‘No tunnels, command centers, etc. to be found in any of these clips or pictures. Instead, focus is on "grab bags" of some guns and body armor scattered around, and a laptop next to CD-Rs.‘

How much in the way of guns and body armor would one normally expect to find in the basement of a hospital?

Also, for those of you unfamiliar with the realities of modern-day remote work, a conference room with a laptop can easily qualify as a “command center.”

A serious question to the folks who’ve spent the last month screaming “genocide!!” — on the “question” of whether Hamas uses hospitals, etc. as shields, what would you accept for evidence? Does some Bond villain type have to be barking orders at the very moment the IDF arrives? Because I have a feeling your final answer will be some version of, “the Israelis planted all of this so-called ‘evidence’.”

I watched the little video.
Is that what qualifies as roughing someone up these days?

“So, basically Biden just thinks anyone who runs a communist country that isn't set up like America is a dictator.”

How could any communist country be “set up like” America? How many communist countries haven’t had a period of de facto dictatorship(s)? And of all the things Biden said, you’re criticizing that statement? So speaking truth to power isn’t still a thing?

"changing the constitution to abolish term limits" -"has a firm grip on the party" hmmm, which candidate does that sound like?
You won't be complaining about Biden if the Orange Turd wins enough swing states!

https://youtu.be/AfDO-MaUrC0?feature=shared

There’s not much to say about Adele other than she’s worshipped by a wide array of music fans around the world. Some of those fans will want to kick my ass when I say that she’s not the world’s greatest vocalist, but she is the greatest vocal stylist. The absolute best. Roberta Peters or Doris Day or Barbra couldn’t have made “Someone Like You” any better. For instance, Adele choses to not sing the word “in-stead,” but rather sings “in-staid.” These choices make her work all her own and immediately recognizable as Adele. She used to work in a record shop once upon a time and was influenced by several singers she listened to there – not to say that Adele isn’t an original, but she has studied voices.

I’m very glad for her ultra-success and I’m glued to her music forever. I will always love her if only for “Set Fire to the Rain.” I know time marches on, but I do miss younger Adele – slightly chubby, black wool turtlenecks with plaid, pleated worsted wool skirts. Now she’s such a glamour queen. Comes with wealth, I suppose. Just keep writing and singing, Ms. Adkins. No one has ever made being dumped so melodious and pure.

@3.....There are no real communist countries in the world today; Karl Marx himself said that communism could not exist until a millennium of socialism had passed by. Once socialism is fully established it will gradually morph into communism provided the world hasn't morphed into anarchy.

You live at 47.6 degrees north on the east side of the Pacific Ocean. It's mid-November, just a month & a week from the Solstice. Its SUNNY outside, so of course it's going to be cold(er). If you want warmer (55?), then it's going to be gloomy and rainy.

All of N. Europe is darker than this - Seattle is south of Paris.

@1. "Well, Your Honor, we have plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are 'kinds' of evidence."

@4
Relax. There is very little chance of a Constitutional Amendment ever making it through congress let alone being ratified by the states.
Terms limits are going no where
Unfortunately, there is also little chance of term limits being imposed on congress.

@1 "How much in the way of guns and body armor would one normally expect to find in the basement of a hospital?"

Probably some. One should assume that a large hospital in a volatile region like Gaza would have a security force, no?

It’s almost as if most SLOG news writers are competing to break the world record for how many things can crawl up one’s ass and die.

"The US said its own intelligence backed up claims of a Hamas headquarters located underneath the hospital. Of course, our intelligence in that region always seems to conveniently match our interests. Speaking of our interests, and our tax dollars ...."

Your disingenuous playing with the facts and flagrantly anti-Israel stance is absolutely cringing Ashley.

Speaking of tax dollars, Bibi is welcome to use every penny of mine on whatever means possible to destroy Hamas before Hamas, Iran, and their Palestinian sympathizers wipe Israel off the face of the Earth.

@2 Protestors intentionally block all entrances and exits in a manner that only allows for aggressive methods to unlink and clear. This is intentional to stop them from being removed or to give them a story about being bullied. When they are moved, they cry for the cameras, even though it was their actual intent.

This is fitting and ironic given their protest is to give a mulligan to a bunch of thugs who intentionally raped, tortured, kidnapped, and murdered a bunch of civilians in the hopes of provoking a fight, and then ran for the camera to cry about the fight.

Well done (golf clap)

@9 and @1,

Ashley wrote,

"Hamas denied Israel's claims, as did some hospital staff, who said they, their patients, and displaced Palestinians sheltering inside the hospital were terrified. ... Of course, our intelligence in that region always seems to conveniently match our interests."

The claim by Hamas is just as self-serving as the statement of the IDF, with less supporting evidence than the IDF claim. So why would @9, or any reasonable assessor of fact (e.g. a juror) find Hamas' statement more credible and be so one-sided in calling for the exercise of restraint in the use of force?

Bodies of Hamas commanders and fighters were allegedly recovered from an IDF bombed school, if the IDF assertion in that separate case is true. If the IDF is smart they documented that with geolocated video and invited embedded journalists and U.N. observers to the body recoveries.

If Hamas is showing a pattern and practice of making other protected locations into legal military targets, that increases the probability they are doing likewise in making protected sites and facilities like hospitals into legal war targets as well. If they use students as human shields, why not hospital staff and patients. It's all the more effective if they conceal from the shields, that they are shields. It makes the shields all the more credible as alleged non-shields and effective in their camouflage function.

https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-772742

If that's true then the violation of international law, and the butcher bill, is on Hamas under international law. International law would absolve the IDF of any and all culpability even though their munitions destroyed the school and any non-combatants within it.

That principle is also enshrined in domestic laws on lawful use of deadly force in self-defense, in most legal systems. If you are using deadly force for a lawful purpose, like self-defense, and bystanders get hit, the culpability isn't with the user of deadly force, but with the actor that made that use of deadly force a legal act by the party delivering the deadly force.

It is correct to be skeptical of the self-serving claims of both sides. The difference so far, is there is potentially collaborating evidence available and being put forth by one claimant, but none even being offered by the other.

So does the stranger support Donald Trump as POTUS? It kinda sounds like it with how they constantly throw Biden under the bus for nothing.

Stranger going full tankie today.

@1 clearly there should be sharks with laser beams attached to their heads before it can be considered a command center.

Let's see. Major democratic lawmakers had to be evacuated from the building for their own safety, six officers were assaulted (including several who were pepper sprayed) but sure the problem is the protestors who were "rough upped". Why is it that the ceasefire crowd continually ends up assaulting people (a Jewish man is dead in LA after being hit on the head), destroying property and otherwise acting like complete a-holes during their protests (tearing down US flags from monuments for instance). Anyone who does that should be arrested and get to spend some time thinking about their actions.

@11: Ok, but how does that observation negate US and Israeli intelligence on Hamas having a command center under the hospital?

https://youtu.be/3MreemUwbHE?feature=shared

"So, basically Biden just thinks anyone who runs a communist country that isn't set up like America is a dictator. Cold war brain."

Well, uh, yeah. That's the brain, cold or hot, the US president should have. I don't think it's disparaging to call the leaders of China, North Korea, and Cuba dictators. If fact, it probably makes them moist.

@16: Yep

Xi Jinping is a dictator without question. His entire political philosophy is Xi Jinping Thought which permeates every aspect of public Chinese society. But to suggest he is not and that Biden is is, frankly, ridiculous and absurd. If you want an authoritarian president who is going to destroy the country, then look no further than Trump.

Manchin may realize and vocalize that, but if he runs for office he will do more to help destroy democracy than anyone by guaranteeing that Trump gets a plurality of the votes from disaffected Progressives who don't show up and the numbskull centrists who will throw their votes away to let the ironclas Trump cult take hold of the reins of government. Divide and conquer, divided we fall.

Brb logging in to my remote work command center.

@22,

Nailed it.

@23, Just don't be directing combatants to engage in unlawful violence or crime when you log in, and your golden under international and domestic law. Start doing that, and the you may face lawful violence from a foreign military or domestic law enforcement.

It's the activity engaged in at a location, not the location itself, that puts the location in-bounds or out-of-bounds as legal target.

@19 It doesn't, and I'm not drawing any conclusions either way, but Israel had better not be engaged in a WMD-type fishing expedition at that hospital. The consequences for being caught flatfooted in this case will be exponentially greater than those suffered by Bush & Co.

@25. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

@13 You want to give all your money to bomb an enemy that is thousands of miles away from you and completely contained in a way they could never harm you, but you advocate that we vote no on school levies because fully funding and maximizing the growth and development of our future workforce is somebody else's problem?

Are you and your buddies like tensy and toby too in it and committed to the idea of death to all you dont understand to even acknowledge how this hypocrisy is all one needs to simply ignore anything your ever say?

@27: What is “extraordinary” about the claim Hamas uses human shields?

“Hamas has launched rockets, positioned military-related infrastructure-hubs and routes, and engaged the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from, or in proximity to, residential and commercial areas.”

(https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields.pdf)

Imposing communism on any country will require a dictatorship. Why? Because people aren't naturally geared towards working for a communal ideal. They work for the financial betterment of themselves and their families. They work else they'd be hungry and cold. To make people work (write, paint, labor) for the state or for the good of the general public requires enforcement because participation will never be voluntary, and that enforcement is usually, almost always brutal.

Seems I'm frequently quoting Bill Maher these days, but I absolutely love his description of economic systems. Free market capitalism is like a river run wild. Socialism is like a dam, a barrier to prevent capitalism from flooding most people out, but communism is like trying to reverse the course of the river.

https://youtu.be/3q-6jBVns9A?feature=shared

Leave it to the dipshits at the Stranger to take terrorists at their word. Do you know Hamas want's gays executed? And don't even tell them about genderfluid crap. Why do you people love your abusers?

@32. These extremist terrorists hate you and would kill you for your sexuality, so you should be fine if the millions of uninvolved innocent civilians and children who live there are killed en masse because their terrorist government attacked Israel and provoked a war that killed thousands of them and forced them all from their homes.

After all, there can be no distinguishing between Hamas and children who can't even vote or civilians who can't speak out against their government without it cracking down on them. Because the behavior of fringes members of the outgroup is made indistinguishable from the entire spectrum of lives and perspectives of two million people. Thus, because Hamas would kill you, then you should be okay watching non-Hamas people die without questioning the methods of the IDF.

@28: If you want to engage raindrop, I cannot stop you, but please leave my nym out of your resultant word-salad.

@33, You wrote:

"After all, there can be no distinguishing between Hamas and children who can't even vote or civilians who can't speak out against their government without it cracking down on them."

That distinguishing is exactly what the Law of Unarmed conflict requires when its feasible.

If you can use a guided bomb to land on the school, mosque, house, et. al., that a combatant is in, then you can't carpet bomb the whole block. That munition, in blowing up the house, school, etc. might damage the other houses on the block for flatten a few, that weren't targeted, but that collateral damage is legal, because you can't breach and destroy the structure being used as a fort, command center, etc., and the combatants within, without that collateral damage. That munition also might fail to hit what was targeted, leaving the combatant(s) that were targeted untouched, but killing hundreds of innocents. That is also not a war crime by the user of the munition, but is a war crime that the surviving combatant could be charged with.

It's the fortunes of war. It's the tragedy of war.

How dense an area Hamas chooses to be a combatant from, and how many human shields they pack into that structure, and surrounding structures, is the sole determinant of how many innocents get killed as collateral damage when the IDF legally targets those Hamas combatants. Hamas is solely accountable.

If that were not the case, then there would be no right to self-defense guaranteed by the U.N. charter.

For example, applying your logic, to a future North Korea, with not just nukes, but a missiles capable of hitting anywhere in the U.S., North Korea could put one highly hardened, deeply buried, missile silo in heart of Pyongyang and shoot any civilians that attempted to leave the City. They could surround it with tens of thousands of civilians in skyscrapers adjacent to that silo. They could then load up the silo with a missile with a nuke capable of taking out one U.S. bomber base at a time, or one U.S. silo at a time, and fire them off one at a time, as fast as they can reload and rehabilitate the silo (say once a day, or once a week). The U.S., under your logic, would not be able to target that silo with a nuke, or multiple nukes (if required), because hundreds of thousands of civilians might die, and the only people dying in the U.S. would be soldiers and airman, ONLY by the thousands (and surrounding civilians ONLY by the thousands).

The loss of innocent North Korean civilians doesn't drop much if the U.S. invades Pyongyang with ground troops to avoid using a nuclear bomb of their own; however, U.S. casualties grow exponentially. At the end of the day, the total loss of human life is higher, and more of that is put upon the U.S. side. The law of armed conflict doesn't require that trade-off.

The problem is that in war, or any hostage situation with a determined hostage taker, innocents will die.

As the line from the old movie War Games pithily put it, "The only winning move is not to play." Hamas chose to play, just with less lethal munitions and fewer human shields.

@30, Insightful. No analogy is perfect, but the one you supply from Maher, is apt.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/16/politics/supreme-court-rules-against-florida-anti-drag-law

The Supreme Court comes down overwhelmingly on the side of the 1st Amendment.

Even those justices voting for Florida, would likely have joined the majority once the law had been applied and challenged after application. We will never know, because the law won't be allowed to go into effect. That is the right call. The court didn't need to see the law factually applied and challenged to conclude there was no way to apply this law in compliance with the 1st Amendment. The 6 justice minority made the right call.

@ Garb "After all, there can be no distinguishing between Hamas and children who can't even vote or civilians who can't speak out against their government without it cracking down on them. "

What you are failing to acknowledge is who is putting those children and civilians in danger.

Imagine if the next time there is some lunatic mass shooter armed with assault weapons ready to blaze away in a school, or shopping mall. But instead of strapping on a tactical vest this mass shooter strapped a couple of babies to his body. If those babies die in the cross fire who would you blame? You seem like a sensible enough person that you would fault the lunatic who took the babies into a gun battle.

Well Hamas is that lunatic. But it's even worse. Hamas climbs into the crib as uses it as a base to launch its assault.

And don't kid yourself about who Hamas is or what they want.

"From the River to the Sea" is not some Woody Guthrie penned paean to unity. It's a violent chant stating that Israel (or Jews for that matter) should not be allowed to exist in the Levant, or really the entire Middle East, or the World for that matter.

So other than acknowledging the horror of the situation and that there are no good choices, how do you propose Israel deal with this conflict?

You don't have to convince me that Hamas is evil and their ethos is antisemitic. I understand that well and condemn every single thing they stand for, but regardless of how you rationalize it, at the end of the day I cannot be okay with triggers pulled and bombs dropped in the name of a trolley problem that makes it a black and white situation where those who take the actions to remove Hamas from Gaza, even those who have embedded themselves among the civilians they endanger, are killed with massive explosives and forced to flee to the borders of a cage they cannot escape. It is a question of agency. Was this really the best way? Is it just a matter of just war permitting us to look the other way as the population starves and rots and is forced from the region, all of them, in the name of fighting the Hamas ethos? Hamas cannot destroy Israel. But Hamas has destroyed Gaza and Israel is pulling the trigger. The hostages that were taken will not be saved and the body of one was found today. I cannot in good conscience look the other way, even when options are limited and within the narrow confines of the laws of war as defined by men, when babies are born into this world only to be buried in rubble and fire and chaotic death in the name of national security for some that annihilated others in a sick and twisted and inevitably explosive situation established on decades of injustice and blood feuds. There will be no end to the suffering so long as injustice prevails and Hamas is rewarded with the destruction it seeks.

@Garb

how do you propose Israel deal with this conflict?

What will happen to the people who fled their homes once the war ends? What happens after 2 million people are forced into neighboring countries and refugees abroad? How will the open air prison of Gaza be restored with a functional economy and a government that will cooperate with Israel? How will Israel curb the extremists in the Knesset who in no small terms are racist and propose war crimes and ethnic cleansing of Gazans? Who will restrain the illegal settlements of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and beyond seizing land and forcibly removing Palestinians from their homes? How will the surviving family members and the children traumatized by the abject horrors of this war be prevented from joining an insurgency when they come of age and prolonging the hatred and attacks against Israel?

The Hamas attacks and the ethos that justified them were inevitable in any comparable situation where a people are restricted from movement, cannot thrive economically, are harassed and restrained at checkpoints, are conditioned by propaganda from childhood to hate the occupiers and vice versa, and where they are given false empowerment through extremist and twisted versions of religion that grant them self destruction through weapons and suicide and murder and rape and kidnapping in the name of righteousness and God. Such circumstances are a breeding ground for evil for any people, and to turn a blind eye to the context and to collectively bomb and demonize a people for the actions of the few that results in ten times more of the uninvolved being annihilated, will not stop this situation from happening again, and again, and again, and again.

As wiser souls than myself have said, Israel and Palestine can either share the land, or they can share the graveyard under it. It isn't right. It isn't right.

@39. I don't have a good answer to this question, but I know there must be a better one than the answer we are seeing now.

@26: WMD is Iran's department. But more to the point, you seem eager to prove that there isn't a command center. Why is that?

@28: Only to illustrate that anyone talking about "tax dollars" are themselves engaged in "word salad" even before they've prepared the lettuce.

@38: "There will be no end to the suffering so long as injustice prevails and Hamas is rewarded with the destruction it seeks."

The only party responsible for injustice is Hamas. Israel has always provided diplomacy and negations in all its disputes. It left Gaza in 2005, fully intact, with industries, farms and greenhouses.

"Hamas cannot destroy Israel." With Iran's help, it's a sure thing. T-minus already and counting.

@41: The correct answer is: anyway it can!

You can't acknowledge that Hamas is evil and want Israel just to "take it" until your holy grail solution is found.

"Cold War brain"?

Would you like to make a straight-faced argument that Xi is not a dictator? What exactly the fuck do you think he is? A constitutional monarch?

@42. Iran does not have nuclear weapons yet. Israel does. And thanks to Jared Kushner's dealings with MBS, the Saudis likely will or do as well.

Forget bombs and hospitals, nearly the entire population of Gaza has been rendered homeless by this campaign. They are starving. They have no clean water. They have no heating or electricity. They have no sanitation. They have no guarantee of safety even in the south now as they are made to flee there. The temperatures are dropping and disease and destitution and desperation are spreading. Aid cannot continue to enter the country. Hundreds of thousands cannot escape. This is the meaning of genocide, not systematic murder, but the consequences of de facto ethnic cleansing in the region. Surgical, justified, not technically genocide, whatever, or the necessary tragic losses of war, tens of thousands more face their end in the coming days, week, and months, and if nothing is done to stop the violence, if nothing is done to intervene, then no one will question the use of the word genocide when hundreds of thousands have perished when a peaceful solution could have been reached without the total annihilation of the Gaza Strip in the name of uprooting Hamas.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2023/nov/16/israel-hamas-war-live-updates-biden-ceasefire-israel-criticises-un-humanitarian-pauses

@45: Yes, but Hamas wants in on what Tehran's cookin'!

@46: I don't recall anyone complaining about the bombings in WWII because of being "in the name of uprooting Hitler or Hirohito". That's what war is - defeating the enemy in the name of defeating the enemy. It's an all or nothing kind of thing.

@ tensy: no, you and he are functionally the same and I will address the both of you as I see fit. cuz freedom and stuff.

@ dewey and tensy: my comments to you receive the amount of proofreading and editing you deserve. Ive noticed that when I just spray out words at you and then just send it annoys you, which is the cherry on top.

@48. Gaza is no Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. That's an intellectually irresponsible comparison that ignores the decades of occupation of the region after the Nakba and that was also a conventional World War. You can't measure it on the same scale or with the same callousness as if a standing army of Gazans were engaged in trench warfare with Israel. If you want to hold us to the same standards as WW2, then the world will return to the consequences or permitting World War 2, and none of us will survive to see what comes after.

You wrote, "I don't have a good answer to this question, but I know there must be a better one than the answer we are seeing now."

I appreciate your honesty.

I also share your horror expressed in @38 and the realpolitik assessment expressed in @40.

Don't you think that, to use Sir Toby's analogies, that if someone could figure out a way to kill the mass shooter without killing the baby's he straps to his chest, or kill Hamas without destroying the crib, and all innocents in it, the IDF would do so?

Of course they would. They would readily deprive Hamas of the visceral images that Hamas is cynically trying to use to wage Legalfare in international legal forums and to command the narrative in the Arab and Western Street.

Do you think if the U.S. would supply Israel the means to be more surgical if they possessed it? Of course we would. We would be heroes not only in Israel, but in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Muslim world as well.

As long as Hamas exists, safely cloaked safely under the cribs of babies, and behind babies strapped on their chests as body armor, they are free to continue the mass killing spree at will, and they have demonstrated both the will (see their charter) and the capability (see 10/7). If those cribs and babies make it unlawful to fight back, then Israel, and whoever their next target is, have no legal right to fight back.

Your de facto position is that so long as Hamas chooses to shield itself in civilians and with civilian infrastructure, then they must be left free to continue their 10/7 campaign.

That isn't middle ground. That is capitulation to Hamas' agency and will.

@45, Saudi going nuclear doesn't require Kushner's deal, U.S. assistance, or U.S. acquiescence.

They have the wealth and technical capability (or been readily able to acquire it) to develop nuclear and other WMD's since the 1970's.

They have not chosen to do so in response to Israel's development of nuclear weapons.

Most geopolitical assessments have been that Sunni, Saudi Arabia, likely in coalition with other Sunni Gulf States, would rapidly develop nuclear weapons in response to Shia, Iran doing so. They also have relied on American assurances that we will not allow Iran to become a nuclear state.

They fear Shia Iran, as more of an existential threat, than Jewish Israel. Ironic.

@4 patL, and @10 ASaxman5537: An idiot judge in Michigan just ruled that the Orange Turd can still run for the White House 2024, and already MAGAt zombies are wildly cheering. I like Greenwood Bob's thinking: If only we could compost and recycle DJT and its satanic cult of MAGAt zombies for peace, democracy restoration, and public good. I hope we can do so before the Earth and all inhabitants are toast if WWIII strikes.
WTF is WRONG with all the rabid MAGAt zombies?? It's like they're all for The End to come, and when it does, they'll still all be grinning in the bottomless depths of Hell.

@22 Garb Garblar: +1 For the WIN!!!

@40: And, finally, the other shoe drops:

“The Hamas attacks and the ethos that justified them were inevitable in any comparable situation…”

No, there is never any excuse for terrorism. Full stop. Throughout recorded history, many peoples have endured worse for longer without killing children in response. American Blacks arrived chained in the holds of ships, had their labor stolen, endured flatly-unconstitutional apartheid regimes AND extra-judicial killings — and that last still happen. Their response? Civil disobedience and demands for inclusion, the exact polar opposite of eliminationist terrorism.

No single course of action is ever inevitable, and there is never an excuse for terrorism. Ever.

So funny, all these progressives would have gassed Jews in WW2. Meanwhile try flying a pride flag in Gaza……… hahahahahahHaha. You can be gay in Israel, Islamic countries…. Not so much

@49: Showing your usual fine abilities of observation, I see. But I remain myself, not raindrop, no matter what your lazily simplistic judgment says.

“Ive noticed that when I just spray out words at you and then just send it annoys you, which is the cherry on top.”

Nah, it just comes across as slovenly drunkposting. Thanks for the laughs.

@56- “all the progressives would have gassed Jews”? Really? Most of the progressives I’ve heard are disregard by the killings on both sides and want it to fucking stop. Noting that there won’t happen until there is some kind of solution that gives the Palestinians a fair shake is hardly the same as wanting to gas Jews. Frankly that’s libellous.

Dismayed by the killings.

When the hell will there be an edit function here?

@57. The other show shoe drops? There is something broken with your empathy. Maybe it's a characteristic of your specific brand of neurodivergence where you feel you have to beat a dead horse to continue to find some kind of way to be proven right through being a broken record and misconstruing any point in any way to completely ignore the cause and effect of rebellion and injustice, but you simply cannot put yourself in the position of Gazans and to maintain that callousness you simply uphold this monolith of terrorism and look the other way. Arguing with you is always a bad faith endeavor because you are more attached to a petty sense of winning an argument and dying on a hill than doing the right thing in the aggregate. You can't perspective shift or face the inevitable long term effects of your stances. You have always shown this trait whether it is vis a vis the homeless or otherwise, the outgroup is always scapegoating as the same and without any redemption or humanity. So long as you can be right in your petty heart of hearts, the cost of your rightness doesn't matter. You can't see that you are becoming what you condemn most. And worse, you aren't even a Democrat and regurgitate the talking points of those who would destroy this country.

Ceasefire now. There is no other chance for a sustainable peace that will not further endanger Israelis or the hostages or result in worse consequences for all unless cool heads and a united world can intervene. If things continue as they are, there will be no chance of peace for anyone, and the terror will be at your doorstep as it is in the hearts of the millions fleeing for dear life whose plight is on the brink of bringing a world on fire to the gates of hell.

@55 No, there is never any excuse for terrorism. Full stop.
Agreed.
Some would argue the founding of Israel was a result of a successful terrorist campaign. One person's terrorist is the other person's liberation movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing
Hamas, bad. (happy. Disclaimer: the anti-anti-semitic campaign now requires this for all non conforming opinions.)
Bibi, only slightly better.
Both Isreal and Palestine deserve better representatives.

@59 dvs99: I share your frustration.

@60: “Ceasefire now. There is no other chance for a sustainable peace that will not further endanger Israelis or the hostages…”

“Ceasefire now” is the very best way of ensuring further attacks by Hamas inside Israel. Hamas has explicitly promised more if they can. And now you’re even legitimizing Hamas’ kidnapping civilians for hostages.

For weeks now, other commenters have described to you how you have let yourself be emotionally manipulated by Hamas’ terror tactics into becoming Hamas’ obedient mouthpiece. Now you’re even saying civilized persons should negotiate with hostage-taking terrorists. All of this follows Hamas’ strategy, which NATO described completely many years ago, in the report I’ve repeatedly quoted to you.

None of this matters to you. You just continue nonsensically fear-mongering about this expanding into a global conflict (which Hamas’ financiers in Qatar and Iran would not permit, as it would threaten them as well) and endlessly repeating the unverified casualty numbers which Hamas feeds you. This is a terrible situation, and you’ve done what little you can to make it worse. Just stop already, go find yourself some other hobby, and leave this dialog to those of us who can actually use real facts.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/17/middleeast/disabled-palestinians-gaza-survival-intl-cmd/index.html

Take your own advice, tensor. The fact that you have children of your own and can so readily turn a blind eye to the suffering of innocents and helpless kids shows how broken of a person you are. Israel stands to lose much more than another attack from Hamas if this situation continued to escalate, can't you understand that?

It's shamefully that you cannot possibly consider that any perspective that seeks to mitigate senseless violence must be a Hamas terrorist mouthpiece. These are all right wing propaganda and Republican demagoguery in action, and if anyone is parroting actual propaganda it is you. Your talking points toe the line of the most bigoted and shameless evil being spouted by legislators around the country who have no sense of nuance to their perspectives. Instead of putting yourself in the place of innocents and being able to empathize, which I would be equally outspoken about if the tables were turned if Gaza were Israel and Israel were Gaza and out alliances were switched, you always snap back to this terror terror terror and Hamas Hamas Hamas. They won't negotiate, so you won't negotiate! How convenient. Peace requires courage and character, and you show time and again you have none. May God have mercy on your soul, you poor little small and shameful weakling.

Apologies for poor spelling, phone autocorrect is not my friend.

Jews Lives Matter

@64-65: More attempts at emotional manipulation. Children in Gaza suffer when Hamas takes water-supply and sewer lines out of service to build weapons; children in Israel died when Hamas attacked Israel on 10/7. Children in Gaza are dying because Hamas attacked children in Israel, then Hamas fled to hide behind children in Gaza.

Your inability to see a full-blown terrorist organization as the root of the problem just astounds me. It’s as if you’re determined to validate exactly what NATO wrote about Hamas years ago: “The use of human shields can be considered an example of ‘lawfare’ – i.e. the use of the legal system against an enemy by damaging or delegitimising them, tying up their time or winning a public relations victory.”

@68. Emotional manipulation? It's called a conscience. Maybe you should try listening to it, it would do you a world of good and everyone else.

@69: A conscience helps with making difficult decisions. All you’re doing is taking the cheap and easy way out, by focusing exclusively on the Israeli military response as if Hamas doesn’t even exist. Hamas has already said they intend to make more attacks into Israel. A cease-fire now just helps them recover to do that.

Yes, Hamas will indeed fight to the last Palestinian child. That’s on Hamas and their supporters, and I’m glad not to have it on my conscience.