Hamas official says group would lay down its arms if an independent Palestinian state is established
apnews.com
A top Hamas political official told The Associated Press the Islamic militant group is willing to agree to a truce of five years or more with Israel and that it would lay down its weapons and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders.
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The fact that a large number of people in the West are denying this and portraying Hamas as freedom fighters is very worrying.
Well then who is Israel attacking? If Hamas is in Qatar?
You can't be seriously asking this in good faith.
The fact that a large number of people in the West are waking up from the Zionist propaganda is very worrying to you?
Israel being evil doesn't make Hamas the good guys. If you butcher unarmed men, women, and children, then you're fucking evil. Fuck Isreal, and fuck Hamas.
In Western news and media, everything has to boil down to a good vs evil story. It’s part of the reason our society has become so polarized. In reality, there’s often no good sides in a conflict.
Trevor Noah had a great segment on this, about how it always has to be X vs Y. The example he used was cat people and dog people who get into arguments -- "why can't we just agree that they're both cute?"
"Hitler being evil doesn't make the Allies the good guys! They bombed Dresden and killed many German civilians!"
"Everyone who does a war crime is equally evil and if you aren't perfect when you fight back against being Genocided you are equally as evil as the party doing the Genocide!"
Is the PA going to stop israel doing Genocide? Were you doing it? Was America doing it?
Nobody was doing it. Nobody cared. So Hamas fought back. Nobody did anything when they peacefully protested in 2018. Don't complain now.
Hamas "fought back" by breaking down the doors of Israeli homes and slaughtering the families cowering inside. Gunning down teenagers at a music festival and kidnapping the survivors. That wasn't strategy. That was fanatical hatred, cowardly, and evil.
Hamas are cowards, perfectly happy to sit back and watch innocent Palestinians be slaughtered in the aftermath.
The IDF has killed 11 thousand men, 9 thousand women, and 14 thousand children, making 34 thousand total killed (an unknown number of which were civilians). Hamas has killed 0.6 thousand military personnel and 0.8 thousand civilians, making 1.4 thousand total killed (57% of which were civilians).
The number of children killed by Isreal (only children) is 17 times larger than the number of civilians killed by Hamas. Of course that doesn't make killing civilians OK, but I struggle to see an argument that Hamas is worse than the IDF. And if Hamas is the only method by which Palestine can defend itself, then there is a solid argument to be made for it being the lesser evil.
Both groups are murderers. One is just better equipped for it. Hamas hasn't killed less civilians out of some kind of restraint or combat disipline, they just don't have the same capability as the IDF. Meanwhile, Israel is gleefully using all the free shit that it's allies are supplying it with to kill every man woman and child in sight. Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare
If you ever find yourself on either side of asymmetric warfare, and you're killing kids...you're the bad guy.
Do you have any proof to back up your statement that Hamas ordered killing of children?
If you expect decency from malnourished oppressed people i would just call you entitled
Good thing Hamas barely killed any kids. Less than 3% of the deaths.
Israel kills 40% children.
Wonder who the bad guy is.
It's like I said, it's not one or the other. They are both the bad guys.
Do you call Ukraine the bad guys too for defending themselves?
Every country has soldiers killing innocents.
Every country does war crimes.
Everyone is the bad guys.
If Ukraine kicked down Russian doors and gunned down families or purposely targeted unarmed civilians, sure, they would be the bad guys in that situation.
Anyone who commits war crimes should be called out, and the perpetrators held accountable.
Okay but we do know that Ukrainian soldiers have committed war crimes. For example
Amnesty International - Ukrainian fighting tactics endanger civilians
And they used forbidden cluster munitions
And much more! But I am not out here saying "Ukraine are the bad guys" because of a few war crimes.
Because they are being invaded and occupied and they have the right to fight back.
And I'd love for them to do it cleaner and more peaceful but hey, if the invader isn't interested in peace I'm not asking the victim for perfection.
Staging equipment in populated areas is hardly the same as gunning down civilians. If you put an unarmed, defenseless person in your sights and pull the trigger, you're a fucking monster. That's not defensive, that's murder.
And accidentally killing 33% IDF soldiers and destroying every military base next to the Gaza strip. Just pure coincidence.
Hamas has the civilian casualty rate which israel claims the IDF has. And israel has to lie about it.
Actually 45% soldiers. 824 civilians were killed and 678 soldiers and police were killed on October 7th, according to Israel.
Hamas killed soldiers so that they would free to go on their rampage against civilians. Israel accidentally kills civilians as they are trying to fight an enemy that hides behind them and camouflages themselves as civilians precisely to blur the lines between civilians and soldiers. That's the difference between the two.
Israel isn't accidentally killing anyone. They're stright up murdering civillians. Let's not pretend the IDF is any better than Hamas.
I literally don't know if this is true any more.
So
Hamas is killing soldiers "so they can go after the civilians".
Israel is killing civilians "so they can go after the soldiers."
.....
That's not what I said and you know that.
That is very much what you said you are just twisting reality because the numbers don't fit your narrative. If Hamas wanted to go for maximum civilian casualties they would have attacked deeper into cities.
At some point you might learn that simplistic, childish concepts of pure good and evil rarely apply in this world. Yes, the Allies were the good guys in WW2. Being the good guy doesn't mean you're perfect, because absolutely nothing is.
At some point you might learn that lesson yourself.
Go find out what the ANC did in South Africa to free themself from their colonizers. Go find out how the Haitans rebelled against their colonizers. Go learn how the American Natives fought back against their colonizers.
Hamas colonial resistance was probably one of the most targeted in all of history with a 33%+ soldier kill rate. But of course nothing is good enough for those that demand absolute perfection from angry people in a concentration camp.
Like the other user said, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa only became successful after it abandoned violent resistance - and citing Haiti as an aspirational example is downright hysterical.
There's also a massive difference between demanding outright perfection and not applauding people who behead Asian guest workers (who, as I'm sure you are aware, but equally willing to ignore, are not "evil Zionist colonizers") with a rusty gardening hoe while live-streaming the torture-murder on the Internet. Coincidentally, you seem to have no trouble with demanding outright perfection from the IDF, who, by the way, has a roughly similar soldier kill rate in this conflict according to most estimates - but I bet you are not willing to applaud them for that.
As for what Gaza actually was, here's what this supposed "concentration camp" looked like before the war:
https://youtu.be/W1r1z3x53ZU
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/W1r1z3x53ZU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The other user got history completely wrong. As do you. Consider reading about Apartheid South Africa and Mandela first. Mandela was very violent near the end.
Telling lies again? This sounds exactly like the Hamas beheads babies story. Israeli propaganda became so lazy.
Fuck Hamas and what they did, but compared to the genocidal Israelis they are saints and I’m tired of reading all these unproven horror stories of what Hamas allegedly did while Israel is literally using an AI to murder children.
I've watched that beheading and worse things. I wish I hadn't. Imagine having the audacity of calling Hamas saints by comparison. What a despicable and inane thing to do.
And surely you can post a link to it because surely it exists, like all the evidence against the UNRWA members being Hamas, and the systematic gang raping that allegedly happened on October 7, and the Palestinians bombing their own hospitals, etc. etc.
I’m so tired of this Zionist tactics of making up shit and then not being able to come up with evidence, because how can there be evidence if you made that shit up.
The ANC in South Africa was largely ineffective. Mandela specifically is a great example of how people can get much more done as moderates than violent radicals. He would never see any sort of true progress until after his imprisonment and subsequent putting down of arms.
That's not a clean experiment. Moderation gives you nothing when the oppressing side knows you can't do violence.
The only thing that kept the apartheid gov in place was US and British support. There's a reason the Berlin wall was a big deal for SA. Similarly, Israel's current existence as a colonist state and the dominant power in the middle east is only possible because of daddy America. If not for our support (and emigration, many settlers are from the US) they would likely cave to international and internal pressures (like in Argentina, Chile, South Africa, and others)
I hope that Joe can finally get the balls to do it. People are pissed off and he's going to lose the election if he doesn't do something, which is a shame as his government isn't great but it has been a lot better than many previous ones, and especially has done a lot concerning monopolies (insofar as taking them to court). Also though I don't want to live in a fascist shithole under Trump.
For Israel - maybe. I'm not sure it's possible to drop such amounts of support and cooperation, likely with enormous volumes of defense-related corruption involved too. There'll be assassinations to not allow that to happen.
I'm just saying that in most cases of oppression over the world moderation without potential for violence will just get you imprisoned and possibly killed.
I recommend reading about the ANC before posting about it because the literal opposite happened. You got the American fairy tale propaganda version.
What really happened is that after his imprisonment for peaceful protesting, Nelson Mandela realized that Apartheid Nazis don't listen to words so he started leading a violent resistance and got put on the American terror watch list.
You are talking about young Mandela. He went to prison for 20 years and changed his mind about a lot of things.
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/658964
Hamas is not a protest organization. They pick up the gun first, not last. They have direct connections to Iran and Syria, who could put more diplomatic pressure in favor of a peaceful solution. But none of them want that.
They want to kill for revenge and domestic support and personal gain. Someone like that will never make peace. Just like Netanyahu.
If you just ignore the peaceful Great March of Return your argument makes sense
Too bad that Hamas did do a peaceful march first, probably knowing that israel would never respond to it. But they still did it. Why? o cover themselves against baseless accusations like those of yourself that would bring up that "they should have tried something peaceful first".
Hamas did a peaceful protest. Israel massacred them.
You can scroll up and read this article. It says Hamas wants peace. Who doesn't want peace? Israel.
What the fuck
When you are so disconnected from reality that the obvious and easily fact check-able truth becomes a "wtf moment".
Do you know what the native Americans did to American Colonists?
You have fun with your 66% civilian murder rate. Literally worse than the US carpet bombing Japan into oblivion, but I'm sure Hamas soldiers on the ground are way less capable of discerning between civilian and soldier than WW2 pilots literally aiming for civilians.
Can you cite a source for that claim?
Here's a fun recent one of America having a 300% higher civilian casualty rate than Hamas:
Nearly 90 Percent Of People Killed In Recent Drone Strikes Were Not The Target - U.S. drone strikes have killed scores of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Here's the UN in 2022:
Ninety Per Cent of War-Time Casualties Are Civilians
For the bombings in WW2 having a better soldier-civilian kill ratio than Hamas?
Are you fucking kidding me? If you go to the actual source, the Intercept (not Huffpo) cites an example in which 35 deaths out of 200 were of targets during Operation Haymaker - Operation Haymaker primarily targeted Taliban posts, not some fuckers in the streets, and engaged targets of opportunity during many of the strikes. Independent sources often point out that the civilian casualty figures of drone strikes are off by almost an order of magnitude from what the US government claims. That is to say, 15-20% instead of .2%-2%
Which is worse?
1 civilian killed for every 4 soldiers killed?
Or 2 civilians killed for every 1 soldier killed?
Must be the one that says "Hamas good!" and the appropriate buzzwords du jour.
That's not even fucking close to being relevant to the civilian casualty ratio of a military force, unless you think fucking Israel is more moral than the average war right fucking now.
I have no idea what your comment is even supposed to mean. Are you claiming Huffpost and the UN are all lying?
Do you think israel has a better civilian casualty ratio than Hamas when >70% of the people israel kills are women and children?
Going to be hard to beat Hamas on the civilian casualty front when literally every single male israel kills would need to be Hamas to have the same civilian casualty ratio as Hamas
If you want to ramble on without bothering to read my points, you'll have to do it without me.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Do you know what the native Americans did to American Colonists?
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Pick pretty much any conflict other than WWII. Like WWI. All bastards.
That's the fun part about ww2. People in concentration camps makes everything very black and white.
Unless they are brown I guess.
It's not a concentration camp, it's just a non-exitable area surrounded by barbed wire with not enough food let in. (mostly /s, the OG camps were worse, but really, is that the bar we want to set?)
Not to dunk on your correct comment but a small conflation many people have: There is a big difference between a Concentration and Termination camp.
Termination camps did the mass extinction and the Holocaust thing of gassing thousands of bodies and throwing them in ovens at a rapid pace.
Concentration camps abused their prisoners for labor. About a million prisoners were worked to death in Concentration camps.
Guess who had cheap labor to abuse while locked up as well?
Yeah, there's actually a lot of complexity to the Holocaust. I'd say nuance, even, if that didn't have moral connotations. Auschwitz is the most famous one, but it was exceptional in that it had both extermination and labour centers in the complex. IIRC most Jewish victims didn't even get the luxury of going to a camp. My ancestral shtetl, at least, would have been the kind where Einsatzgruppen show up and just kill everyone on the spot, however they can think to do so.
... is fucking Hamas doing it right now? Because from what I see, Israel is closer to completing their genocide than they have been in my lifetime. Sure as fuck doesn't look like they've STOPPED anything, but rather poured gasoline on the fire.
Israel is further from completing their Genocide than they have ever been. They used to be able to just slowly take over land with full international support. Israel is now the pariah of the world and the Abraham accords are gone. Hamas has taken off the mask and shown israel as the Nazis they are.
TIL fighting against the fire = pouring gasoline on it.
People keep claiming that what Hamas did will lead to nothing for the Palestinians. The only thing we can be certain of is that not fighting back will have ensured they burned to death slowly. We're currently seeing mass protests on college campuses, is that because people are really mad israel is doing a Genocide in the West Bank right now too?
The only thing we can be certain of is that Hamas's attack has led to Israel genociding some 30,000 Palestinians. The fuck makes you think killing a bunch of civilians is in any way fighting for any cause other than extending the conflict? But neither Hamas nor you care about that; only drum-beating for Islamofascism using Palestinian independence as a shield for that shitfuckery. Fucking insane.
Tell me how is the West Bank doing right now? They should just not fight back and slowly get Genocided so you don't get mad about it right? Imagine if they fought back that would be so stupid. Then it would be their own fault if israel Genocided them!
This victim blaming is truly astounding.
"The only thing we can be certain of is [thing that is by no means certain]; therefore the attack was justified! Legitimate Resistance(tm)!"
"The only thing we can be certain of is [THING THAT HAS ACTUALLY ALREADY HAPPENED]; killing a bunch of civilians did nothing but lead to [THING THAT HAS ACTUALLY ALREADY HAPPENED]"
But anything to play apologist for the murder of civilians, huh?
Yeah you can just deny israel that israel is annexing the West Bank.
Really convenient to pretend it doesn't exist because it debunks all your arguments.
It does exist by the way.
How is the West Bank relevant? How does the West Bank debunk or even address ANY of my arguments?
It debunks every single argument of people pretending that peaceful negotiation with israel is possible.
Israel are Nazis. Not in the figurative but a very literal sense.
They want to expand their Lebensraum and will ethnically cleanse people living on land they want
They want to create an Ethnostate for only their group of people
What you are saying about Palestinians is like saying "the Jews should just have negotiated with the Nazis". They tried and ya know what? Nazis gonna Nazi.