Israel’s New Air War in the West Bank: Nearly Half of the Dead are Children

IndustryStandard@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 294 points – Israel’s New Air War in the West Bank: Nearly Half of the Dead are Children
theintercept.com

Around 9:30 p.m. in late February, a white Mazda pulled up near a game cafe in the Jenin refugee camp on the northern edge of the West Bank, where a crowd of boys and young men often gathered to socialize.

As the car stopped, a few people walked by on the narrow street. Two motorbikes weaved past in different directions. “Everything was fine at the time,” according to an eyewitness sitting nearby in the camp’s main square.

Then the car erupted in a ball of flame. Two missiles fired from an Israeli drone had hit the Mazda in quick succession, as shown in a video the Israeli Air Force posted that night.

According to the IAF, the strike killed Yasser Hanoun, described as “a wanted terrorist.”

But Hanoun was not the only fatality: 16-year old Said Raed Said Jaradat, who was near the vehicle when it was hit, sustained shrapnel wounds all over his body, according to documentation collected by Defense for Children International-Palestine. He died from his injuries at 1 a.m. the next morning.

Jaradat is one of 24 children killed in Israel’s airstrikes on the West Bank since last summer, when the Israeli forces began deploying drones, planes, and helicopters to carry out attacks in the occupied territory for the first time in decades.

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History for Israel started on May 14, 1948, 8 hours before the British protectorate ended.

The war started on May 15, 1948, when 5 Arab nations invaded Israel because they weren't happy with the UN borders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War

Israel fought back, and has been fighting back ever since.

"Fighting back" by heavily bombarding a Palestine area that has no offensive means due to decades of slowly administered austerity measures. From a land their diaspora didnt own for the last 2000 years...

To be fair they literally asked for it and continue to do so by taking and not releasing the hostages.

Edit: It doesn't help that when killed the other civilians refer to them as martyrs. The whole thing is incredibly ugly and done for imo stupid reasons on both sides.

Israel is was holding hostages before October 7. You are implying that Israel asked for October 7.

No need to lie. Israel isn't innocent, but Hamas has a demonstrated reliable record of using civilian deaths for their ends. They are counting on your naivete to gain sympathy and support and you're falling for it when in actuality this is their ducks coming home to roost.

Surrender. Release the Hostages. Crisis averted. Do they? Nerp. Instead its "you're killing civilians like we've intentionally aimed for for decades! Unfair plane!"

No factually Israel had kidnapped Palestinians from the West Bank and held them hostage before October 7.

You understand 'imprisoning terrorists' /= 'holding hostages' right?

Yes these are different things. How is this relevant to Israel taking Palestinians hostage?

Because imprisoning terrorists is what it is correctly called

The difference is due to the military control Israel has over the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Palestinians are tried in a military court with no civil rights or representation, tortured into false confessions, and incarcerated with routine torture, sexual abuse, and denial of basic medical care. That includes hundreds if not thousands of children.

Palestinians denied civil rights (HRW) including Military Court (B'TSelem)

Palestinian Prisoners in Israel including Child abuse - Save The Children

Torture and Abuse in Interrogations - B'TSelem

Thousands of Palestinians are held without charge under Israeli detention policy - NPR

Urgently investigate inhumane treatment and enforced disappearance of Palestinians detainees from Gaza - Amnesty

Israel/OPT: Horrifying cases of torture and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees amid spike in arbitrary arrests

"no offensive means" except the rockets and a military of tens of thousands of people with guns

As for living there a long time... are you fucking stupid? Jerusalem is in Israel, and the Kingdom of Israel (which is in that vicinity) is mentioned in the original Hebrew fucking bible, which was completed around 2000 years ago. Jews have been living in that region since Judaism became a thing.

No. Israel has 13bil in millitary means just from this year from USA, while Gaza is starving. Fuck off.

Just open other books as well. Plenty of books talk about lands controlled by long forgotten kingdoms. And many of these are actually history books, instead of religious gospel from influential figures.

Yes, Israel is stronger than Palestine. Is that a crime? Palestine still regularly attacks Israel, they had to build a fucking missile defence system because of it.

Are you actually claiming jews didn't live in that region for the last two thousand years? There are thousands of historical records beyond just the bible proving that they did.

Israel is a weak little bitch that relies on daddy America while pretending to be the toughest kid in the neighborhood. An old book does not justify genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Hamas is an even weaker little bitch that relies on money and arms being smuggled in from Muslim countries to fight against Israel.

Gaza has a GDP per capita of $800 PER YEAR. Israel is around $60,000.

Hamas is a terrorist organization. You'd think Israel, as an internationally-recognized country, would be better than a terrorist organization, but apparently not. In fact, Israel has been more brutal and less reasonable than even Hamas in many cases.

Then you jump to comparing the GDP of Gaza, which has the entire weight of Israel and the west sitting on it, with the GDP of Israel which has the full backing of the west. Kind of hard to produce things when you've got a neighboring country hell-bent on ethnically cleansing all of your land and the most powerful countries in the world funding them to carry it out.

I wouldn't think Israel would be better, because the whole fighting strategy of guerilla terrorist organizations like Hamas is to make it impossible to fight cleanly. That's why they meet up in residential locations surrounded by women and children, and set up resources in schools, hospitals, etc.

This strategy isn't unique to Hamas, it's used by pretty much every group around the world who are fighting civil wars from a weaker position.

I'm not saying that the reason they're poor isn't because of Israel, I'm simply saying that they are poor as fuck and therefore the funding for their terrorism is coming from elsewhere.

The Israeli imposed closure on Gaza began in 1991, temporarily, becoming permanent in 1993. The barrier began around Gaza around 1972. After the 'disengagement' in 2007, this turned into a full blockade; where Israel has had control over the airspace, borders, and sea. Under the guise of 'dual-use' Israel has restricted food, allocating a minimum supply leading to over half of Gaza being food insecure; construction materials, medical supplies, and other basic necessities have also been restricted. This has been a deliberate tactic of De-development.

Gaza Policy Forum summary: Experts agree that Israel’s dual-use policy causes acute distress

Through 1993 Israel imposed a one-way system of tariffs and duties on the importation of goods through its borders; leaving Israel for Gaza, however, no tariffs or other regulations applied. Thus, for Israeli exports to Gaza, the Strip was treated as part of Israel; but for Gazan exports to Israel, the Strip was treated as a foreign entity subject to various “non-tariff barriers.” This placed Israel at a distinct advantage for trading and limited Gaza’s access to Israeli and foreign markets. Gazans had no recourse against such policies, being totally unable to protect themselves with tariffs or exchange rate controls. Thus, they had to pay more for highly protected Israeli products than they would if they had some control over their own economy. Such policies deprived the occupied territories of significant customs revenue, estimated at $118-$176 million in 1986. (Arguably, the economic terms of the Gaza—Jericho Agreement modify the situation only slightly.)

  • page 240

In a report released in May 2015, the World Bank revealed that as a result of Israel’s blockade and OPE, Gaza’s manufacturing sector shrank by as much as 60 percent over eight years while real per capita income is 31 percent lower than it was 20 years ago. The report also stated that the blockade alone is responsible for a 50 percent decrease in Gaza’s GDP since 2007. Furthermore, OPE (com- bined with the tunnel closure) exacerbated an already grave situation by reducing Gaza’s economy by an additional $460 million.

  • Page 402

The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development - Third Edition by Sara M. Roy

It certainly didn't. The settlements and Zionist aggression led by the head of the Labor Party, David Ben-Gurion, planned for the forcible transfer (Plan Dalet) of the Palestinians while rejecting any Bi-National State Solution in favor of Partition.

Before 1948, Palestinian Leadership repeatedly advocated for a Unitary Binational State for decades: Palestinian Arab Congress advocating for Unified State 1928, Arab Higher Committee advocating for Unified State 1937, Arab League advocating for Unified State 1948

Plan Dalet

Declassified Massacres 1948

Details of Plan C (May 1946) and Plan D (March 1948)

The settlements represent land-grabbing, and land-grabbing and peace-making don’t go together, it is one or the other. By its actions, if not always in its rhetoric, Israel has opted for land-grabbing and as we speak Israel is expanding settlements. So, Israel has been systematically destroying the basis for a viable Palestinian state and this is the declared objective of the Likud and Netanyahu who used to pretend to accept a two-state solution. In the lead up to the last election, he said there will be no Palestinian state on his watch. The expansion of settlements and the wall mean that there cannot be a viable Palestinian state with territorial contiguity. The most that the Palestinians can hope for is Bantustans, a series of enclaves surrounded by Israeli settlements and Israeli military bases.

‘One state is a game changer’: A conversation with Ilan Pappe

One State Solution - Foreign Affairs

Oslo Accords 'peace' process: MEE, NYT, Haaretz, AJ

History of peace process - The Intercept

The Arabs were certainly in favour of a single state solution. An Arab-led single state, that is.

Theodor Herzl died in 1904-

It goes without saying that the Jewish people can have no other goal than Palestine and that, whatever the fate of the proposition may be, our attitude toward the land of our fathers is and shall remain unchangeable

Yea, he died in 1904, 44 years before the invasion of Israel.

Just because some dude said "we should strive to take the land" fifty years prior doesn't give those countries a right to invade.

Nothing happened during that time.

Nothing at all happened before even that... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936%E2%80%931939_Arab_revolt_in_Palestine

We can keep going back a thousand years if you want, this fight between the Muslims and Jews has records of attacks occurring between the two groups for at least that long.

At the end of the day the ottoman empire lost in WW1, the country got split up, and some of the people living there didn't like the new UN plan and called in their friends to invade.

Multiple sides fought, Israel won. If we want to reverse that shit, we should be demanding the reversal of the US invasion (and return all north america to native americans), we should be demanding the return of Finland(and a few neighbors) to Russia, we should be demanding the Chinese return their country to it's previous government (which is hilariously in Taiwan)... none of which we're going to do. So why should only the Palestinians get special return to original owner treatment?

The simple answer is they shouldn't.

Because bad things happened in the past, we must allow bad things to happen in the present and future. The logic is sound.

The border things in Israel happened a long time ago. Israel has had official control of the Palestinian territories for decades.

The bad things that are happening now are primarily caused by Hamas attacking Israel.

Israel has had official control of the Palestinian territories for decades.

there’s the problem

The US government has had control of the states for decades.

Is that a problem too?

When exactly did we decide that borders were no longer allowed to change when someone lost a war?

Might makes right. Isn’t that the same irredentism that Putin used to invade Ukraine? 🇺🇦

Putin has changed the borders, and the world accepted it (See Crimea)

People don't want it to be true, but it definitely is.

Sounds good to me. Let's do it.

(Although Finland should keep its independence; it was captured from Sweden by Russia, before that it wasn't a single country, though its inhabitants were pretty close culturally.)

Maybe because the entire state of Israel was created by the British on what was at the time Palestinian land, and nobody else agreed to that. I'm not sure it's an invasion when a third party is saying it's someone else's now.