this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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I have come to dislike snappy one-liner responses in these posts, as well as the quick judgments based on uninformed opinions. Back in January, Brett Stephens, a journalist currently with the New York Times who lived and covered stories in Israel for years, had this to say about UNRWA :
"Last Friday, Israeli officials presented the U.S. government with an intelligence dossier detailing the involvement of 12 UNRWA employees, seven of them schoolteachers, in the massacre of Oct. 7. As reported by The Times’s Ronen Bergman and Patrick Kingsley, the charges range from kidnapping an Israeli woman to storing rocket-propelled grenades to murdering civilians in a kibbutz.
Awful enough — and the U.N. rightly moved swiftly to terminate the employment of nine of those identified by the dossier. But that may be the least of it. “Intelligence estimates shared with the U.S. conclude that around 1,200 of UNRWA’s roughly 12,000 employees in Gaza have links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and about half have close relatives who belong to the Islamist militant groups,” The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
The figures are worth bearing in mind the next time you weigh the credibility of information about Gaza sourced to the U.N. Also worth bearing in mind is that this has been going on for years. As Bassam Eid of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group noted over a decade ago, “In order for UNRWA to survive, they accept [Hamas’s] conditions because they want to continue their activities.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/opinion/unrwa-un-palestine-agency.html
Setting all opinions aside, Hamas is the elected government in Gaza, ofc international aid workers will have to coordinate with them.
Weasel words in "have links" and "close relatives." Mary Trump for instance recognizes the threat Donald Trump poses and speaks out against him constantly, but you could instead say she's a close relative and imply the opposite. Same with Paul Gosar's family. Would I "have links" to Hamas if I worked at a hospital they ran?
I'll tell you what I dislike, this trend in the world where as soon as you "officially" label someone a terrorist, you're allowed to bomb them...and whoever is in the vicinity of the blast simply becomes "collateral damage." It's purely a matter of perspective. When I consider the perspective of Palestinians...what their daily life must be like...having hell rained down from above on a people with no real defenses after their homes have been flattened has to be far more terrifying than feckless rockets, suicide bombers, beheadings...etc. I'm not saying anyone is the good guy or the bad guy here, just that "terrorist" has become shorthand for people that don't have billions of dollars worth of equipment on their side.
Hamas is the elected government, one which has openly stated that its aim is to wipe the jews out of the Middle East completely. It enjoys broad support among the population in Gaza, despite having demonstrated on October 7 that it has no qualms about shooting teenagers with assault rifles at a peace rave. We saw the footage that they themselves took; no doubt there. They own it. That's the goal. Many Palestinians who were not members of Hamas appear to have streamed across the border to take part on that day, too.
And, yes, Hamas, as the government in Gaza, also happens to be tallying casualty figures that Lemmy eats up without question.
Nobody is excusing Oct 7th, we don't need a retelling of it. I don't think shooting civilians is any more barbaric than bombing them to pieces from above. You'll have to excuse me for not recognizing it as the civilized way to kill your enemies.
Go count them yourself then. You seem to have no self-awareness of how absolutely disgusting it is, morally speaking, to insinuate "there haven't been THAT many innocents killed" with nothing but your own doubt and bias to argue the point. But this is how you folks tend to work, you don't have to prove anything, just cast amorphous doubt and leave it at that.
I am disgusted with the loss of any innocent life. So don't put that on me; shame on you for making that accusation. I think you're confused about what I'm saying: Hamas knew perfectly well when they raped Israeli women, cut off their breasts, and paraded their bodies around town square that they were provoking military force against Palestinian civilians -- because their military installations are built underneath civilian infrastructure. They knew and they didn't care, and they still don't care, because it's martyrdom in their eyes.