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.

  • Altofaltception@lemmy.world
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    19 天前

    Do the Palestinians have a right to defend themselves? Or are we just going to call any retaliation “terrorism”?

    • FlowVoid@lemmy.world
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      19 天前

      He was suspected of involvement in a shooting at a kibbutz near the West Bank. There is no right to attack settlements with no military value.

        • FlowVoid@lemmy.world
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          18 天前

          They can’t arrest him, he doesn’t live in Israel. And killing enemy combatants is legal, for example Osama bin Laden.

          • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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            18 天前

            I’m sorry I just spent that entire time laughing. The IDF and Israeli Police absolutely have the run of West Bank. It’s not called an occupation for nothing.

            And when you kill someone without even trying to arrest them inside your civil jurisdiction, it’s called murder. At least it is in civilized countries.

            • FlowVoid@lemmy.world
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              18 天前

              Israel is not the civil authority of Gaza. Hamas is.

              More important, the attack on the kibbutz occurred during a war between Israel and Hamas. That makes the attacker a combatant, not a criminal. In fact, you cannot legally prosecute combatants unless they commit war crimes.

              Combatant immunity bars the prosecution of combatants for mere participation in hostilities. Thus, they are immune from prosecution for murder and destruction of property committed as part of an armed conflict, unless such acts constitute war crimes.

      • Anas@lemmy.world
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        18 天前

        Settlers have no right to be in the settlements, either.

        Also, suspected isn’t enough.

        • FlowVoid@lemmy.world
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          18 天前

          The kibbutz was in Israel, and Israelis have the right to be in Israel.

          And as an armed member of Hamas, he was a military target even if he wasn’t involved in the kibbutz shooting.

    • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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      19 天前

      It’s a war, they’re both allowed to attack each other. Palestinians are going to lose though, the two sides are not equal.

      All this peacefire talk is just a nice way of framing the Palestinian surrender. The only question is how long Hamas will keep fighting before they are forced to give in.

      • Altofaltception@lemmy.world
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        19 天前

        It’s a war, they’re both allowed to attack each other

        Ehhh not exactly. We describe it as a war when Israel is doing the killing (37k civilians dead) but we describe it as a terrorist attack when Hamas does the killing (<1000 civilians dead).

        the two sides are not equal

        You’re not wrong

          • Eximius@lemmy.world
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            18 天前

            “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…

            • Burstar@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              18 天前

              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.

                • Burstar@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  18 天前

                  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!”

            • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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              18 天前

              “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.

              • Eximius@lemmy.world
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                18 天前

                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.

                • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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                  18 天前

                  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.

          • Keeponstalin@lemmy.world
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            18 天前

            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

          • catloaf@lemm.ee
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            18 天前

            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.

          • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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            18 天前

            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

            • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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              18 天前

              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.

                • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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                  18 天前

                  Nothing at all happened before even that… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936–1939_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.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    19 天前

    Oh, but I’ve been told that Gazans voted for Hamas, so they’re getting what they deserve. Awfully young voting age they have in Gaza…

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
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      18 天前

      Also this is the West Bank. They’re governed by Fatah, not Hamas.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        18 天前

        That was my fault. I just keep hearing about more and more dead children in Gaza and then see people say that Gazans voted for Hamas so that’s what you get when you do that…

  • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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    19 天前

    The median age in gaza is 19.6

    So almost half the population are children, and this includes a large number of Hamas fighters. They don’t wait until they’re adults to recruit. There are verified reports of them using kids down to age 12.

        • originalfrozenbanana@lemm.ee
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          18 天前

          When you dehumanize and demonize your opponent to the extent you are right now, you have lost the moral high ground.

          • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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            18 天前

            There’s no moral high ground, It’s a multi-thousand year civil/religious war.

            I have one simple question.

            Let’s say that Palestine is given statehood, with established fixed borders. Do you really think they’d stop attacking Israel at that point?