Due to the severity of the situation and the fast flowing news cycle, we have decided to create a general megathread for discussion regarding the conflict.
Informal/Satirical news sources are not allowed on the main feed of the community but you are free to post them in this thread.
Please remember that all community and instance rules apply to this thread hence keep is civil.
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Some facts about the Gaza Strip:
- Population: ~2.3 Million
- Area: 365 km² (141 sq mi)
- 41 km (25 mi) long, from 6 to 12 km (3.7 to 7.5 mi) wide
- Population density: ~6300/km² 1
Gaza is very densely populated. In Gaza live as many people as in Houston. But Houston has an area of 1658.6 km² (640.4 sq mi). Thus Gaza has nearly five times the population density of Houston. New York City is the only city in the US with a population of more than a million and a higher population density than Gaza. 2 The tallest building in Palestine stands at 76.1 m (255 ft). 3
A little less than half of the population of Gaza is made up of children. 4
There are only three (“legal”) ways in and out of Gaza:
- Rafah Crossing into Egypt in the south
- Kerem Shalom Crossing into Israel in the south
- Erez Crossing into Israel in the north
Gaza has a very small port. It can only be used by small fisher boats. 5
Israel built a wall and fences around Gaza. 6
Seems like a mistake to place the danger zone on that side of the Kerem Shalom goods crossing, but then again they left that moron Netanyahu in charge so I’m sure that’s no mistake.
I heard Egypt actually warned Israel of the exact date of the initial attack and Israel still failed to react, it becomes harder every day to think this whole war wasn’t the intention of Israel leadership.
Egyptian here
Would you care to share with us your perception of the situation from the ground? What are the prevailing feelings you’re seeing in Egypt re: the initial Al-Aqsa flood, the Israeli retaliation, Sisi’s handling of the border crossing?
Sorry man, I don’t even watch the news…
When your illegitimate regime is definitely not losing every front including the information front and is definitely not about to eat a major L: Israel has announced that consuming “Hamas media” will now be a federal offense punishable by a year in prison, even if no actions were taken. Visiting Hamas websites is considered an offense.
IDF misinformation from the start of the conflict until now:
1. Hamas beheaded forty babies
Context: the reports of Hamas beheading babies came from an interview by i24 News of an IDF commander. This quickly spread through Western media outlets such as CNN, NBC, MSNBC, FOX News, the Telegraph, Daily Mail, etc. I haven’t done a comprehensive sweep of who picked up the story and who didn’t (and of course now it’s much harder to do so because of retractions, edits, my lack of direct TV access, and SEO), but from what I can tell AP News and Al Jazeera have been relatively reliable.
Lack of evidence: 6 days ago, Anadolu (Turkish state-owned media) reported that: Israeli army says it does not have ‘confirmation’ about allegations that ‘Hamas beheaded babies’. This was later confirmed by other sources.
Misinformation: 5 days ago, Biden stated "I never really thought that I would see, have confirmed, pictures of terrorists beheading children,” said Biden, who described Saturday’s attack as the “deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust”. The White House later posted a retraction of this claim: "A White House spokesperson later clarified that US officials and the president have not seen pictures or confirmed such reports independently,” The Post reported on Wednesday.
2. Shani Louk, claimed to be naked, dead, and sexually assaulted
Context: images circulated online about a video purporting to show Shani Louk, a German national attending the Nova EDM festival, on the back of a truck, face-down. Claims that she appeared to be naked, dead, and sexually assaulted circulated on the same media sources discussed above.
Misinformation: given the videos we have, we know with a decent amount of certainty that the video being shown is of Shani Louk. However:
A. She’s clearly not naked in the video and you can see that she is wearing black shorts as well as boots. A top is also visible (but she is face-down, so we can’t see much of it). Neither her shorts nor her boots appeared to have been removed. From what I can tell, she was initially wearing a long skirt that was likely lost in the chaos.
B. Her family claims that she is alive and receiving medical attention at a hospital in Gaza, which does explain why they would be transporting her. There is visible blood on the back of her head, but she does not seem to be bleeding profusely when the video was taken.
C. I will not comment on whether or not she was sexually assaulted.
3. 260 dead Israelis at EDM festival
Context: many news sources independently verified that 260 bodies were pulled from the EDM festival. Many sources reported that this was an act of terror with no strategic objective and a massacre of innocent civilians.
Lack of context: Nova was held in Kibbutz Re’im, mere minutes from Gaza, and also mere minutes from the IDF Gaza Division’s Re’im base. Tanks are clearly visible in videos leaving the festival, as are armed personnel. Hebrew-language interviews of released prisoners are providing more insight into these attacks, but I do not speak Hebrew so I will refrain from commenting on this further. Hamas has claimed that fighters were told to avoid harming or killing civilians.
Potential misinformation: Hamas claiming that fighters were told to avoid harming civilians does not mean that Hamas fighters did not harm civilians, obviously.
Potential misinformation: the reports indicate that 260 bodies were found, but their origin has not been confirmed. We know that armed personnel discharged their weapons against Hamas fighters (and vice-versa). How many of the dead are civilians, IDF, armed security, or Hamas?
Much of the media coverage on this conflict has been used to spread misinformation, even from traditionally “reliable” sources in the Western sphere. As a result, I would strongly recommend supplementing coverage of these events with those outside the Western sphere. The journalism being done is lazy.
Israel is doing a genocide, the us and its puppets are funding or arming the genociders, and Europe is banning protests of the genocide.
Western capitalist hegemony is a fascistic death cult that will destroy us all unless we destroy it first, and every day we don’t millions are condemned to horrific deaths
I really wish I could have a permanent record of everything every liberal has ever said so I could easily demonstrate how full of shit they are in 10 to 20 years when they all collectively deny ever having supported Israel through the Palestinian genocide.
apologies for the off topic, but this thread shows as 11 hours old and I only see 7 top level comments. for a major event mega thread I expected much more and I’m wondering if I’m doing Lemmy wrong somehow?
lemmy.ca defederated from hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, who are driving top-level comments on here. Since you can’t see the top-level comments, you also can’t see any discussion below.
I opposed lemmy.ca’s decision to defederated from hexbear based on the perceived behaviour of hexbear users on other instances for exactly this reason: I think an instance’s role is to police the actions of users posting to that instance, not to police their users’ exposure to other instances.
As a counterpoint, I don’t mind the hexbear and lemmygrad posts being hidden from view. These people have no interest in good faith arguments and instead derail every post into irrelevant arguments filled with half-truths or outright disinformation.
Server instances deciding independently whether or not to defederate gives people the option to either use an instance where they won’t see this garbage or one where they do. Sounds like a win-win to me.
Damn hexbear and lemmygrad really became the new “commie”
It’s really shone a light on how little the West actually understands communism tbh
Y’all are talking past each other because you’re operating on entirely different assumptions about what the same words mean
These people have no interest in good faith arguments and instead derail every post into irrelevant arguments filled with half-truths or outright disinformation.
I haven’t really seen any evidence of this and worldnews gets a lot of hexbear and lemmygrad posters. It just comes off as red-scaring to me.
Well a lot of the rest of Lemmy have seen numerous examples of it which is why they keep getting defederated from instances. This being about communism is a red herring as the lemmy.ml is run by self-proclaimed communists.
Furthermore, I rarely ever see hexbear users actually discussing communism or any other economic system. Typically it’s just ad hominem remarks about “the west,” strawman arguments, concern trolling as if they’re innocent victims, and carrying water for the Chinese and Russian governments.
Well a lot of the rest of Lemmy have seen numerous examples of it which is why they keep getting defederated from instances.
NGL the users of the big instances that have defederated like .world are the majority of comments I have to delete here for overt racism, supporting genocide, etc. You can check the modlog if you dont believe me.
I’m sorry, I dont really trust the opinion of the admins of instances overflowing with calls for violence and racism.
This being about communism is a red herring as the lemmy.ml is run by self-proclaimed communists.
I’ve seen the admins be called tankies by the same people complaining about hexbear and grad.
Furthermore, I rarely ever see hexbear users actually discussing communism or any other economic system. Typically it’s just ad hominem remarks about “the west,” strawman arguments, concern trolling as if they’re innocent victims, and carrying water for the Chinese and Russian governments.
Yeah this comes off to me as someone who had read a bunch of their comments with no background understanding of why the US empire is the largest purveyor of violence in the world today. I cannot blame them for not having the resources or authority to educate everyone they encounter.
Water runs out at United Nations shelters in Gaza
Israel has cut off the flow of food, medicine, water and electricity to Gaza, pounded neighborhoods with airstrikes and told the estimated 1 million residents of the north to flee south ahead of Israel’s planned attack. The Gaza Health Ministry said more than 2,300 Palestinians have been killed since the fighting erupted last weekend.
U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN on Sunday that Israeli officials told him they had turned the water back on in southern Gaza. But the spokesman for Israel’s energy and water ministry, Adir Dahan, said it was only flowing at a single location in southern Gaza. Aid workers in Gaza said they had not yet seen evidence the water was back and a Gaza government spokesperson said it was not flowing.
Hmm! Why would the US spread Israeli misinformation? It’s a mystery! 🙃
About half a million Gaza residents have taken refuge in U.N. shelters across the territory and are running out of water, said Juliette Touma, a spokesperson for the U.N.’s Palestinian refugee agency, known by the acronym UNRWA. “Gaza is running dry,” she said, adding that U.N. teams have also begun to ration water.
Touma said a quarter of a million people in Gaza moved to shelters over the past 24 hours, the majority of which are U.N. schools where “clean water has actually run out,” said Inas Hamdan, another UNRWA spokeswoman.
Across Gaza, families rationed dwindling water supplies, with many forced to drink dirty or brackish water. Many resorted to going to dirty wells and the sea, increasing the risk of dehydration, water borne diseases and more deaths.
“I am very happy that I was able to brush my teeth today, can you imagine what lengths we have reached?” said Shaima al-Farra, in Khan Younis.
Settlers are sick.
I’m curious what disinformation you’re talking about given what you quoted? And you implied that it is known, but why do you think said disinformation would be spread?
Also, there are no settlers in Gaza. Haven’t been for around 18 years.
The misinformation is the Zionist lie that they turned the water back on, when actual people on the ground in Gaza are telling us they don’t have water.
Also, everyone living on stolen Palestinian land and benefiting from land theft and apartheid is a settler. From the river to the sea.
Everyone knows that the UN is a Hamas front. Providing the UN with water is akin to providing Hamas with the heads of babies.
Might want to add a /s tag there or something, poe’s law
The fact that I have to is a condemnation of this community.
Yeah, we are trying to very actively crack down on it but you know how things are with the influx
Why do Palestinians and Israelites hate each other?
Tl;dr Israel showed up and kicked Palestinians out, Palestinians want their land back. Ensue 80 years of complications
Also Israel has two means of aquiring citizenship. First is having Jewish ancestry. The second and more problematic is that anyone who converts to Judaism can apply in a slower process that grants them citizenship. People who aquire citizenship can then live there and gain govt benefits that subsidize living cost, in other words, govt sanctioned stealing of Palestinian homes/land. Thats why Palestinians say they often hear settlers with Brooklyn accents. People who live in places like NYC with high costs of living are basically given the option to have much cheaper housing if they convert and forget their morals about theft.
So basically Israel recruits citizens from groups of people who have financial incentives to move there and lack a sense of humanity to turn down “free stuff stolen from destitute opressed people” and thus you build a citizenry who is totally comfortable with this Apartheid/Genocidal bullshit.
Technically it wasn’t so much Israel as Europe (and the US) but the Zionists definitely made their mark.
Europe (Britain mostly) and the US pushed the newly formed UN to pass a resolution calling for the creation of Israel in 56% of the territory, but the zionist militias actually took almost 75% of the land while destroying entire villages and murdering the existing population. The West continued to support them after that and have been tacitly approving of them taking even more of the land as the decades have gone by. The West is not blameless, but it was very much Israel that did it.
It’s even simpler
Israel showed up and kicked the Palestinians out, those either unable to or unwilling to leave are now being subject to ethnic cleansing.
Or even simpler: Israel’s sole purpose is to exterminate Palestine.
While many Palestinians do hate the Zionists and vice versa, framing the conflict as between two powers that hate each other for religious reasons or racist reasons or what have you is what leads to such terrible “Two religions fighting again for the billionth time!” analysis.
Israel is a modern colonial state. While most outright colonist countries are no longer around, Israel is the exception. One of the reasons why it’s allowed to be the exception is because it’s a stronghold for American interests in an incredibly important region - whoever controls the world’s oil supply, controls everything that depends on oil, which is a LOT of things. Lately, it’s also increasingly a weapons manufacturer and cybersecurity base - their technologies are tested out on Palestinians as if they are guinea pigs, and then these systems are sold to various countries for use in their own populations. In general, Palestinians today have low qualities of life and the amount of territory they control shrinks by the year as Israel shoves Palestinians out of their homes and puts Israeli settlers in those homes instead. Naturally, the Palestinians are not happy about this at all, but resistance is difficult even when you’re not surrounded on all sides (Gaza has the sea, Israel, and Egypt bordering it, and Egypt is currently sympathetic to the Israeli side due to a coup that put Sisi in power; while the West Bank has Israel and Jordan, and Jordan is also sympathetic to Israel currently).
Palestine wants a state for themselves, which is a fairly reasonable thing to want. Israel absolutely does not want a two-state solution let alone to give Palestine all its land back. The two are therefore at an impasse - there’s a fundamental contradiction here that cannot be solved by some middle of the ground solution. Palestine has attempted on numerous occasions to try and resist, both peacefully and violently - both methods get them killed in the thousands while the West says nothing, because again, it’s extremely important to have Israel in the region as a Western imperialist outpost. Have you ever noticed that the only time the phrase “… has a right to exist”, it’s always in reference to Israel? Few other nations seem to have this “right” in the West’s eyes. Yugoslavia sure didn’t. Neither did the USSR, or for that matter modern-day Russia given the rhetoric going around a year or so ago about how they wanted to subdivide Russia into a dozen oblasts.
There are other powers in the region that are against Israel, with the weaker ones being Syria and Lebanon, while the strongest is Iran. Up until fairly recently, while Hezbollah (a sort of state-within-a-state military force separate from the rest of Lebanon but also integrated into it) has scored a few points on Israel in the past, they were broadly speaking outgunned by Israel. Additionally, Israel has nukes, which made a war to actually overthrow Israel essentially impossible without the risk of nuclear bombs being dropped on Beirut, Damascus, Tehran, etc. This has changed in the last few years, due to a mixture of Israel (and the West broadly speaking) becoming relatively weaker because so much military aid has been sent and destroyed in Ukraine, and Iran and friends becoming stronger. The threat of nuclear annihilation still exists, and it’s one of the major problems still for the anti-Israel resistance, but given Hamas’ victory in Gaza a week ago, there is blood in the water and the sharks are coming.
I hope this all shows that thinking along the lines of “X hates Y and so they’re fighting” obfuscates a lot of what’s actually going on geopolitically. It’s extremely important to say that the fact that Israel is a Jewish state doesn’t mean that they have, according to various right-wing conspiracy theories, some kind of outsized influence over so-and-so countries. Israel does have an influence over various countries because their propaganda department is very active in the West to shut down anti-Zionist (which is unequivocally NOT the same as anti-semitism) viewpoints, and the aforementioned cybersecurity and weapons development programs, but this is a two-way street. The West needs Israel. Israel needs the West. The United States is essentially what has kept Israel alive for the better part of the last century.
This isn’t to say that Zionist and Islamic beliefs have no impact on the calculus here - they have a lot to do with it, in fact - but merely to say that this isn’t just some inherently religious war.
Hmm, why would Palestinians hate European settlers that stole their land via the imperial edict of Britain? 🙄
“European settlers” in the sense that they hadn’t been in Israel since the Romans kicked them out in '65 for causing too much trouble with all their messiahs and religious zealotry.
2000 years!
They hadn’t ever been in Israel, they were born and raised in Europe by parents that were born and raised in Europe by grandparents that were born and raise in Europe etc. etc. They were Europeans, complete with white skin and European culture and European language.
This wasn’t refugees returning to their home. It was settlers invading nonwhite people’s land and stealing it for themselves.
Yeah, if we stretch this logic even further down, we all get to claim our ancestral land in Africa from 200 millennia ago.
The Netherlands had better watch out… my ancestors came from there about 300 years ago, and that automatically gives me the right to rape, torture and murder my way through Antwerp!
Anrwerp is Belgium, though ;)
Pshhh… there’s a difference?
A third of Israelis are (family of) refugees/emigrants from the middle-east or north Africa.
It’s not a ‘white european’ country, which you’d know just looking at them.
Imposing simplistic American notions of race on a complicated conflict is stupid and embarrassing.
Yeah, now. That’s because they imported Jews from everywhere they could to become Israeli. It started as a European settler project.
But if you look at the positions of power, the government and businesses and celebrities, you’ll see mostly white faces. Israel definitely has a white supremacist bent to it - you don’t think an Ethiopian Jew will ever be the prime minister do you?
America’s white majority is going to disappear too, but you don’t think that will actually end American white supremacy right?
Out of interest, would you describe Romani people (pejorative ‘gypsy’) as being white?
If they were given their own settler colony and started being treated as an equal by all the other white countries? Yes.
I wouldn’t consider a European Jew before the formation of Israel to be white, but they’re sure as fuck white now.
Israeli think tank lays out a blueprint for the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza
An Israeli think tank with ties to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a report on October 17 promoting the “unique and rare opportunity” for the “relocation and final settlement of the entire Gaza population.”
Hananya Naftali proudly boasted that Israel bombed Gaza’s ah-Ahli hospital before deleting and two minutes later lying that Hamas did it. He works directly under Netanyahu.
https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/1714357542879457390
Got community noted
https://twitter.com/HananyaNaftali/status/1714346975326330957
