In other words, not out of the norm for this type of warfare.

I don't see why it would make sense to ignore the Israelis killed on Oct 7, which was very much part of the war.

In any case, lots of wars are fought on one side's territory, with no civilian harm on the other side. See Vietnam, the Gulf war, etc.

HN norms are to assume the best interpretation of your collocutor. This isn’t doing that.

Why wouldn't I want to ? I'm not gonna deny for a moment what Gaza is going through isn't traumatic, of course it is. That's reality. And saying what Israel is going through is nothing is delusional as well.

As for your internationalist fixation of pedantry for the determination of Jihadist, I'll just say thankfully Hamas has been thwarted in its ambitions and doesn't even have the means to create a tiny baby caliphate. RIP you'll be missed.

You're comparing a) the number of named, positively identified deceased people counted during an active conflict [1] where Gaza's healthcare system has been targeted on a daily basis with b) the final body count [2] from something that took place 79 years ago and has been studied by historians for decades. They're not comparable. In actual fact, fatality counts of Palestinians have been subjected to a standard far more stringent than anything applied during other ongoing conflicts, at least in "western" media.

It will probably be a decade before anyone is able to dig up the mass graves, sort through the rubble, interview families (that haven't been entirely wiped out), and come to a more complete list, and even then there will be a large number of unidentified deaths and the estimate will be a range.

[1] Really the word "conflict" is inappropriate here, because most of what's taking place is attacks on Palestinian civilian. The actual military conflict appears to be only a small percentage of the overall violence.

[2] Incidentally, both the high and low estimates for Hiroshima deaths also include people who died from the after-effects of the bombing, not just people who died during the attack itself.

When you start a question with "Surely you will admit ...", it presupposes a certain aura of doubt or guilt on the part of the person that you're addressing (as if you think there's grounds to believe they would be reluctant to give a normal, sensible answer to that question). You also buttered up your inquest with excessive detail, as if you thought the person you were addressing it to would be ignorant of (or in denial about) the events of that day.

No one needs to answer questions like this.

Always telling to see ...

I find the bullshit insinuation of antisemitism that you're making here (on a public discussion forum, no less) to be rather insulting, actually.

Perhaps in its record week. But "each week", no. In fact its average was 4-5k per week.

Meanwhile, it is unlikely that the Dresden bombing (occuring as it did just 3 months before the end of the war, after Auschwitz and nearly all the other camps in the East had been liberated) did much of anything to hasten the end of the war, let alone to mitigate any further atrocities.

That's why it gets so much attention. From just the sheer senselessness of it.

What do you think drives the Palestinian movement and what are its main goals? If it was simply to get their own state surely they could have achieved it by now (as far back as in 1947). So there seems to be much more going on than simply attaining statehood - there is a very strong irredentist force among Palestinians that wants to go back to the way things were 80 or a 100 years ago. Which means returning to their original homes (I don't see how you could do that without throwing out the Jewish 'colonists').

To me that does seem to be motivated at least partly by revenge. As for antisemitism among Palestinians, it's there and widely documented (you could come up with good reasons why it's there, but denying it's there is wrong).

Pretty much yes according to too many liberal professors in ivy league universities. I think human lives on both sides are quite cheap to them.

You have a number of good points.

Not me, people don't expect it, but I admit I actually don't have a point.

Except maybe world peace, but people aren't trying for that any more.

Still just observing, not truly involved. For decades.

Since there are abundant haters on both sides, I can't expect to go unhated ;) Perhaps worse than if I favored one or the other :\

That doesn't mean it's "pointless" to consider what the current destruction is about and what led up to it.

Whether it's a political initiative or the actions of certain military members only, the outcome looks the same.

Good terminology does help. Super-duper evil may be the most accurate description of the IDF if it is carrying out genocide as a political policy. Which would be expected to be handed down from politicians of some type. Which could be happening. OTOH policy may be to avoid casualties as completely as possible, but if too many members of IDF defy that the outcome could trend in the same direction anyway. Still genocide, or bent on genocide, when they try to completely destroy an opposing population either way, whether they are innocent civilians or not. Sounds like something for war crime investigators which may happen someday.

I'm the first to admit it looks like genocide to me before the doctors report adds its own information.

That's why I comment on this article to begin with.

In response, Hamas I would say is not committing genocide. Nope. Not at all from what I see.

It's no secret that Hamas wishes they could, and prays for it, but they are not actually committing genocide at this point.

Certainly there are more than zero Israelis who pray for compete elimination of their adversaries in kind too.

Whenever any of these type prayers come true, that's when it's certainly been the worst, whether in prehistoric times or right now.

There's a lot of vengeance on both sides that goes back stupidly too far into the past any way you look at it.

There's bound to be Arabs & Jews who have never even been to the Mideast who hate each other religiously just for traditional reasons or spite.

Lots of people call it "human nature". I'm no George Carlin but to me it looks like inhuman nature.

There is not supposed to be a subtle difference but one passes for the other all the time, there's got to be some kind of disconnect here.

Or wherever.

After all this I haven't really answered your points very much, mostly adding more of my observations which may be appreciated.

Edit: well added another big comment "below" which will be a different post if it's too long to fit.

There's no need to rebuff anything because you make sense, but here's what I've got.

I may go back too far into the past in an additional comment coming soon, look for it, while also trying to focus most on this exact generation and what is happening now.

Proud jihadists is an accurate description of religious fanatics who relish doing damage to Israel, is it not? Nobody denies that Israel has its own equivalent on every level of hate in the opposite direction. Perhaps embodied in today's IDF. So it's theoretically like a two-way street between Israel & Palestine. Too bad for Israel that there's always been jihadists on all sides in addition to Palestine within. This has never been handled well once modern destructivity fell into the hands of those retaining prehistoric low-humanity religious motivation.

I better explain this.

By prehistoric I mean anything before almost all things started to get written down, almost anywhere, any time. Like when accurate records had already existed for a millennium or more, but the vast majority of a community was still illiterate, and/or everything about their past beyond a certain point, or even sometimes during a certain period in the distant enough past, has been completely lost.

I think it can be accepted that the further you go back with prehistoric cultures, the more likely their activities would be dominated by superstition. You know, where they don't need an earthly reason to hate anybody who does not share the same superstition. So that's what they do, they hate for no "earthly" reason. These were not cavemen, this is modern man, no different than us with the same level of intellect, whenever they would act uncivilized it was usually because they actually were not civilized. They may or may not have had widely different respect for humanity than we would recognize today. Yes there are some records that exist from such early times in different areas but they are almost completely incomplete. People are going to work with what they got anyway.

I would say the evildoers are the ones who actually carry out the destruction, that's not very nuanced but it is a judgment that people know when they see it even if they've never seen it before. Could be anybody doing the damage, not one side or the other, although IIRC this is the exact terminology used by these same two parties in previous decades.

So evildoers involved in this conflict come from either side, whenever destructive action is actually taken.

With everything I've seen over the decades, it's my own fault when I don't have enough awareness that for a while I've been looking back much further than the period of many younger peoples' lifetimes, so they haven't seen what I have in real time. I guess it's too easy to get the idea that people already know all the precipitating events that have been recorded. There's a lot of smart people around. And I must apologize for giving the impression that I don't think the history is important when the opposite has been true for most of my life. Which makes me put different weights on different epochs, but I can't help it.

When you get a wrong idea like that, this is a valid response:

>the hate came from nowhere and they have so much of it that it's ingrained in their DNA.

Good call, which is absurd as it should be so it can't be real. But wait a minute, if something like that is ingrained in some other way could the same type present situation be arrived at? Remember, I'm not talking about one-sided hate here, there's more than enough to go around for thousands of miles. From any of the sources, whichever you may prefer. It doesn't have to be DNA to be passed down from previous decades or millennia, sometimes with mutation, sometimes not. When the root goes back to when nobody living was ever born, it could be hard to tell the difference.

You got me thinking, uh oh, what if there was an unfortunate mutation in the distant past which introduced an evil component?

With DNA they're getting better all the time at locating the most probable time or place for it to have occurred, even in the prehistoric past. With history, technology won't help much, plus the further back you go the more blurry. And of course disinformation can arise for many reasons, usually more over time, and is a factor not shared by DNA.

So I think we've come to a little bit of common terms here, almost nobody has ever justified extermination, but "almost" is not zero so it can occur, and that really is super-duper evil. That's why I don't think it's human nature at all, even though it has surely occurred more times than records exist for. You can't paper over this, too much inhumanity has taken place. People need to emphasize how much of a complete non-killing culture there needs to be for this to be avoided forever. Perhaps because extermination has surely occurred some time or another without any of the perpetrators thinking about any kind of justification one way or the other. Not exactly accidentally but if it can occur without extreme intention, everybody needs to really watch it more than they think.

Imagine how bad it could it get when a single perpetrator escalates to super-duper? You don't want to start the ball rolling, but it could happen and I think it depends on a hierarchy and the position that individual plays in that hierarchy.

I suppose you assumed I was imploring Hamas to stop returning fire at Israeli aggression. Not an accurate assumption when I think everyone should stop shooting (never start actually) and whoever is shooting most should stop the most. But that's just me.

This is so bad there are victims all over the place, thousands of miles away on occasion.

But the genocide risk is right there in Gaza, could be getting worse, and distorted information is proliferating.

When you say this:

"everyone can recognize that there's a lot of violence on both sides, but how can we be sure that the IDF isn't actually doing this because they're super duper evil?"

Right now I would say I 100% agree :)

Isn't this the bloodiest year since Hamas took over Palestine?

There are definitely different epochs.

I think over the centuries they occasionally take turns terrorizing, but most of the time they don't bug each other even if they are not the least bit fond of such a dissimilar culture.

We just happen to be 3/4 of the way into a century that started when the world halted (but failed to reverse) the direct expressway to total destruction. The first time the human race ever had that happen and the lessons are supposed to be a gift only obtainable from a generation who grew up before that level of total human extermination was possible.

It quit mattering who the enemy was any more.

No more enemies were supposed to be allowed.

And nobody will ever grow up like that any more either.

Who wants to squander that gift which can never be replaced?

And why?

What are the odds of a second chance?

"We pulled the settlements, therefore it's all good and people don't know what they're complaining about" is just the government's spin.

Do you mind citing specific proof you have in mind?

> The practical effects of Israel's action, regardless of intent, look like genocide.

What does it mean to "look like genocide regardless of intent" if the intent is the defining feature of the genocide?