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

Useless except if the following done on the US side:

Remove exception to AIPAC political status

Reevaluate AIPAC non profit status entirely

Replicate EO 14046 for Israel which adds the entire ruling party and head of state and spouses and military and affiliated business to the OFAC list

all of this is easy and doesn’t require Congress

but nobody is close to considering those actions with regard to Israel. Notably, other nation’s organizations do not enjoy this courtesy

(Don’t sorry guys, Hamas is already on these lists too)

Voters can take a stand and refuse to vote for anyone complicit in this atrocity.

In the US, both parties were supportive in the last election. Not many choices.

One party had a long leash. The other cut the leash and yelled attaboy.

Now acting mildly concerned when the neighbour downstreet (Qatar) got their chickens bombed.

Why shouldn't Hamas leadership be bombed wherever they may be? They're the leaders of a terrorist organization. The US takes out terrorists wherever they may be (or, works with local authorities to get them first). But, when local authorities are siding with the terrorists, we go in there and do it ourselves. October 7th was Israel's 9/11 - we went and got bin Laden in Pakistan, without dealing with the Pakistani government. Why shouldn't Israel do the same thing? I say - kill all the Hamas leadership, and leave the random Palestinian citizens alone.

> Why shouldn't Hamas leadership be bombed wherever they may be?

Israel wouldn't be nearly as criticised if they're restricted themselves to surgical strikes on Hamas. Hell, they could have done exactly what they did until hostages started being exchanged, and then switched to surgical strikes, and I suspect--while folks would grumble--leaders would have better things to focus on.

Surgical strikes is mostly a myth presented to make the war on terrorism look better than it is. The US military defined anyone killed above the age of 15 to be a terrorist regardless of situation, and thus by definition had almost zero civilian deaths. It was one of those things that got leaked through the war logs.

The war on terror is estimated to have killed 4,5 million people. Surgical strikes is not a good description for that, nor was the war on terror a good model for how to behave in a war.

> Surgical strikes is mostly a myth presented to make the war on terrorism look better than it is

Even if they are, which I don't grant, myths matter in the fog of war.

More pointedly, surgical strikes would mean serially decapitating Hamas and destroying its infrastructure from the sky. It would preclude messing with aid flows. (Even if Hamas steals all the food, you can't turn most food into weapons. And Hamas amassing fighters they have to feed isn't a strategic threat to Israel in the way their ports and tunnels are.)

> war on terror is estimated to have killed 4,5 million people

One, source? Two, the U.S. obviously didn't prosecute a surgical war on the Taliban or Al Qaeda. We invaded, occupied and attempted to rebuild two nation states.

> the U.S. obviously didn't prosecute a surgical war on the Taliban or Al Qaeda. We invaded, occupied and attempted to rebuild two nation states.

Which is why holding Israel to a higher standard than we hold ourselves is odd, to say the least.

the atlantic article from almost exactly year ago: https://archive.is/wKScw

Brett McGurk would push back against the complaints, invoking his stint overseeing the siege of Mosul during the Obama administration, as the U.S. attempted to drive ISIS from northern Iraq: We flattened the city. There’s nothing left. What standard are you holding these Israelis to?

It was an argument bolstered by a classified cable sent by the U.S. embassy in Israel in late fall. American officials had embedded in IDF operating centers, reviewing its procedures for ordering air strikes. The cable concluded that the Israeli standards for protecting civilians and calculating the risks of bombardment were not so different from those used by the U.S. military.

When State Department officials chastised them over the mounting civilian deaths, Israeli officials liked to make the very same point. Herzl Halevi, the IDF chief of staff, brought up his own education at an American war college. He recalled asking a U.S. general how many civilian deaths would be acceptable in pursuit of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the jihadist leader of the anti-American insurgency in Iraq. The general replied, I don’t even understand the question. As Halevi now explained to the U.S. diplomats, Everything we do, we learned at your colleges.