IDF killed Gaza aid workers at point blank range in 2025 massacre: Report

Battle of Fallujah? The war against ISIS in Iraq in the 2010s?

Before the most recent invasion of Gaza started, there was an interview with an Israeli general about the imminent invasion. And when the question came up about what lessons Israel was drawing from other urban conflicts like the Battle of Fallujah, the response was a very indignant we-don't-need-to-learn-anything. Small wonder that the IDF claims to have achieved unprecedentedly low civilian casualty ratios in their invasion of Gaza when in reality, they're commensurate with WW2 ratios and well above the urban assaults of the US's Iraq War.

The motive was pretty clear i.e. to murder aid workers helping Palestinians and assumed to be Palestinian. The report is very clear that the IDF could see the vehicle lights the entire time, making it clear they were protected aid workers. They attacked the first ambulance, the follow up ambulances, the UN truck, and the UN bus, before and after dawn, with plenty of time between. If this were a movie, there could be a clever twist to show some other motive, but in the real world, this is as clear as you get without confessions to tell you what was in their heads.

Why didn’t they murder everyone? As testimony says [0], when one of the survivors called out that his mother was Israeli, the IDF soldiers lowered their weapons and helped him up. It seems to me that these are soldiers that have decided that Palestinians are less than human, or that Palestinians will never coexist and it is “them or us”. This mindset happens in many wars, but actual incidents depend on leadership at all levels and how much it is implicitly allowed. I think their cover up actions speak the loudest to how widespread these things are. The on the ground commander clearly wasn’t worried about destroying any and all evidence or leaving witnesses. Buring everything was to make it too difficult for outsiders confirm what happened, not to prevent leadership from putting them in jail. They were counting on being protected, and they were. A letter of reprimand for the commander, and losing his position as deputy commander (not loss of rank or being kicked out of the military) is little more than a speedbump to their military careers.

[0] Page 36-37 of report

> The death toll, initially put at 500 by Hamas and then lowered to 471, is believed by Western intelligence agencies to be considerably lower — but no number has been verified. The hospital itself was not directly struck; whatever caused the explosion actually hit the hospital courtyard, where people had gathered for safety, and a handful of parked cars.

> Moreover, the crater left from the impact was relatively small, a fact that Israel has cited in arguing that none of its munitions caused the blast, and could be consistent with a number of different munitions. Hamas has not produced a remnant of an Israeli munition or any physical evidence to back up its claim that Israel is responsible.

...

> In addition, the videos show that the projectile in the Al Jazeera footage was launched after the barrage of Palestinian rockets Israeli officials assessed was responsible for the hospital explosion.

> From 6:59 p.m. on Oct. 17, barrages of Palestinian rockets are fired from two positions southwest and northwest of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, the videos show. Flames from the Palestinian rockets are visible in the nighttime sky as their engines propel them northeast toward Israel. More than 25 seconds elapse between the final Palestinian rocket and the hospital explosion.

The Al Jazeera footage does show an interception, not the rocket that hit the courtyard. This has been known for years, indeed. But there were like 5 different videos of the event, which were frequently confused for each other, and that's not the one I'm referring to. The AJ footage went the most "viral" even though it was pretty obvious that it wasn't the right event if you knew what you were looking at. I don't know why the Times didn't mention any of the others.

In any case literally all of the context around it remains a lie, and would still be a lie even if it ended up being a failed Iron Dome missile launched during the rocket barrage as the Times implied

I'm claiming that October 7th was a pretext. If October 7th hadn't happened, they would have done the exact same thing with some other occasion (and they could always provoke some kind of attack from Gaza by killing a few people with no reason, as they have periodically done for the last 30 years).

And the reasoning for why now and not in 2003 is simple. In 2003, they had a much weaker international position - USA leadership was slightly less zionist, and the Arab states around them were much more belligerent towards Israel, and would have likely intervened directly at that time. Israel itself was also much weaker militarily - it has only increased its military spending in all the time since. And finally, a much smaller percentage of the Israeli population in 2003 was actively rooting for ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank, especially since the population had been less exposed to the violent anti-Palestinian propaganda, and that propaganda itself had been less rabid.

That is simply wrong. Palestinians were first attacked by the British, supporting the Zionists, in the 1930s. Then, in 1947, during plan Dalet, Israel attacked Palestine and the surrounding Arab states.

Before that, of course, they colonized Palestine under the shield of the British empire.

An easier way to disarm this argument is: Why did the Zionists come and displace the Palestinians? And who would respond peacefully if you try to displace them?