stated number one priority is the safety and security of its citizens. Unless it finally addresses the needs and aspirations of the Palestinians then it will have neither. That much is glaringly obvious even to a blind man.
I think it tends to be a little one-sided because a lot of media opinion is portraying the much stronger, richer, and more powerful side as the victims here.
It’s not an equal fight. But as has been pointed out by many more level-headed people, especially on here, like the post you replied to, you can condemn the terrorism by Hamas while also condemning the terrorism and creeping invasion by the Israeli government.