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by notacoward 1838 days ago
> I'm not aware of any disproportionate response

The operative definition of proportionality is not between attack and counterattack, as most people seem to think. It's between the military benefit and the likelihood of non-combatant casualties. Since the military benefit of Israel's actions was quite small and the likelihood of non-combatant casualties was extremely high, it's nearly impossible to argue that such proportionality was respected.

> The Israeli government just putting a show

212 dead, including 61 children, is not "just a show" from a human standpoint. If you meant that it was "just a show" from a purely military standpoint, that's practically an admission that Israel's actions were disproportionate.

2 comments

> Since the military benefit of Israel's actions was quite small and the likelihood of non-combatant casualties was extremely high

I think its unclear (to us, the public) what the military purpose/need of the strikes were, so its unclear how porportional they were. As pointed out elsewhere,iron dome is really expensive to operate and probably has limited capacity. If the military goal was to get the rockets to stop before iron dome ran out of ammo, that doesn't seem disporportionate to me, especially if Israel took steps to minimize civilian casualities where possible.

I dont know enough to say if they actually did or not,i just dont think its as clear cut as you make it out to be that it was disporportionate.

>> The Israeli government just putting a show

"Show" means fake / not real / severe under-proportionate response, not disproportionate.

Do you really think that Israeli Air Force was acting in its full unrestrained force?

It uses the same american fighter jets, only with much much better Israeli electronic warfare equipment.

> 212 dead, including 61 children, is not "just a show" from a human standpoint. If you meant that it was "just a show" from a purely military standpoint, that's practically an admission that Israel's actions were disproportionate.

  128 civilians (per UN OHCHR)[20]
  80–225 militants killed (low est. per Hamas, high est. per Israel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Israel%E2%80%93Palestine_...

About 20-30 of the Gazan civilians were killed directly by the Hamas' own misfired rockets.

And all of them were indirectly killed by the Hamas who used them as human shields.

Plus we can't trust their numbers, as they're inflating them in order to solicit donations and monetary aid from the world.

I guess many photographers in Gaza are making a living from selling stock photos and videos. Some of these photos are clearly staged, i.e. a single kid's toy nicely placed in the center of the demolished building, or a kid holding a teddy bear, etc.

Anyway you can't compare this with atrocities done by NATO in the Balkans or by the US and their allies in the Middle East, there are several orders of magnitude difference in the number of civilian casualties. I'm not talking about WW2 or Chechnya war, were carpet bombings were used.

Give me a single example of any other military force in the world who uses Roof Knocking[1], all the other armies have orders of magnitude higher civilian casualties.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roof_knocking

> Do you really think that Israeli Air Force was acting in its full unrestrained force?

Total non sequitur. It doesn't have to be the absolute worst possible response to be disproportionate. Do you know how thresholds or ratios work?

> About 20-30 of the Gazan civilians were killed directly by the Hamas' own misfired rockets.

Do you know how subtraction works? What's 128 minus 30? Still enough to be considered disproportionate by the standard defined in international law.

> all of them were indirectly killed by the Hamas

For the second time, one crime does not justify or exonerate another. Nobody's denying that Hamas also committed war crimes.

> Anyway you can't compare this with atrocities done by NATO >

For the third time, etc. It's not worth trying to debate someone who can't learn.