If that were actually true, deaths would be several orders of magnitude higher. They have the munitions and capability to kill significantly more people.
Bottom line is that anytime you conduct war in a dense urban area, or conduct a ground assault in a populated area, civilian casualties will be high.
Bombing refugee camps, hospitals, schools and just plain carpet bombing districts does not seem like the IDF gives a shit about trying to minimize civilian casualties.
We have tons of footage of Russians and Ukrainians engaging each other in battle. There’s no such footage from IDF, and whatever we got from Hamas looks like guerrilla fighters doing hit and run strikes on mostly armor. You know why? Because Israel is not engaged with “Palestine” in a war. Nor with Hamas. Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing in their own ethnostate.
You also can’t prove how much higher the death toll would actually be, because we’re all just speculating fools. You are using an argumentative fallacy, which is “you can’t explain why this hypothetical thing isn’t occurring” when it doesn’t really have to be occurring. Can’t remember which that is. Red herring? Straw man? Ah, I can’t remember.
Anyway, we’re going by what we’re seeing, which is the bombing of innocent civilians. Terrible, terrible state of the world right now.
I can’t say exactly how many people they could kill if they were targeting civilians, but I can with certainty say it would be significantly more than have currently died.
They could drop many more bombs and shell the entire strip for weeks. These aren’t hypotheticals - we know they have the armament to do that.
There are around 20,000 people dead - out of almost 800,000 in Gaza. If their goal was a maximizing death, they could have killed significantly more. They certainly have the ammunition and means to do it - and that’s not a hypothetical.
You’re phrasing it too black-and-white. If the “goal was maximizing death” they’d just nuke the site, right? But doing so has other consequences. It’s probably much more complex than that. You can’t just go all in even if you have the means, even if it accomplishes one of your goals. It’s obviously the goal of both sides to exterminate the other, as they openly say so, but there’s a process if you want to accomplish your other goals, whatever they might be. Or not cause unnecessary unrelated problems to the land itself if they want to conquer it, etc.
Sure - but I’m saying they can do it without nukes. They could have easily ratcheted up to 30,000 or 50,000 with conventional weapons - they could actually carpet bomb the strip.
My point is if they were trying to maximize death they could have kill many more people indiscriminately.
Assymetrical warfare in a densely populated area always is going to have a lot of civilian casualties.
Please, would you explain to me what your analysis would be of their actual point of the war, then? Both sides have explicitly claimed that they want the other side exterminated. That’s what I see as the point of the war from both sides at face value. But if you know more, please educate me!
If you otherwise agree with that, then surely you could agree that there’s a lot of strategy going into warfare, and that maximizing death doesn’t have to mean that it has to happen as quickly as possible, because that might not be as efficient, or it might damage things that they value as spoils. Infrastructure, buildings, fertile land… “Maximizing death” doesn’t have to be the same as “having one of the goals be to exterminate the people”. Because they might have other goals beside that one, e.g. taking over the land, as they have been doing already.
Their stated goals are to rescue hostages and regime change by eliminating Hamas. If the goal is to kill maximum civilians they’re doing a really poor job.
If you just want the land, you just need to move people forcibly or buy it (it’s not like they’re particularly wealthy) and a plan to keep it. If your goal is genocide which so many people suggest, you kinda have to kill them no?
This is part of my problem with all the reactionary takes here - they aren’t consistent with what we’re actually seeing behavior wise.
Your downvotes remind me of the Reddit hive mind. But you are obviously 100% correct and anyone over the age of about 25 knows it.
It has been almost 3 months since the Hamas terrorist attack. If Israel was trying to kill as many civilians as possible, as you said, the death toll would be orders of magnitude higher.
So many people commenting here have no sense of historical perspective at all. I see people using words like “astounding” and “world record” and “genocide” to describe the death toll in this conflict. It’s hard to know where to start with that level of historical ignorance.
I should know better than to get sucked into this. But you’re right. I’ve been repeatedly told the most complex and longest lasting conflict in history is “simple”. Should stick to Israel bad / Palestine good, communists good / capitalists bad, no one likes nuance or shades of gray here.
If that were actually true, deaths would be several orders of magnitude higher. They have the munitions and capability to kill significantly more people.
Bottom line is that anytime you conduct war in a dense urban area, or conduct a ground assault in a populated area, civilian casualties will be high.
Bombing refugee camps, hospitals, schools and just plain carpet bombing districts does not seem like the IDF gives a shit about trying to minimize civilian casualties.
We have tons of footage of Russians and Ukrainians engaging each other in battle. There’s no such footage from IDF, and whatever we got from Hamas looks like guerrilla fighters doing hit and run strikes on mostly armor. You know why? Because Israel is not engaged with “Palestine” in a war. Nor with Hamas. Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing in their own ethnostate.
You can say that - but seemingly also can’t explain why the death count isn’t stratospherically higher if that was their goal.
Asymmetric warfare always sucks for civilians. The whole point is knowing who a civilian and who’s a combatant is intentionally difficult.
Hamas doesn’t wear uniforms, because they’re terrorists and not a government or regular army.
You also can’t prove how much higher the death toll would actually be, because we’re all just speculating fools. You are using an argumentative fallacy, which is “you can’t explain why this hypothetical thing isn’t occurring” when it doesn’t really have to be occurring. Can’t remember which that is. Red herring? Straw man? Ah, I can’t remember.
Anyway, we’re going by what we’re seeing, which is the bombing of innocent civilians. Terrible, terrible state of the world right now.
I can’t say exactly how many people they could kill if they were targeting civilians, but I can with certainty say it would be significantly more than have currently died.
They could drop many more bombs and shell the entire strip for weeks. These aren’t hypotheticals - we know they have the armament to do that.
There are around 20,000 people dead - out of almost 800,000 in Gaza. If their goal was a maximizing death, they could have killed significantly more. They certainly have the ammunition and means to do it - and that’s not a hypothetical.
You’re phrasing it too black-and-white. If the “goal was maximizing death” they’d just nuke the site, right? But doing so has other consequences. It’s probably much more complex than that. You can’t just go all in even if you have the means, even if it accomplishes one of your goals. It’s obviously the goal of both sides to exterminate the other, as they openly say so, but there’s a process if you want to accomplish your other goals, whatever they might be. Or not cause unnecessary unrelated problems to the land itself if they want to conquer it, etc.
Sure - but I’m saying they can do it without nukes. They could have easily ratcheted up to 30,000 or 50,000 with conventional weapons - they could actually carpet bomb the strip.
My point is if they were trying to maximize death they could have kill many more people indiscriminately.
Assymetrical warfare in a densely populated area always is going to have a lot of civilian casualties.
Please, would you explain to me what your analysis would be of their actual point of the war, then? Both sides have explicitly claimed that they want the other side exterminated. That’s what I see as the point of the war from both sides at face value. But if you know more, please educate me!
If you otherwise agree with that, then surely you could agree that there’s a lot of strategy going into warfare, and that maximizing death doesn’t have to mean that it has to happen as quickly as possible, because that might not be as efficient, or it might damage things that they value as spoils. Infrastructure, buildings, fertile land… “Maximizing death” doesn’t have to be the same as “having one of the goals be to exterminate the people”. Because they might have other goals beside that one, e.g. taking over the land, as they have been doing already.
Their stated goals are to rescue hostages and regime change by eliminating Hamas. If the goal is to kill maximum civilians they’re doing a really poor job.
If you just want the land, you just need to move people forcibly or buy it (it’s not like they’re particularly wealthy) and a plan to keep it. If your goal is genocide which so many people suggest, you kinda have to kill them no?
This is part of my problem with all the reactionary takes here - they aren’t consistent with what we’re actually seeing behavior wise.
Your downvotes remind me of the Reddit hive mind. But you are obviously 100% correct and anyone over the age of about 25 knows it.
It has been almost 3 months since the Hamas terrorist attack. If Israel was trying to kill as many civilians as possible, as you said, the death toll would be orders of magnitude higher.
So many people commenting here have no sense of historical perspective at all. I see people using words like “astounding” and “world record” and “genocide” to describe the death toll in this conflict. It’s hard to know where to start with that level of historical ignorance.
I should know better than to get sucked into this. But you’re right. I’ve been repeatedly told the most complex and longest lasting conflict in history is “simple”. Should stick to Israel bad / Palestine good, communists good / capitalists bad, no one likes nuance or shades of gray here.