[invalidname]

Israel did a lot of bad things. In this particular case it's doing something that's generally right.

Destroying the Hamas is 100% the right thing to do. It's an evil movement that must be eliminated, there's no middle ground here or two sides. To qualify the difference in levels lets look at the situation over the past week. Israel told civilians to move out of the northern part of Gaza so they won't get hurt. Hamas blocked the roads so civilians won't leave.

They use their own people as human shields. They kidnapped civilian women, children and elderly people. They are evil.

Innocent people sometimes get hurt when rooting out evil. That's terrible. But the Hamas must be removed for the sake of the people in Gaza almost as much as for the sake of the people in Israel.

Worldwide support is right. People who actually understand the issue have uniformly come out in favor of this.

Some smart people have said stupid things here, like calling for a ceasefire. That isn't an option. Every time the Hamas was given leeway it has used that to arm itself and attack. E.g. a few years back 1,000 Hamas detainees were released to free one kidnapped Israeli soldier. They promised that they would not attack as a condition of their release. Yet most of them took a part in the October 7th attack. To make matters worse they focused on kidnappings, they learned the effect that has.

[jemmyw]

At this point Israeli actions in Gaza have killed about 3x as many civilians as Hamas did. Hamas did an evil deed but the response Israel is taking is going to make more terrorists. There was a story yesterday about a journalist whose entire family was killed by an Israeli shelling. That's just as evil at the atrocities Hamas committed and support for Israel will ebb if that is their approach.

[mitthrowaway2]

Not to dispute your point, but do you have a source regarding Israeli actions killing 3x as many civilians as Hamas? This would be an important fact for updating my perspective if it's true.

[jemmyw]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/27/how-does-gazas... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_2023_Israel%...

I did a quick search for this. Seems like there's some controversy over the numbers, even though they've tried to back it with evidence. That's approaching 5x the official numbers of Israeli casualties, so even if its been inflated my 3x is probably already low and out of date.

Now you might take that figure with a grain of salt, I cannot verify it and wouldn't trust it at present. However, there are plenty of individual stories being reported by agencies I have enough trust in (and some of which I wish now I had not read). You can't accurately shell buildings in a densely built up city like Gaza. Israel told people to move, but there are credible reports that they then attacked people in transit, shelled an area near the south they'd asked people to move to and shelled a refugee camp.

I'm sure that in every case Israel will argue they had intelligence. But I don't think the families of those who see their kids killed in those strikes are going to care. They're just making the next angry generation by applying indiscriminate vengeful violence.

[jpcfl]

It’s comparing apples and oranges, since Hamas deliberately targets Israeli civilians, while using Palestinian civilians as human shields. Many Palestinian casualties are Hamas’s fault, not IDF.

[jemmyw]

I'm sure their intentions are very different but it's dehumanising to say it's apples and oranges. Seeing your family members killed is the same, regardless of who you are, and being collateral does not abdicate responsibility, and does not reduce the resulting anger. IDF does have a choice of tactics and they do appear to be using shelling on a dense civilian location while providing unrealistic opportunity to evacuate.

[jpcfl]

> I'm sure their intentions are very different but it's dehumanising to say it's apples and oranges.

Relax. It's a figure of speech. It means, "these two things are different." It in no way dehumanizes anyone.

> Seeing your family members killed is the same, regardless of who you are

Would you agree that it's important to recognize who is responsible for the killing?

[mitthrowaway2]

I think if a missile blew up my wedding and killed my family, and I found out it was because some bad guys were hiding among the guests, I'd still be pretty angry at the people who fired the missile no matter who they were aiming for.*

Experts who study the propagation of violence say that the currency of radicalism is grievance. The more grievances happen, the more support goes to violent extremists to strike back, even if this only results in more bullets coming back their way in the future. I can certainly see this feedback loop playing out on both sides of this conflict, because every Israeli civilian casualty results in more support for hard-line military response against Gaza, and every Palestinian civilian casualty results in more support for Hamas.

* This example is taken from an Obama-era US drone strike in Pakistan, because I'm far too distressed to track specific tragedies happening in Israel and Palestine in real time.

[jemmyw]

The person responsible is the one who pulls the trigger. If a murderer runs into a crowd of people it wouldn't be OK for the police to just mow down those people to catch them. And that's an exact analogy here, just because a terrorist hides within a community does not mean you have any kind of moral justification for killing with impunity. Blame the community? Sure, does that blame extend to the kids growing up in that community who know nothing about what's going on. No, it doesn't.

[invalidname]

The source is the Hamas itself and they have proven themselves to be dishonest repeatedly. E.g. the Hospital bombing which was triggered by a misfire of the Islamic Jihad. They knew it wasn't an Israeli bombing when they reported that. There are voice recordings of their leaders discussing this. So any number should be taken with a HUGE mountain of salt.

Regardless of your point the 3x number is irrelevant. This isn't about retaliation. Israel isn't aiming at civilians. The exact opposite. Israel has asked them to leave, they are trying to leave. The Hamas blocks their path so people like you would blame Israel.

> Hamas did an evil deed but the response Israel is taking is going to make more terrorists.

There are no great options here. The Hamas, must be destroyed and any option will be painful. A ground invasion will probably result in even more civilian deaths.

I suggest googling some of the child programming in Gaza's TV station. Pretty horrific stuff. They used the past decade to raise the next generation of terrorists/human shields. All the while their leaders have been amassing vast amounts of properties living in Quatar, Turkey, Lebanon etc.

> There was a story yesterday about a journalist whose entire family was killed by an Israeli shelling. That's just as evil at the atrocities Hamas committed and support for Israel will ebb if that is their approach.

That is a terrible comparison. No one was aiming at that journalists family. Based on your logic the Nazi's should have been appeased. We know how that turned out.

There was a mistake of letting the Hamas survive, even supporting it. It was always a genocidal organization that had no qualms about Palestinian deaths as part of its Jihad. War is messy and terrible, I feel bad for that family. They shouldn't have died, it's not their fault. The natural reaction is to stop violence and in 98% of the cases that's the right thing to do.

This is the 2% case. It's going to get a lot worse but the Hamas (and Islamic Jihad) can't exist when this is over. This is the only path for a future Palestinian state. If you support a Palestinian state then the only path to get there is this.