The problem is that both sides lie flagrantly with such frequency that very few claims about the war can be taken at face value.
On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket, with video from multiple angles of the failure, that it hit an empty parking lot in front of the hospital and only blew out the windows and burnt a few cars, and that no more than a handful of people had been killed.
And also the repeated claims that Israel were lying about the tunnels under Gaza Hospitals, and make videos of one such strike (a bunker buster penetrating the parking lot just outside the entrance) go viral, only for Hamas to later announce that one of the replacement leaders for Sinwar had been killed in that strike, and for excavation to find the bunkers / tunnel network underneath that very hospital.
As well as, earlier in the war, a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza.
None of that justifies genuine instances of war crimes and atrocities that Israel may have committed, but there's a reason why people tune out some of the extreme claims that fly around.
But not the video in the OP which demonstrates that the IDF were, in fact firing on aid workers and refugees as they had been accused of, and certainly not the hours of footage of the IDF brazenly taking human shields over the years while insisting they didn't, or the reports of the IDF arming settlers. Curious that you can't enumerate any of these, and you're happy to take at face value a claim the IDF makes but doesn't allow independent third parties to verify (a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza) while abjuring such behaviour.
Independent 3rd parties were brought in to verify, though.
I already said I don't condone any instances of legitimate war crimes. I don't think enumerating everything that has ever happened by either side is very useful. But it's a fact that both sides lie flagrantly about atrocities. Lots of the footage in the early days of the war that was claimed to be from Gaza was actually recycled from the Syrian civil war.
If you want me to start listing some BS that Israel has done, fine - the calendar stunt was ridiculous (if you have followed the conflict, you probably have heard of it). What goes on in the west bank is disgraceful. There are plenty of statements by Israeli politicians that are basically genocidal language (though you can play that game with most countries, random US politicians say psychotic shit all the time).
>Independent 3rd parties were brought in to verify, though.
Reuters was given an IDF escort as they were walked through the tunnel system, during which a room with some servers was called a Hamas data centre, and they nodded along. That's not quite the same thing.
>Lots of the footage in the early days of the war that was claimed to be from Gaza was actually recycled from the Syrian civil war.
Lots of footage that Hamas or advocates for Palestine released or Twitter randos? Not all of those things are equivalent to Israel making a claim.
> On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket...
And one side started it by killing 1,200 civilians and kidnapping 250. Which doesn't justify genocide. But it does factor into the response when one side is governed by a death cult that has no problem letting scores of their own civilians die if it furthers their cause.
In the 1947 Palestinian civil war, and they have been attacking and trying to destroy Israel ever since?
Also look at what they did in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan.
Palestinians, Hamas and Hezbollah are not the good guys here. Not saying Israel is all good either, but let’s put it this way. Where would you want your wife or children to live if given the chance?
You can live as a Muslim in Israel, you can’t live as a Christian or Jew in Palestine.
1) Israel attacked Arab Palestine and the neighboring Arab states first, in plan Dalet.
2) Christians and Jews absolutely can live in Palestine. They were afforded that in the Ottoman empire (the Dhimmi) and they are afforded that now.
3) Muslims do not get to govern themselves in Israel. Every other religions can choose their own representatives in official matter, but Islam gets a token person selected by the Israeli state.
> 2) Christians and Jews absolutely can live in Palestine. They were afforded that in the Ottoman empire (the Dhimmi) and they are afforded that now.
Add to this, Amira Haas (Jewish, anti-Zionist Haaretz journalist) lives in Ramallah. There was also a Palestinian man who converted to Judaism living in the West Bank, but he was killed... by the IDF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_David_Ben_Avraham
This is so disingenuous, the poster clearly has no clue what he's talking about.
Local Christian communities have been living amongst Muslims there for centuries and continue to do so under Israeli occupation. About 25% of the population that calls themselves Palestinian are Christians, and are treated the same as Muslims by Israel, that is as second class citizens at best inside the Green Line and targets for ethnic cleansing outside of it.
Scores of foreign Christians and Jews go stay in Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank to provide some amount of protection to the Palestinian Muslims and Christians there. They are encouraged and welcome to come stay among them by Palestinians.
Right. Thats what happened in Jordan and Lebanon right? Damour massacre in Lebanon for example? Black September and Jordan civil war?
Christian percentage went from 10% to 1% in Palestine.
Parliament has 120 seats, 15 of which for Muslims, and Muslims have full rights.
Sorry, ya’ll are delusional if you think you have better life and more rights as a Christian in a Muslim country than a Muslim in Israel or a European country.
No they don't. Israel is a state with discrimination against non-Jews baked into its laws, with a couple of clever facades that don't stand up to basic scrutiny.
>Christian percentage went from 10% to 1% in Palestine.
And the decades of ethnic cleansing by Israel against Arabs, both Christians and Muslims, has nothing to do with this? How come those communities were there for millennia and started disappearing? What major event in the last 100 years in the region of Palestine led to the flight of Palestinian Christians?
>Christian Palestinians who are citizens of Israel suffer from the same widespread official and unofficial discrimination that other non-Jews do, in everything from land ownership and housing to employment and family reunification rights. [1]
The difference between Hamas and Israel is the magnitude of effect. And that for most of the war one party had much more capacity to change its course than the other. But either way criticism of the semantics and focus of media just seems irrelevant and overly abstract. It focuses too much on the group and not enough on the individual. Which drags the argument into the realm that ethno-nationalists of either side occupy. Death is always a tragedy and unnecessary killing is immoral. Anything deeper than that stinks of ignorance and is grotesque.
You're correct, it was yet another genocide carried out by the Israeli state, as usual.
> In an interview with Politico in 2023, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that "In the last 15 years, Israel did everything to downgrade the Palestinian Authority and to boost Hamas." He continued saying "Gaza was on the brink of collapse because they had no resources, they had no money, and the PA refused to give Hamas any money. Bibi saved them. Bibi made a deal with Qatar and they started to move millions and millions of dollars to Gaza." At a Likud party conference in 2019, Benjamin Netanyahu said:
> “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” - Benjamin Netanyahu
> Gershon Hacohen, former commander of the 7th Armored Brigade and an associate of Benjamin Netanyahu, said in 2019 in an interview:
> “Netanyahu’s strategy is to prevent the option of two states, so he is turning Hamas into his closest partner. Openly Hamas is an enemy. Covertly, it’s an ally.”
Swiss Policy Research has excellent documentation on the promotion of Hamas in Gaza by Israel:
Even then, Gaza is far more dense than Grozny; almost certainly the Grozny campaign was conducted with far more deliberate indifference to any concept of morality.
What Israel is doing is genocide. The International Association of Genocide Scholars say so https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS... . Is there anyone who is arguing, in ”good faith” as you say, that the atrocities of October 7th were a genocide?
> On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket,
This is an Israeli lie. Not only has Israel bombed all of the hospitals, they murdered an entire NICU of infants. I can't believe people are still trying to justify blowing up hospitals!
No. This is about a specific claim. Hamas claimed that Israel killed 500 people in a hospital bombing, and that was indisputably a lie. Videos show that it was a Hamas rocket, not a bomb. Pictures show that the damage was limited to a few burned cars and broken windows and a pothole sized dent in the asphalt. There were no mass casualties and every credible news outlet that initially reported that there were, walked it back when evidence proved otherwise.
> 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
On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket, with video from multiple angles of the failure, that it hit an empty parking lot in front of the hospital and only blew out the windows and burnt a few cars, and that no more than a handful of people had been killed.
And also the repeated claims that Israel were lying about the tunnels under Gaza Hospitals, and make videos of one such strike (a bunker buster penetrating the parking lot just outside the entrance) go viral, only for Hamas to later announce that one of the replacement leaders for Sinwar had been killed in that strike, and for excavation to find the bunkers / tunnel network underneath that very hospital.
As well as, earlier in the war, a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza.
None of that justifies genuine instances of war crimes and atrocities that Israel may have committed, but there's a reason why people tune out some of the extreme claims that fly around.