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'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

aljazeera.com

351–360 of 1001 posts

Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#351
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hamas statements have said it's about killing Jews and it being the moral duty of Palestinians to do that and sacrifice their children to the cause. It's religious in at least one direction. It was about land once. I suspect, to throw the exact level of thinking on the table by these people, about as worthy as a meme at this point.

Any source for Hamas saying it wants to kill Jews. I read it was in their charter but they removed it ~20 years ago

You will not find any current or reliable source for this line of propaganda.

Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your opinion what are the chances of having an early election to replace Netanyahu? AFAICT it requires a non-confidence vote in the Knesset, but how likely do you think this could happen?

Not the OP but Netanyahu is living on borrowed time — he won't be replaced in the middle of the war, but even Likud is having private talks about who replaces him once it's over. I would give very high probability that he is replaced well before his term is up.

Unfortunately, given Bibi's single-minded focus on staying in power, "he won't be replaced in the middle of the war" guarantees that he will try to make this a forever war.

Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#353

I have mixed feelings about this topic appearing on HN as I feel like folks are entrenched one way or the other and information isn't going to sway anyone. If this were a discussion we want to have here, this feels like a very bad article as by it's nature it's a one-sided subjective narrative with very little light to shed on the depth of the conflict. An interesting differentiator left unsaid in this article is tha…

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Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#354

Those are the most serious allegations: "The men and teenage boys were taken to a warehouse where they sat on a bare floor covered in scattered grains of rice. There they were beaten, interrogated and verbally abused. There was no sleep, and the grains of rice cut their skin as they sat there, undressed." A man claims: "Some people didn’t return from the torture sessions. We would hear their screams and then nothing.…

> 1. It has to happen in the same time as the agression There are still rockets flying out of Gaza into Israel. > 2. Its only purpose is to defend against the agression The people sending those rockets are in Gaza, so to stop them, Israel has to go there. > 3. The defense has to be proportionate That one is regularly the most difficult point of contention in individual self-defense. Hamas essentially goes by this pla…

Has Israel said what the plan is for Gaza in future? Politically, Economically, Rebuilding?

Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#355

Those are the most serious allegations: "The men and teenage boys were taken to a warehouse where they sat on a bare floor covered in scattered grains of rice. There they were beaten, interrogated and verbally abused. There was no sleep, and the grains of rice cut their skin as they sat there, undressed." A man claims: "Some people didn’t return from the torture sessions. We would hear their screams and then nothing.…

I don’t think your take is entirely unreasonable, but I do think you’ve missed a critical detail: Hamas continues to attack Israel. So Israel’s military operation is contemporaneous with a threat, and does at least serve some degree of self-defense purpose.

As I understand it (and wow, the press coverage is incomplete in so many ways), Hamas has a very large number of, approximately, these things:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qassam_rocket

And they fire them, on an ongoing basis, from civilian sites, at Israel. And Israel could, arguably, feel that it defending itself, contemporaneously, from ongoing attacks, thus satisfying #1 and #2. And, while the defense might not be proportionate per se, it’s not that easy to see how, from a purely tactical perspective, Israel is supposed to defend itself more proportionately. Certainly firing an equal number of rockets back at random civilian sites would make no sense. Although Israel could probably find a way for their soldiers to treat people in a much less dehumanizing way.

(And I think this situation is horrible. And I suspect it’s intentional on Hamas’s part — see my other comment.)

Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#356
post #136

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Over 18000 Palestinians were killed, about 70% of them were women and children. Many more under the rubble. 1.9 millions (85% of the population) are displaced. And you're calling people antisemitic (how original) because they care about the massacres and ethnic cleansing Israel is committing against Palestinians (who are in fact Semitic).

Can you please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38618713 and please not comment in this spirit in the thread? You've been crossing well into the battle that we're explicitly asking users to avoid.

I don't say this in a spirit of criticism—I am certain that you have deep and legitimate reasons for feeling the way that you do. But we're trying hard to have a certain sort of discussion here, one that remains within the intended spirit of this site, as expressed at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If you can't find that place in yourself, that's entirely understandable and ok, but please don't post in this thread unless you can.

The same goes for some of the commenters arguing against your position—my moderation point here is certainly not about agreeing with them and disagreeing with you (I add this because I know it can all too easily feel that way).

Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#357

My political awareness was forged by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the American response. The core lesson: the point of a terrorist attack is to trigger an over reaction. America wildly over reacted and became fundamentally hostile to Arab and Muslim people. This reaction led to some of the most successful recruiting of radicals in generations. Israel's response to this crisis seems to have failed to learn from that…

My political awareness was forged by participating in the Iraq war on the US side after falling for the massive propaganda before. I've literally never been the same person since, and have spent most of my waking free hours in between the jobs I can barely hold down for my PTSD trying to understand the details behind the global geopolitical situation.

The truth is this is likely just a continuation of the same playbook, and until one understands the true reasons behind the GWOT one will not be able to understand why it seems those "mistakes" haven't been learned from. When I started asking Cui Bono about Iraq (I did not participate in Afghanistan) and the various real results of the war I keep returning to Israel. For example, I know a person who was in the Green Zone when an Iraqi general came and said "I have 40k military men about to have no job, what do you want to do with them, please hire them." and the top-down directive that every boot-on-the-ground with half a brain knew would result in majorly increased chaos was to tell them to f-off! My conclusion after tons of reading is that balkanization was part of the intention as part of prepping for Oded Yinon. (I won't even start on the various secret societies (ancient mystery religions) obsession with Solomons temple and rebuilding the third temple, which would require the destruction of Al Aqsa)

Then as I started truly analyzing 9/11 and doing what the intel bubbas call "threat finance", I keep ending up at deep state actors heavily tied to Israel (and the UK) even within my (US) government. For an example that is even mirrored in this recent escalation, are indicators of pre-knowledge via trading that occurred prior. This happened on 9/11 (by a firm formerly chaired by AB Buzzy Krongard, A.B. Brown, acquired by Banker's Trust turned Banker's Trust-AB Brown) and before 10/7, and in a way that is mathematically provable to be major outliers.

My point is that there are much deeper things going on that surface analysis will fail to provide understanding for. If I went into further detail, I would for sure be seen as a "crazy conspiracy theorist"...

I riff on Barbossa in Pirates of the Caribbean "You'd best start believing in ghost stories, because you're in one!"

Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#358
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Do you really think that the Russo-Ukrainian war has 10x LESS civilian fatalities than the current Gaza war?

The reason people think only 10,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed is that is lowball number the UN made up to not offend and anger Russia and China.

It is estimated that 25,000-75,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed just in Mariupol and surrounding areas.

Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All reports are that Netanyahu and the Israeli intelligence services knew this attack was coming. They've been promoting Hamas over more moderate elements in Gaza. The goal was to provoke an attack which would "justify" a counter-attack to completely level Gaza and kill or force out all the remaining civilians.

While there are elements of truth to this, the reality is more nuanced. They have been promoting Hamas over moderate elements, and have looked the other way as Qatar has provided money in briefcases to Hamas. Israel ignored warnings from their own intel as well as civilians who noticed that Hamas were increasing training exercises on the border from listening to radio communications. The explicit goal of promoting Ha…

That article you cite, uses this haaretz opinion article (https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-20/ty-article-op...) as evidence for Netanyahu bolstering Hamas. The main point presented is here:

"Releasing Palestinian prisoners, allowing cash transfers, as the Qatari envoy comes and goes to Gaza as he pleases, agreeing to the import of a broad array of goods, construction materials in particular, with the knowledge that much of the material will be designated for terrorism and not for building civilian infrastructure, increasing the number of work permits in Israel for Palestinian workers from Gaza, and more. All these developments created symbiosis between the flowering of fundamentalist terrorism and preservation of Netanyahu’s rule."

The idea that these points prove that Netanyahu purposefully bolstered Hamas is tenuous at best.

Re: 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think an honest answer would be to end occupation and oppression of the Palestinians by Israel. Any occupying force has an interest to silence and stop indigenous people from claiming their land rights. For example, Gaza had been described as an open air prison for almost 2 decades because its borders, imports, sea usage, had all been controlled by Israel. This is not what we call “sovereign rule”. The West Bank ha…

This statement is very uninformed. Isreal left Gaza very logn time ago. They had an election and Hamas came to power, and they never hold an election after. There is no land dispute between Isreal and Gaza (Unlike Westbank where there are serious disputes). The main problem is that Hamas and its supporter Iran consistentnly in word and in practice declared that want to wipe out and destroy Isreal. It is not about som…

> Hamas need to agree that Israel has the right to exist.

Agreed

And maybe Israel needs to agree that Palestine has the right to exist

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