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

One of my filter bubbles presents me with something similar to what the parent is seeing, for another datapoint.

There are extremely different narratives which one can be presented with.

In one, the pro-palestine marches have been commandeered by russia/iran and/or neonazis, to the extent of chanting 30's era slogans and marking people's homes based on their Jewishness. The on the ground atrocities and brutal tactics of Hamas are hilighted against the humanness of Israeli victims.

In another, Israel, aided by the US, is committing the systematic genocide of a severely underdefended population and there's an unspoken understanding of how Hamas could have arisen in such conditions. There's a sense that everything Hamas is doing is ineffectual and anyway reactive. The on the ground atrocities pale in comparison to the Israeli-sourced on the ground atrocities due to the imbalance of power and an implied overarching guilt / causality.

Also, regarding food and water .. it's not hard to find pictures and reports of thriving markets, cafés, clubs. Materially, I'm pretty sure Gazans are better off than Egyptians.

Of course that doesn't much diminish their grievances which is based on lost land and and lack of freedom of movement.

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> If Ukraine were to bomb a Russian city during the current war, no one would views it as legitimate for Russia to bomb a Ukrainian city back

If Kyiv went into Russia to capture children and seniors after gunning down a rave, their Western backing would evaporate overnight. Russia would be vindicated in its claim that their neighbour poses a security threat.

Had Hamas hit military installations (demonstrating Israeli impotency) and taken hostages, but treated them well (taking the moral high ground as images of Nonna being served tea and falafel are juxtaposed with those of aerial bombardment), our conversation right now would be very different.

You're broadly right. One component of the solution must be an independent Gaza (if not Palestinian state). Another has to be reparations for the Nakba. Israel can be partly responsible, but the primary debtor should be the U.K. and possibly French. (Reparations for the blockade are needlessly divisive. Israel can always argue, legitimately, I believe, that it was Palestine's Arab allies who repeatedly attacked it first.)

> The bombing of power targets, according to intelligence sources who had first-hand experience with its application in Gaza in the past, is mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: to “create a shock” that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas,” as one source put it.

> Several of the sources, who spoke to +972 and Local Call on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed.

> In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source.

> “Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

> According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”

https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-cal...