Israel declares war on Hamas

[Bagor]

Front page of tomorrow's (UK) Independent.

The world starting to get more vocal in expressing their disgust at the Israeli genocide and terrorism

https://twitter.com/user/status/1775642721459532064

[Zary's-Mustache]

Originally Posted by Beninho

Who is celebrating war? I have friends in the war zone you weirdo. Nothing about war is worth celebrating. It’s a war. Go outside or fight someone else about this.

Your friends should think about not being complicit in genocide. There are posters here who have family in Gaza being murdered by the genocidal regime your friends are apart of. Not sure why you mentioned that? Sympathy? If your against war, it doesn't feel that way.

Notice how most if not all posters who are against Israel have also said they are against Hamas and the killings of ALL innocent lives. You just have tests you need to study for when it is time to condemn Israel for another atrocity.

Stop the Genocide AND free the hostages.

[Bagor]

Am I the only one wondering if he's going to submit his test paper then knock on his teacher's door three or four times in the hour after the exam asking if he can edit his answers.

[Cube Inmate]

This "free the hostages" mantra is bull####. Let's just imagine that Hamas came out and said we've killed them all, there are no more hostages... then what would Israel do? Withdraw? Oh, wait...now it's "Hamas must surrender!" OK, so the the leadership of Hamas surrenders or is killed, and??... I'm going to guess the goalposts move again. Now "every Palestinian must disarm and move to the West Bank" ...

We've watched 2 other wars this century with massively disproportionate forces trying to eliminate the threat of being attacked by a completely outclassed enemy. This one's no different. The first two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, haven't gone all that well for the superior forces, and I think Israel knows that and understands the only way to eliminate threats from Gaza is to eliminate the Palestinians from Gaza. At the same time, they'll continue working to crowd them out from the West Bank with settlements until all Arab/Muslims disperse into Egypt, Jordan, or who really cares where?

That is the goal of this war. That is the ultimate outcome of this war, unless enough international pressure stops Netanyahu et al.

[AltaGuy]

The only way to rid Gaza of Hamas is genocide or a longterm major effort to materially improve the lives of the people living there.

Israel chose the former.

[ResAlien]

https://twitter.com/user/status/1775665579375915176

Would this be because it’s such a small space and it’s too difficult to differentiate between the Palestinians and the aid workers?

[Coach]

It seems like AT BEST they just don't care to differentiate. At worst, are actively targeting anyone in Gaza thats not IDF.

[Zary's-Mustache]

Originally Posted by Coach

It seems like AT BEST they just don't care to differentiate. At worst, are actively targeting anyone in Gaza thats not IDF.

I think his comment was a little tongue in cheek. They can't differentiate between aid workers and regular Palestinian civilians because they aren't trying to. They're on a killing spree.

If those aid workers were regular Palestinians try to get food then no one would have even made a peep and likely they would have called them Hamas members.

[Doctorfever]

Originally Posted by activeStick

Pretty chilling article that goes through how Israel has used AI that killed innocent Palestinians, including entire families.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...mas-airstrikes

Definitely chilling to talk about people’s lives in terms of “allowable casualties” to kill Hamas members.

Also very chilling to know that more lives are lost because smarter bombs are more expensive.

I wonder why Israel would release this information, or was it leaked?

Is there a strategy to releasing this information? If there is, I don’t see it.

[_Q_]

Take it with a grain of salt, but if true, aljazeera is reporting a potentially huge policy shift from Washington.

https://aje.io/y4222w?update=2818325

Biden urged Netanyahu to take immediate, even unilateral, action to stop civilian suffering in Gaza.
Biden requested specific changes from Netanyahu, including increasing aid access, expanding the powers of the Israeli negotiating team to reach a ceasefire and stopping any Israeli arrangements regarding a future presence in Gaza.
Biden told Netanyahu that the world had turned against Israel and Washington’s allies had informed it of a shift in their policy.
Biden informed Netanyahu that he would temporarily suspend deliberations on a future arms deal with Israel in Congress.
Biden requested a detailed report from Netanyahu on the killing of aid workers and called for an immediate investigation that includes comprehensive accountability.
Biden said he would send his national security adviser to Israel to follow up on steps to change Israel’s policy.

[Fuzz]

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pushed back Thursday on comments made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about an Israeli military airstrike that killed seven aid workers in Gaza, including one Canadian.


In a video statement released earlier this week, Netanyahu expressed regret over the incident and called it a "tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people in the Gaza Strip." He also said "this happens in wartime" and that Israel was looking into the situation.


"No, it doesn't just happen," Trudeau said Thursday during an event in Winnipeg. "And it shouldn't just happen when you have aid workers for an extraordinary organization like World Central Kitchen risking their lives every day in an incredibly dangerous place to deliver food to people who are experiencing a horrific humanitarian catastrophe."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tru...163579?cmp=rss


Super embarrassing to have our PM stand up to the leader of Israel like that. And to not even finish with "release the hostages"? BRB, going to hang my flag upside down.

[Mathgod]

[_Q_]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tru...163579?cmp=rss


Super embarrassing to have our PM stand up to the leader of Israel like that. And to not even finish with "release the hostages"? BRB, going to hang my flag upside down.

Trudeau must be antisemitic.

[Bagor]

UK govn being advised that continuing to export arms is in breach of international law and their legal obligation to prevent genocide.

Former supreme court judges say UK arming Israel breaches international law.

Exclusive: More than 600 prominent lawyers sign letter that calls for end to exports as a ‘measure to prevent’ genocide

Three former supreme court justices, including the court’s former president Lady Hale, are among more than 600 lawyers, academics and retired senior judges warning that the UK government is breaching international law by continuing to arm Israel.

In a letter to the prime minister, the signatories, who also include former court of appeal judges and more than 60 KCs, say that the present situation in Gaza is “catastrophic” and that given the international court of justice (ICJ) finding that there is a plausible risk of genocide being committed, the UK is legally obliged to act to prevent it.

The 17-page letter, which also amounts to a legal opinion, was sent on Wednesday evening and says: “While we welcome the increasingly robust calls by your government for a cessation of fighting and the unobstructed entry to Gaza of humanitarian assistance, simultaneously to continue (to take two striking examples) the sale of weapons and weapons systems to Israel and to maintain threats of suspending UK aid to Unwra falls significantly short of your government’s obligations under international law.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ernational-law

[Azure]

Originally Posted by _Q_

Take it with a grain of salt, but if true, aljazeera is reporting a potentially huge policy shift from Washington.

https://aje.io/y4222w?update=2818325

lol, sure.

The US is not going to chance anything about their policy, which in the last couple weeks has clearly shown that they have no issue continuing with weapon sales agreements.

[_Q_]

Originally Posted by Azure

lol, sure.

The US is not going to chance anything about their policy, which in the last couple weeks has clearly shown that they have no issue continuing with weapon sales agreements.

Yet the official statement from the Whitehouse is this:

President Biden spoke by telephone with Prime Minister Netanyahu. The two leaders discussed the situation in Gaza. President Biden emphasized that the strikes on humanitarian workers and the overall humanitarian situation are unacceptable. He made clear the need for Israel to announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers. He made clear that U.S. policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel’s immediate action on these steps. He underscored that an immediate ceasefire is essential to stabilize and improve the humanitarian situation and protect innocent civilians, and he urged the Prime Minister to empower his negotiators to conclude a deal without delay to bring the hostages home. The two leaders also discussed public Iranian threats against Israel and the Israeli people. President Biden made clear that the United States strongly supports Israel in the face of those threats.

The bolded part shows a potential major departure from previous policy.

[Itse]

Let's talk about the reality of "targeting Hamas".

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

the Israeli army has developed an artificial intelligence-based program known as “Lavender,” unveiled here for the first time. According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”

Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. The sources told +972 and Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.

One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing

Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.

This is just too blatantly on-the-nose pure evil to be a Black Mirror episode.

It's also just pretty obvious that no one participating in this could actually think they are targeting "Hamas terrorists". Not when you know you are deliberately bombing civilian residential buildings full of sleeping families, just because a computer somewhere tagged someone in that building be potentially connected to something.

(Let's also remember that Hamas was the official government of Gaza, so every bureaucrat and secretary working for the government is very likely to have some connection to "the military wing".)

That's not a process to "target Hamas", that's a process to create the maximum possible number of "legitimate" targets, and then the maximum possible amount of collateral death and destruction around those "targets".

In other words, this is a thin veil of plausible deniability. This is how you tell a military to do a genocide, without telling them to do a genocide.



This was okay, because the AI said so. Everything was a legitimate target.

[Fuzz]

Israel has killed at least 5000 since the last hostage was recovered on Feb 12th. Even if you are blind enough to think hostage recovery is the goal, you have to admit they are really really ####ty at it. But the reality is these facts tell the truth, they don't actually care about the hostages if they can keep working at their real goal.

[activeStick]

Originally Posted by Itse

Let's talk about the reality of "targeting Hamas".

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/







This is just too blatantly on-the-nose pure evil to be a Black Mirror episode.

It's also just pretty obvious that no one participating in this could actually think they are targeting "Hamas terrorists". Not when you know you are deliberately bombing civilian residential buildings full of sleeping families, just because a computer somewhere tagged someone in that building be potentially connected to something.

(Let's also remember that Hamas was the official government of Gaza, so every bureaucrat and secretary working for the government is very likely to have some connection to "the military wing".)

That's not a process to "target Hamas", that's a process to create the maximum possible number of "legitimate" targets, and then the maximum possible amount of collateral death and destruction around those "targets".

In other words, this is a thin veil of plausible deniability. This is how you tell a military to do a genocide, without telling them to do a genocide.



This was okay, because the AI said so. Everything was a legitimate target.

Good share. This article is what was referenced in the Guardian news article I posted earlier regarding the usage of AI by Israel. Extremely long article, but a good read.

[Red Slinger]

I think it's pretty clear that the Netanyahu government is bordering on rogue state status, if they haven't already reached it. Similar to the situation in Russia with Putin, he needs to be removed from power, along with the extremist elements in his cabinet, for there to be any hope.