The Israeli rescue service Zaka says its paramedics removed more than 260 bodies from a music festival that came under attack by Hamas militants.
The total figure of bodies found is expected to be higher, as other paramedic teams were also working in the area and Zaka added that the bodies “haven’t all been collected yet”.
Early on Saturday morning, Hamas targeted Nova music festival, a techno rave in the desert near the border with Gaza.
Videos shared on social media and by Israeli news outlets showed dozens of festival-goers running through an open field as gunshots rang out. Many hid in nearby fruit orchards or were gunned down as they fled.
And ALL of this was because Hamas was banking on people in the west doing exactly what this gullible sap is doing: assuming that Israel is the monster.
Hmm well maybe, but is there a part of this (taken from another comment) that you reject as untrue?
The 1967 borders are the most recent broadly recognized boundaries. After the Six Days War, Israel gained control of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and Gaza.
As of today, East Jerusalem is a diverse but uneasy mix of Jews and Palestinians. Israel maintains that a unified Jerusalem is its capital, and this is the de facto situation. According to general peace plans, an eventual Palestinian state is meant to have East Jerusalem as its capital, so this is an obvious conflict point.
The West Bank is divided into three areas: A - administered by the Palestinian Authority, B - jointly administered by the PA and Israel, and C - administered by Israel. Israel has been increasingly building more and more settlements within Area C, which are widely recognized as illegal and being incredibly counter-productive towards peace. The Israelis who move there are often extremely nationalistic and often commit violence against the Palestinians.
I don’t disagree with any of that.
The important context is that the war in which Israel captured all that territory was a war where all of Israel’s neighbors were the aggressors.
And Israel quickly traded back land for peace, as was the case with Egypt.
And the neighboring Arab states DELIBERATELY created the Palestinian refugee crisis by refusing to take in all their former countrymen, believing that the humanitarian crisis was good politics for them, and would be a nightmare for Israel. (Correct on both counts).
I also agree that the settlements are a dick move, and purely antagonistic.
I also think Israel is using them as a bargaining chip.
I think in the Oslo Accords, Israel offered literally everything it could, and when that wasn’t enough, they leaned hard into creating settlements, a new bargaining chip, which someday they could add to future negotiations.
I also think that over time the Palestinians’ bargaining position has weakened.
Now that Israel has a security fence, the iron dome, and one of the most powerful militaries in the world, the daily threat of terrorism has been reduced to an unfortunate but livable state of existence. (This week excluded obviously)
Frankly at this point Israelis can wait out the Palestinians indefinitely, and I’m betting that when this current state of War is over, Israel is going to be in the business of securing themselves even more tightly.
I doubt if they’ll be inclined to ever offer Palestinians a peace deal as generous is the one they offered during the Oslo Accords.
So if we agree that the settlements are (today) antagonistic and generally viewed as illegal, and if our goal is to remove the motivation for people to kill each other - maybe we should couch this in terms of whether the settlements belong there instead of in terms of who has a stronger “bargaining position” like we’re haggling over a horse or something.
Because it certainly looks to me like the stronger party provoking the weaker party so they have a reason they can point to for smashing them under their heel.
Like when a cop provokes someone’s fight or flight response so they can justify using more force and/or a “resisting arrest” charge.
