Israel was taken by surprise by the most ambitious operation Hamas has ever launched from Gaza.

The scale of what’s been happening is unprecedented. Hamas breached the wire that separates Gaza from Israel in multiple places in the most serious cross-border attack Israel has faced in more than a generation.

It came a day after the 50th anniversary of the surprise attack by Egypt and Syria in 1973 that started a major Middle East war. The significance of the date will not have been lost on the Hamas leadership.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says his country is at war and will exact a heavy price from its enemies.

Videos and photos of dead Israelis, civilians as well as soldiers, are all over social media.

  • 🐱TheCat@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Everyone choosing a side between Palestine and Israel, but I’m going to take the mega unpopular stance of fuck both these people. Fuck the fundamentalist followers of Abraham, no matter what branch.

    They would visit great violence on you in the name of their god if they had the chance. They are murderously self-righteous.

    • AdmiralShat@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Yeah I’m with you here.

      Seems so strange that two sects of the same religion would commit horrid acts of violence against each other, against children, all because at some point some dude may have said some different shit than some other dude at a place like 60 miles away.

      I also don’t get the side picking. This attack was violent and horrible, but does that wipe away the decades of horrible shit Isreal has done? Seems like two toxic groups are doing toxic shit at each other.

      I only feel sorry for the innocent people caught in the cross fire.

      • Krauerking@lemy.lol
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        1 year ago

        They are too similar, so they must go out of the way to villainize and demonize the “other” lest people not feel like they are 100% in the right. Something similar to you but not you might make the regulars of society realize the invisible lines and honestly they don’t really want to think about it anyways. Us vs them and the more alike the mora adamant the existence of differences.

    • Dkarma@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Which side should you support? Maybe the only side actually facing genocide.
      Israel is kettling Palestine. Palestine has no option but to fight back against israels apartheid.

      Both sides say they want to eradicate the other but only Israel is actually doing genocide.

      • 🐱TheCat@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        I get it. if I was born in Palestine I’d fight too. But if I went to Palestine in the body I currently inhabit, I’d be raped and stoned in the streets for the way I dress.

        I’ve seen videos of children of both cultures calmly telling tourists they should die, that god will kill them, that the children themselves would kill them if they could. The Israeli children are dressed nicer, but the raw hatred is the same. Both cultures suckle their children on self-righteousness. On stories of being ‘gods chosen’. If their cultures grow and succeed they wont care that you helped, they’ll use their power to subjugate you to their god all the same. Because they’re ‘special’

        • Dkarma@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          You keep talking about rhetoric. Now do reality. Who is being exterminated?

          Hint it’s not the Jews this time.

          • 🐱TheCat@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            Theyre both exterminating each other, and the one with the most power is doing better at it. If Palestine suddenly had more power, they would be doing better at it. HAMAS has as much chance of establishing a peaceful secular democracy as ISIS

            • Dkarma@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              No they’re not that’s the point. Palestine cannot destroy Israel. You act like both sides have the ability to wipe each other out.

              • banana_havoc@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                Palestine can’t destroy Israel, but there are quite a few like minded governments surrounding the country that have attempted that before.

                Even specific to this invasion, hamas is suspected to be receiving considerable backing from another country to destabilize Israel or any other myriad reasons. This conflict isn’t happening in an isolated bubble with just two sides.

                • davepleasebehave@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  and Israel has had a few years to create a more stable solution.

                  I would suggest continuing to support illegal settlements in Palestinian land is not conducive.

              • ours@lemmy.film
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                1 year ago

                People forget only one side has access to nuclear weapons on top of a very modern military arsenal.

              • phx@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                And? If I blow up somebody’s house and family with a $1,000,000 missile while they blow up mine with $150 worth of explosives, does that make one side more right?

                No, both side are cooking in hatred. The bigger question isn’t “who has the better ability to kill the other side” but rather “who has the better ability to break the cycle, and what can they do towards such means”

                • prole@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 year ago

                  The thing is, they were objectively Palestinian homes that were getting blown up and literally stolen right out from under them. It’s not “trading blows,” it’s "this is our land now because God said so, and we have the most high tech weapons on the planet (thanks US) to enforce it.

                  And apparently they immediately “forgot” what they vowed never to.

                  To suggest the cost of the armament isn’t going to be in any way proportionate to it’s capacity for destruction is silly.

            • prole@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              They’re absolutely not “both exterminating each other”. Please do yourself a favor and find some (accurate) death count numbers for every single clash between Israel and Palestine, AT THE VERY LEAST since they began building settlements on Palestinian land.

              Every single time, it is the opposite of proportional response. They kill 100x-1000x more. They are slaughtering several orders of magnitude more (and we’ll just see it again in the coming days/weeks). The majority of Israelis that have died in these conflicts are IDF. They are soldiers.

              On the other hand, Israel TARGETS civilians (including people clearly marked as civilian medics and the press) and fucking children in their “response”.

              Palestinians could never actually put up an even, proportional battle (for example, Ukraine and Russia seems at least relatively proportionate). What’s happening in Israel isn’t a battle or a war, it’s genocide.

              • 🐱TheCat@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                Has your country been attacked / been in any wars?

                I assure you no one is trying to do ‘proportional’ damage. Thats not how anything works. Someone attacks you, you try to crush them.

                All the same I wish the US would stop subsidizing Israel because they suck too. They might not do so well against Palestine then.

              • 🐱TheCat@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                Same for Israel … establishing a peaceful secular democracy? I agree. And I wish the US would stop subsidizing their madness, but our religious fundamentalists (who have too much power) think they need their religious fundamentalists to be located in Israel for ‘god’ to return to earth.

                Religion is a blight on the planet.

        • clanginator@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          But if I went to Palestine in the body I currently inhabit, I’d be raped and stoned in the streets for the way I dress.

          I obviously don’t know how you dress, but could you provide a source saying that someone has (at least somewhat recently) been stoned to death in Palestine for the way they dress?

          I tried researching this myself because it sounded like some bigotry based on absolutely nothing, and I found nothing. I did find several articles about a Palestinian woman who was stoned by Israelis, and obviously Palestine has lots of issues related to religion, but saying you’d be “stone for what you’re wearing” is a pretty bold claim to make

          I’ve seen videos of children of both cultures calmly telling tourists they should die, that god will kill them, that the children themselves would kill them if they could.

          Okay, so you hate religion, got it. I’m not big on religion myself, especially when religion is entwined with govt, but that doesn’t mean I go around being a centrist in a conflict which has a clear aggressor and a clear overall victim. Even tho both do suffer from the situation, Palestine is absolutely the victim here.

          If their cultures grow and succeed they wont care that you helped, they’ll use their power to subjugate you to their god all the same.

          How about - since that’s complete conjecture and based on nothing but your personal biases and distate for religion, we cross that bridge when we get there and currently worry about the apartheid state that’s carried out much of stages 0-8 of genocide against the Palestinian people.

          • 🐱TheCat@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            I wear clothes that show my arms and legs below the knee, and I like to be able to go outside at night. Audacious I know, for me to want the same freedoms as men. Do you need sources for the fact that I can’t do this in Palestine? Do you need sources for the fact that when Palestine started to see more beach tourism, HAMAS swooped in to crackdown on women on the beach?

            Im not silly enough to think that if these abrahamic religions spread that I will be spared.

            You’re right. Palestine are victims now. If Israel stopped being funded by the west, Israel would be the victims next. You disagree?

            • clanginator@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              So you don’t care about any other human rights, only rights for women, right? So if a country doesn’t have a perfect gender equality track record, I can’t be upset at injustices happening to Palestinian people because some Palestinians are religious extremists.

              What does that remind me of? Oh yeah, blatant racism.

              Still waiting on a source that says people have been stoned to death for dressing inappropriately in Palestine. You completely ignored that.

              I have no doubt there is religious extremism and I understand that freedoms for women and overall freedom in Palestine are far from perfect. But a large reason religious extremist groups in Palestine have as much power as they do is thanks to Israel’s suppression causing more extremism, so if you ACTUALLY care about women’s rights in Palestine, you’d be advocating for Israel to end their oppression.

              Im not silly enough to think that if these abrahamic relgions spread that I will be spared.

              But you are silly enough to think that they’re gonna spread and affect you. Right now, they don’t. RIGHT NOW, the Israeli government is continuing it’s apartheid state, oppressing indigenous people.

              And because you can’t be assed to look anything up, I’ll copy-paste for you:

              Palestinian women’s struggle for gender equality and women’s rights is restricted by two main interrelated forces: the Israeli occupation, and internal patriarchal control. Women activists in Palestine are fighting simultaneously on two fronts for political (national) and social (gender) liberation. They remain sceptical of a feminist agenda that primarily focuses on individual and social gender empowerment and instead insist that gender inequality in their context stems not only from patriarchal oppression, but from poverty, economic dependency, continued political violence, insecurity and instability caused by Israeli occupation, siege and settler-colonial policies. Israeli occupation policies of territorial (and political) fragmentation, spatial separation and mobility restrictions have systematically dispossessed, occupied and destroyed Palestinian living spaces, breaking up Palestinian territory into several unconnected and isolated cantons. Such policies of spatial control have a severe damaging impact on Palestinian economy (Roy, 2004), society, family and kinship organisation (Johnson, 2006), but also on women’s activism. Women are not only divided geographically (between - and within - the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Diaspora), but, more importantly, their contexts and predicaments are widely varying: refugees, West Bank and Gaza ‘citizens’, East Jerusalemites and Palestinians with Israeli citizenship all have different access to rights. This wide variation and fragmentation complicates women activists’ efforts to organise a united agenda. While the specificities of refugees and ‘citizens’ in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem will be drawn out, this note does not cover Palestinian women’s rights and issues of gender equality inside Israel or the Diaspora. Women’s rights in Palestine thus cannot be dealt with in isolation; the impact that the occupation and political conflict have on women’s legal, social, cultural, educational, economic and political status is crucial when looking for possible strategies to empower women. This is not to say that patriarchal structures and cultures are not a major concern for Palestinian women’s activists. To the contrary, it highlights that women’s empowerment in the Palestinian context and their struggle for equal rights is closely linked to their political and economic empowerment which can only be achieved by ending the Israeli occupation.

              • 🐱TheCat@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                Bro saying Hamas doesn’t have a ‘perfect track record’ is the biggest understatement. They push towards fundamentalism every chance they get and rose to power through violence.

                • clanginator@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Palestine≠Hamas.

                  Palestine is a country/people, Hamas is an extremist religious group that controls a portion of Palestinian territory right now.

                  Funny how you COMPLETELY IGNORED the source I shared which discussed exactly how that circumstance affects women’s rights. And chose not to speak at all about the ongoing struggle for gender equality or equality for Palestinians. But instead chose to focus on your hatred for an extremist militant organization while equivocating that as representing an entire people who cannot possibly be represented by them due to the very nature of the situation.

                  Almost like, in all your comments, you were never actually concerned about women’s rights, but were just looking to excuse your bigotry.

                  • 🐱TheCat@sh.itjust.works
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                    1 year ago

                    Your source mentions internal patriarchal control on the same level as the Israeli occupation. Almost like you just ignore evidence that yea, Sunni Muslim populations who welcome Shar’ia law don’t provide good lives for women by definition.

                    You also ignored my question about what Hamas would do to Israel if they had more weapons / power.

                    You’re the one confusing Palestine and Hamas. Israel is attacking the Gaza strip which is run by Hamas.

      • time_lord@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Maybe the only side actually facing genocide.

        For better or worse (probably worse though) the British gave Israel to the jews because they were also facing genocide. So it’s not quite as clear cut as you’d like it to be.

    • zerfuffle@lemmy.ml
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      Calling this a religious war completely misses the socioeconomic context. Palestine is extremely poor, but they’ve also been systematically oppressed, had their homes stolen from them, had their rights ripped away, and are treated as basically subhuman.

      Religion is the power that’s organizing revolutionaries, but it’s not the power that’s creating revolutionaries.

      • 🐱TheCat@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        I think calling it a socioeconomic war strips away all the context of the last 100ish years. These groups are fighting over who gets Jerusalem, because they believe it’s holy. The socioeconomic conditions in Palestine are the result of a long holy war that they are losing. Tell me I’m wrong.