Hezbollah have had this coming, they fired rockets at Israel on October 8th. So not because of what Israel was doing to the Palestinians, but in support of what Hamas did on October 7th.
The moment the first news dropped on October 7 it was clear Israel was to retaliate with a bloodbath and they started bombing Gaza the same evening. If Hezbollahs goal at the time was to make use of the situation, they would have went for an all out attack while IDF was in disarray.
The goal was to increase the pressure on Israel for reaching a cease-fire agreement through keeping their northern settlers out of their settlements, rendering the region economically inactive and the settlers angry at their government.
It seems like no one anticipated this to go into a yearlong war. Initially Hamas seemed to have aimed to reach a ceasefire quickly through a hostage exchange deal, but Israel put genocide over having their hostages return alive.
There’s been no evidence of genocide. I have plenty of criticisms of the Israeli government, and if you were arguing it’s indiscriminate you’d have a point. But genocide? No. We don’t call Hiroshima a genocide and that was far worse than what’s happening in Gaza. We don’t call Dresden a genocide. We don’t call shock and awe in Iraq a genocide.
Words have meaning.
There is overwhelming evidence of genocide, Apartheid, and disregard of civilian lives.
Genocide
Holocaust scholar to discuss his conclusion that Gaza campaign constitutes genocide
UN Expert Says Impunity for Israel Must End as ‘Genocidal Violence’ Spreads to West Bank
“A Textbook Case of Genocide”: Israeli Holocaust Scholar Raz Segal Decries Israel’s Assault on Gaza
800+ Legal Scholars Say Israel May Be Perpetrating ‘Crime of Genocide’ in Gaza
Human Shields
Hamas:
Intentionally utilizing the presence of civilians or other protected persons to render certain areas immune from military attack is prohibited under international law. Amnesty International was not able to establish whether or not the fighters’ presence in the camps was intended to shield themselves from military attacks. However, under international humanitarian law, even if one party uses “human shields”, or is otherwise unlawfully endangering civilians, this does not absolve the opposing party from complying with its obligations to distinguish between military objectives and civilians or civilian objects, to refrain from carrying out indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks, and to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and civilian objects.
Israel:
Additionally, there is extensive independent verification of Israel using Palestinians as Human Shields:
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Including Children (2013 Report)
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Israel “Systematically” Uses Gaza Children as Human Shields, Rights Group Finds 2024
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Breaking The Silence - Testimonies from IDF Veterans
Deliberate Attacks on Civilians
Israel deliberately targets civilian areas. From in general with the Dahiya Doctrine to multiple systems deployed in Gaza to do so:
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The Dahiya Doctrine & Israel’s Use of Disproportionate Force
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‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza
Israel also targets Israeli Soldiers and Civilians to prevent them being leveraged as hostages, known as the Hannibal Directive. Which was also used on Oct 7th.
Starvation
Prior to the current hostilities, 1.2 million of Gaza’s 2.2 million people were estimated to be facing acute food insecurity, and over 80 percent were reliant on humanitarian aid. Israel maintains overarching control over Gaza, including over the movement of people and goods, territorial waters, airspace, the infrastructure upon which Gaza relies, as well as the registry of the population. This leaves Gaza’s population, which Israel has subjected to an unlawful closure for 16 years, almost entirely dependent on Israel for access to fuel, electricity, medicine, food, and other essential commodities.
After the imposition of a “total blockade” on Gaza on October 9, Israeli authorities resumed piping water to some parts of southern Gaza on October 15 and, as of October 21, allowed limited humanitarian aid to arrive through the Rafah crossing with Egypt. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on October 18 that Israel would not allow humanitarian assistance “in the form of food and medicines” into Gaza through its crossings “as long as our hostages are not returned.”
Rights expert finds ‘reasonable grounds’ genocide is being committed in Gaza: https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147976
Human Rights Watch founder accuses Israel of genocide: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0j1rk0c
A top U.N. court says Gaza genocide is ‘plausible’ but does not order cease-fire: https://www.npr.org/2024/01/26/1227078791/icj-israel-genocide-gaza-palestinians-south-africa
I can’t bring myself to mourn for people like Nasrallah. That said things are undeniably going to get a lot worse for everybody before they get better.
I don’t see any indication of a reasonable end goal from Israel. They’ve remained uncommitted on an exit strategy from Gaza and opening a front in Lebanon rather then helping the security situation is as likely to get them bogged down in a quagmire. From what I can gather anyway they’re just going balls the wall trying to eliminate as many of Iran’s proxies as they can before they bow to international pressure like they historically have whenever things “escalate” too much
Wars have to end. If you go into them without an exit strategy they will backfire. Right now Israel’s government seems more concerned with keeping Bibi out of jail then it does with crafting any sort of humane way out of this mess.
You understand October 7 was hamas response to Israeli settlers continually invading and stealing Gaza land, right?
This did not “begin” October 7th.
Israeli settler terrorists are just as bad as hezbollah.
If your response to a disagreement about olive groves in the west Bank is to rape and murder 1200 innocent people I’m gonna go out on a limb and say you probably shouldn’t get the olives
You literally just reduced people’s entire lives and livelihoods to “olive groves” to justify everything they’ve been going through for decades. No matter which way you put it, that was an incredibly shitty thing to say. Not to mention just plain wrong and evil.
Hezbollah has stated that they fired those rockets in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Cool. That’s an incredibly dumb reason to start a war with a country like Israel. There’s a reason Egypt and Jordan don’t do that anymore.
Hezbollah only exists because of Occupation by Israel, like Hamas, and the three previous invasions. Jordan and Egypt are allies of the US
1982
The 1982 Lebanon war began on 6 June 1982, when Israel invaded again for the purpose of attacking the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Israeli army laid siege to Beirut. During the conflict, according to Lebanese sources, between 15,000 and 20,000 people were killed, mostly civilians.
On 16 February 1985, Shia Sheik Ibrahim al-Amin declared a manifesto in Lebanon, announcing a resistance movement called Hezbollah, whose goals included combating the Israeli occupation. During the South Lebanon conflict (1985–2000) the Hezbollah militia waged a guerrilla campaign against Israeli forces occupying Southern Lebanon and their South Lebanon Army proxies.
Israeli Withdrawal
Throughout the painstaking process of confirming the Israeli withdrawal, Hizballah was at pains to declare its commitment to recovering the last millimeter of Lebanese territory, but it also acknowledged that it would not act hastily to reinitiate violence. In sum, Hizballah’s behavior and deference to state authority have worked to its political advantage. It reaped recognition in an unprecedented meeting between Nasrallah and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who praised Hizballah’s restraint and its promise of cooperation. The meeting with Annan offers a remarkable contrast with Hizballah’s earlier days, when it was hostile to the UN and especially to the UN force in the south.
Without an agreement between Syria and Israel, there will be little pressure on Hizballah to disarm. Syria’s calculated strategy is to allow Hizballah to serve as a constant reminder of the consequences of continuing to occupy the Golan Heights.This is a role that Hizballah is happy to play, given its enmity toward Israel. At the same time, it remains profoundly aware of the political costs of bringing destruction down on the heads of its supporters, and this further reduces the prospect that Hizballah will initiate attacks on Israel
2006
The doctrine is named after the Dahiya suburb of Beirut, where the Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah has its headquarters, which the Israeli military leveled during its assault on Lebanon in the summer of 2006 that killed nearly 1,000 civilians, about a third of them children, and caused enormous damage to the country’s civilian infrastructure, including power plants, sewage treatment plants, bridges, and port facilities.
It was formulated by then-General Gadi Eisenkot when he was Chief of Northern Command. As he explained in 2008 referring to a future war on Lebanon: "What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on… We will apply disproportionate force on it (village) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.” Eisenkot went on to become chief of the general staff of the Israeli military before retiring in 2019.
While it became official Israeli military doctrine after Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon, Israel’s military has used disproportionate force and targeted Palestinian, Lebanese, and other civilians since Israel was established in 1948 based on the ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians, including dozens of massacres to force them to flee for their lives.
2007 - Present
Until recently, the border had been relatively quiet. Occasional rockets or drones crossed from Lebanon into Israel without leading to serious escalation, while Israel violated Lebanese airspace more than 22,000 times from 2007 to 2022.
While the withdrawal was certified by the United Nations, Lebanon disputed it, arguing that the Shebaa Farms was part of its territory, and not part of the Syrian Golan Heights, which Israel continues to occupy.
So there are two separate issues here that lead to the current dispute: the first is that Israel occupies the Golan Heights and treats it as its own territory in violation of international law, and the second is that there was already a pre-existing disagreement between Syria and Lebanon over the border, prior to the Israeli occupation.
I don’t think standing up for human rights violations is a dumb thing to do. And Israel started this war. They didn’t have to slaughter innocent civilians indiscriminately, but Israel did. They didn’t have to assassinate key figures, perform acts of terror like blowing up pagers, or attack civilian areas in Lebanon. But Israel did do all that. They started this war, and they’re just crying victim because people are actually calling them out on their bs and fighting back.
