Over 100 Israelis have died and more than 900 were injured after rockets were fired from Gaza by Hamas militants, Israeli officials said Saturday.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said 198 were killed in Gaza and at least 1,610 were injured Saturday in retaliatory attacks from Israel.
“We are at war. We will win,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday.
The Israeli Defense Forces earlier declared “a state of alert for war,” according to a statement issued by the IDF.
“Over the past hour, the Hamas terrorist organization launched massive barrages of rockets from Gaza into Israel, and its terrorist operatives have infiltrated into Israel in a number of different locations in the south,” the IDF said early Saturday.
This is a chart that shows one thing only: Israel has the stronger military.
It doesn’t say a thing about who attempted to kill more civilians, and who took steps to avoid civilian deaths. It doesn’t say anything about who has made concessions for peace, and who has walked away from peace deals for almost a century.
The chart shows military might. It doesn’t show intent. It doesn’t show who tried to avoid bloodshed. It doesn’t show who ignited conflict after conflict.
A similar chart showing civilian deaths in WWII would show the US killed way more Nazi civilians than vice versa. Would you be arguing that the US was the bad guy in that war?
This is only true because Israel is good at stopping attacks, not because Hamas isn’t trying.
Graph “intentional attacks” targeted at civilians and you’ll get a very different picture. Personally, if someone tried to murder my family but failed, I wouldn’t find them blameless just because they didn’t succeed.
Also missing from the picture is that for decades Hamas has been using Palestinian civilians as human shields, building bombs and rockets in the houses where children live, shooting rockets from inside schools and hospitals.
Hamas gave Israel the choice of letting it’s own children die, and not shooting back, or shooting back and Knowing that no matter how hard they tried (and they try pretty fucking hard) that they wouldn’t be able to avoid civilian deaths.
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.
Let’s see a chart of the number of attempted murders of civilians from each side. That’ll paint a pretty different picture.
Tell me, because we both know that the Israeli casualty number is only low because Israel is good at protecting its citizens and not because Hamas isn’t trying to kill as many Israelis as it can, do you really think the situation would be better if Hamas was more successful at killing Israelis?
And to the exact same point, one side being less successful at killing citizens doesn’t make them right either.