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Top UN legal investigators conclude Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza

(www.middleeasteye.net)
1332 points Qem | 5 comments | 16 Sep 25 08:24 UTC | HN request time: 1.082s | source
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MangoToupe ◴[16 Sep 25 20:11 UTC] No.45267350[source]▶
I'm afraid the latest spate of "recognizing the state of Palestine" is not, in fact, a sign of coming relief for the people there, but rather a spigot to relieve domestic pressure to engage in substantive actions (sanctions, pressuring the US and other suppliers of arms to engage in sanctions, let alone sending peacekeepers or no-fly zones).

Regardless of how much you're personally invested in the topic, this should break the hearts of everyone who dreamed that the international community could hold each other legally accountable. Indeed, the US would rather sanction individuals at the ICJ than acknowledge any sort of legitimacy—even as our own politicians accuse Russia of engaging in "war crimes". I have no doubt that they are, in fact, I think that the evidence is quite damning. But the double standard is striking, as is the difference between the footage visible on social media and what is acknowledged when you turn on the TV or open the paper.

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energy123 ◴[17 Sep 25 02:57 UTC] No.45271093[source]▶
It makes it worse by reducing pressure on Hamas to surrender, increasing the duration of the war. Grotesque virtue signalling.
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MangoToupe ◴[17 Sep 25 04:41 UTC] No.45271749[source]▶
Surely if a surrender takes place, it will be merely symbolic. I cannot imagine anyone can convince a population so terrorized to forgive or forget.
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energy123 ◴[17 Sep 25 05:00 UTC] No.45271862[source]▶
Japanese civilians experienced far worse in WW2, and they forgot pretty quickly. The war against the Tamil Tigers would be another case study. Once the radicalism is dealt with by force, the ratcheting of violence is reduced, and people move on.
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fakedang ◴[17 Sep 25 05:10 UTC] No.45271930[source]▶
> Japanese civilians experienced far worse in WW2, and they forgot pretty quickly

Because the vast majority of the Japanese people barely faced any kind of obstacles in the same way Palestinians are facing. Yes, they had food shortages and their wooden homes were bombed constantly to oblivion, and they suffered a couple of nuclear blasts, but that was because their history lessons teach their WW2 as something in which they were the aggressor (with Pearl Harbor, not the invasions of China and Korea). In Palestine's case, it will take much longer to wipe out that resentment. Besides, Palestinians aren't the "radicals" here.

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energy123 ◴[17 Sep 25 05:23 UTC] No.45272032[source]▶
Before Japan was defeated, their military propaganda was that they were victims of encirclement and an oil blockade, and the attack on Pearl Harbor was a justified response to this victimhood. They started teaching a different story only because the allies forced them to change their curriculum. The same process of deradicalization will be forced onto Gaza after the defeat of Hamas. And why did you overlook the Tamil Tigers case study? And why would you euphemize nuclear bombs onto civilian cities like this, as if it isn't significantly more brutal than anything the Palestinians have been subjected to?

> Besides, Palestinians aren't the "radicals" here.

A luxury belief that's only possible to hold because Israel is militarily dominant to the point that the radical views prevalent in Palestinian culture cannot be acted out. The Israelis know this luxury belief is factually false, that's why they are the way they are.

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tdeck ◴[17 Sep 25 05:48 UTC] No.45272202[source]▶
> and why would you euphemize nuclear bombs onto civilian cities like this, as if it isn't significantly more brutal than anything the Palestinians have been subjected to?

https://www.bradford.ac.uk/news/archive/2025/gaza-bombing-eq...

> Gaza bombing ‘equivalent to six Hiroshimas’

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1. energy123 ◴[17 Sep 25 06:05 UTC] No.45272305[source]▶
How can six Hiroshimas kill less civilians than the actual Hiroshima (let alone the fire bombings) despite much higher density? The answer to this question might unlock something in your mind.
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2. tdeck ◴[17 Sep 25 06:09 UTC] No.45272332[source]▶
We don't have anhthing like a complete count of the dead yet. The 60k number the media still reports has barely moved in a year because Israel destroyed almost all of the health infrastructure that used to report deaths, and even before that people trapped in the rubble and not identified by anyone weren't counted.
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3. energy123 ◴[17 Sep 25 06:40 UTC] No.45272539[source]▶
That's true, but that 60k number isn't just civilians, and even if the total civilian count is higher than 60k, it's still likely lower than the civilians killed in Hiroshima, which is an inconvenient fact best left unmentioned by those who say that Israel has unleashed six Hiroshimas onto a location that's over 10x higher density than 1945 Hiroshima. How do you resolve this discrepancy?
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4. tdeck ◴[17 Sep 25 08:33 UTC] No.45273317{3}[source]▶
There's no discrepancy because there aren't numbers. The 60,000 number is a dramatic undercount. The fatalities were being undercounted even before Israel had attacked every hospital in Gaza multiple times. There are mass graves occasionally found in Gaza but nobody is able to go through and document everything while they're still being genocided. In any situation like this it takes decades of research to try to reach an accurate count and even then there are is huge uncertainty, particularly when whole extended families are murdered all at once. Look at the Hiroshima death toll estimates - between 90,000 and 166,000 people killed. And this is the best estimate after decades of research. Almost none of that can take place now in Gaza.

But of course I'm talking to someone who pretends to believe you can carpet bomb an entire city of 2 million people relentlessly, cut off food and water, and kill fewer than 60,000 civilians.

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5. energy123 ◴[17 Sep 25 11:52 UTC] No.45274681{4}[source]▶
I mean, there is a discrepancy, because even if I grant you your wildest guess as the base case, it is still going to be vastly lower than 6 Hiroshimas, despite 10x higher density, which makes no sense. So maybe it is not "carpet bombing", at least not how it was done in WW2 or Vietnam, and maybe such vague, loaded words are being deployed more for rhetorical effect than for descriptive accuracy. It kind of looks like ... a war?