> How does bulldozing a family home have any affect on a tunnel?
The tunnel entrances and exits are tremendously hard to find. Some of them were located in private residences.
But Israel has an oil & gas industry. They have equipment that can look underneath a quiet city. If tunnel elimination were truly the goal, temporarily displacing the population while clearing operations took place should have been sufficient. As it stands, simply bulldozing over the entrances probably doesn't actually destroy the tunnels. It just hides their entrances.
The problem with Ghaza is, that its the living proof that the peace process never could work. Charon returned it, des-ettlered it, the hippies moved near the border to help, they integrated them into the economy- only to get murdered on the 7th of october.
Not even egypt allows ghazans in- 10.000 euros for one passport is insane. And all those walls and checkpoints. And egypt is pretty islamist itself, so natural ally to hamas and the like.. but they know had that brush with the mb
You neglected to mention the decades-long blockade, or Netanyahu doing everything in his power to keep Hamas in charge. A true "peace process" has never been tried. (Well, except by Rabin, so of course they murdered him)
Or, if you are not a genocidal terror group, you actually go house-to-house and check. Difficult, dangerous, but not a war crime. That's why Mosul isn't a pile of rubble, even though ISIS was more than willing to use booby traps!
---
"We are demolishing more and more homes, they have nowhere to return. The only obvious result will be the desire of the Gazans to emigrate outside the Strip. Our main problem is in the receiving countries."
> Like when packaged food gets potentially contaminated, you don't test each package for bacteria.
You're comparing wiping out tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian people's lives... to disinfection.
Like yeah, there's plenty of examples of israel's current leaders calling the Palestinian race sub-human, vermin, animal, saying it should be wiped off the earth, etc, but I didn't expect it on HN, JFC.
If you check the parent for this thread, the conversation is about Israel use of bulldozers to flatten Rafah, and the reason they do it is the same reason you toss any possible contaminated food. It's impractical to check a bunch of empty buildings for booby traps. Rafah was evacuated about a year and a half ago.
Here is a link to the conversation topic to help clear your confusion:
Again, you're comparing the ethnic cleansing of an entire city to "tossing possibly contaminated food".
Take a step back and see the echoes of your words in history.
> It's impractical to check a bunch of empty buildings for booby traps
That's life. That you might find it hard to achieve your military conquest without engaging in ethnic cleansing isn't a legal or moral excuse for perpetrating ethnic cleansing. Find a way that doesn't require ethnic cleansing or pick more realistic military objectives.
> Rafah was evacuated about a year and a half ago.
A forced expulsion of all existing inhabitants of a city without any right of return is commonly called "ethnic cleansing". So is razing the city. It's called that because it is cleansing the city of all people and/or traces of an ethnicity, like israel did here. Both constitute crimes against humanity, regardless of the excuse (the nazis had excuses for their similar crimes too, look how that went for them).
They didn't claim to. They are responding to a claim that all the houses were demolished because they all contained booby traps, because "might contain booby traps" is obviously a legally and morally insufficient justification for demolishing every home in the city and cleansing it of the previous inhabitant race. Your home might contain booby traps, too.
Over a million people live here. The estimate was that "448 to 593 civilians were killed due to coalition military operations", orders of magnitude less than Israel has killed. Basra was not wiped off the map or seized and annexed by coalition forces while the population was herded into a concentration camp.
It is simply slander against the US military to suggest they have in the 21st century done anything like what the IDF has done in this genocide.
There were weeks of airstrikes by the coalition and then artillery barage("Down Barage").
Basically Mosul was leveled before a single soldier entered it.
Here's historical satellite imagery. Go to 2017-08. You can see Mosul airport and surrounding facilities leveled, immediately adjacent to a city that is obviously a city and not 1) flattened Mosul airport or 2) similar in any way to the Rafah imagery above.
If you are describing Mosul as "leveled" then what adjective do you use to describe Rafah? It cannot possibly be also "leveled" given that vast areas of Rafah are actually a flat pile of rubble and Mosul is clearly a city with a destroyed airport, even in late 2017.
This is a good rebuttal to the claim that no part of Mosul was struck hard or leveled. But nobody claimed that.
From your linked AP article:
"Nearly a third of the Old City [a specific neighborhood] was damaged or destroyed in the final three weeks of bombardment up to July 8, according to a survey by U.N. Habitat using satellite imagery"
From MSF re Rafah:
"Over 15 months of all-out war on Gaza have left 92 percent of housing units and about 70 percent of all structures destroyed or damaged."
So we have 1/3rd of a particularly hard-hit neighborhood destroyed in Mosul versus 70% of the entire city of Rafah.
You are comparing different things. You should be comparing the intensive part of the battle in both cases. Mosul vs. Rafah is a great comparison. The total number of civilians were similar. The number of combatants were similar. Rafah is a lot denser. Israel's war results in significantly less civilian casualties. The allies pounded Mosul with its civilian population with heavy bombardments. The criticism of Israel on this is orders of magnitude higher than any criticism levelled at the allies (well basically none). If you look at why did the allies go to war on ISIS there is nothing even borderline comparable to the Oct 7th attack on Israel from Gaza. Something to ponder.
That Israel kept looking for tunnels and destroying empty buildings for strategic reasons after the battle was over and Rafah was mostly abandoned is not relevant to evaluating the main battle.
That MSF statement is not specifically about Rafah in your link either. It's about the entire Gaza strip. And just like Rafah a lot of the destruction happened in evacuated areas for tactical reasons, searching for tunnels, preventing guerrilla attacks, dealing with booby traps etc. We can argue about the necessity and legality of those but they are a different kind of discussion vs. the main battle portion.
Gaza in total had a population of about 2 million people and about 70,000 casualties. Israel's own estimate in 2025 claimed 8,900 of those were combatants.
Mosul had 1.5 million people at the time of the battle and ~10-20k civilian casualties + ~10-20k combatants.
Hard to do direct comparisons and all the numbers are obviously squishy, but your claim that Israel's war results in significantly fewer casualties seems... dubious at best.
And in any case, we actually know for a fact that Israel's non-combatant casualty cut-off value (NCV) -- i.e. their accepted rate in decision-making -- is several multiples higher than the coalition forces were.
> Peter Gersten, former deputy commander of operations and intelligence for Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve, states that “[w]ith Osama Bin Laden, you’d have an NCV value of 30, but if you had a low-level commander, his NCV was typically zero. We ran zero for the longest time.” U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, when he was head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) during the war against ISIS, would personally be called to authorize an operation with a “high” NCV of 14 or 15.
Re the Jabalia Camp attack:
> Satellite visual analysis of the attack site shows at least five large craters, including two approximately 40 feet wide, consistent with the impact of 2,000-pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions. The attack destroyed not just one residential apartment building, but a whole block.
> Even without specific further intelligence, on the basis of this information Israel’s CDE must have resulted in a very high estimate for civilian casualties. Given the location, population spread, and choice of weapons, the actual toll of hundreds of civilians killed or wounded would have been a reasonable expectation.
That's kind of what they did. Just in the most heavy-handed indiscriminate way imaginable. But the booby-traps are cleared, and they did use teleoperated robots to do that
Ethnic cleansing and property damage are not the same thing. The claim of ethnic cleansing can't be determined now. I would say with almost complete certainty that Gazans will eventually be allowed to return to a rebuilt Rafah. There is no evidence right now the displacement is permanent. Israel says it will not withdraw until Hamas disarms is where things stand now. So it is saying it will withdraw when Hamas disarms.
To be clear. There are cases where civilian property damage is a war crime. And we do need to evaluate that. But ethnic cleansing is something else. If there are good military reasons to destroy said property then it's also not a war crime.
Sorry, nearly the entire population of these cities has been displaced, their homes all destroyed (not “damaged” but basically completely razed) and you’re saying it’s not ethnic cleansing because Israel says they will withdraw when Hamas disarms (e.g. when pigs fly)?
> The claim of ethnic cleansing can't be determined now.
When the members of the biggest coalition in the Knesset say openly and proudly that they are doing ethnic cleansing what exactly are you pretending to defend?
> There is no evidence right now the displacement is permanent.
All of the allies of Likud and the settler movement wants Palestinians expelled.
> Israel says it will not withdraw until Hamas disarms is where things stand now.
They used to say they would withdraw when the hostages were returned. The goalposts were moved, as is typical.
> But ethnic cleansing is something else. If there are good military reasons to destroy said property then it's also not a war crime.
At this point there are literally hundreds of accounts of IDF members who were given told quite explicitly that it was an open field for killing with no consequences.
Heat trigger sensors can be had for a few dollars in China these days. As long as you got a decent electrical engineer and a supply chain... you can probably whip up a working prototype in a day or two.
You're right, that's totally doable.
However supply chains to that Gaza aren't exactly robust, they can barely get enough food to survive. It's unlikely an AliExpress package full of PIR sensors is going to make it's way through the blockade.
And if the structure isn't actually being used for military purposes they just have to say "oopsie"? It makes sense for occasional houses that are being used for military purposes to be destroyed, but destroying all houses simply due to suspicion seems like too much.
Personally I haven’t. I know my office is gone. I know the hotel I used to stay in (always fun to wake up seeing a gunboat a couple of miles off shore pointing at you out the window) has gone.
My colleagues have seen these tunnels. At least ore 2023. Israel has denied them entry since then.
Because I can say that both sides are deplorable and wrong? In fact, I can even say they're both deplorable and wrong in uneven amounts, but that both meet the bar of "deplorable and wrong."
You think you have to choose a side between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel? You think you need to send one of them money?
Well I care about it principally because of the degree to which it distorts our politics. The funding is one cause and effect of that distortion but there are others. For example the theological allegiance between US evangelicals and Zionists is a shockingly powerful force in US politics.
But yes the component that morally implicates me personally is the funding and it’d be a big improvement not to participate in it.
Just like I don’t think it’s obvious that we should fund Sinaloa despite them being decidedly less monstrous than New Generation.
Why wouldn’t you answer the question that I asked? Do we need to pick a side in the cartel wars? If no, why is that different?
The power imbalance allows one side to exhibit restraint and use more civilized options. These aren’t actors on the same footing. It’s a nuclear power with a multi billion dollar military against some of the poorest people on the planet.
Israel is the great betrayal. In 1948 it was supposed to become a secular country based on European values not a Jewish theocracy. It is dragging us down and for what?
The words you are looking for are combatants. How does bulldozing a combatants home have any affect on a tunnel? Because it destroys the entrance to the tunnel. There are no innocents in Gaza.
“ There are no innocents in Gaza.” funny, this is exactly what people said to defend what Hamas did on October 7th.
The babies and young children in Gaza are as innocent as they are everywhere else in the world. If you can’t see that, you should reexamine the lens you use to look at the world, it’s distorting things massively.
This is true. Their crime is not having been born a Jew. According to the Torah, the Talmud and the Talakha, shkotzim and shiksim like us must be slaughtered as is the right and the duty of the Chosen Ones to honor G-d.
It seems bonkers to me that we’re nitpicking what to call a given mass extermination of human lives, like some kind of deranged Clippy. Talk about loss of perspective.
The link provided in your parent post explicitly says there is no precise definition of “ethnic cleansing”, so I don’t even understand why you’d think the distinction matters.
I will add as a comment—because I can no longer edit the post—that it’s also bonkers how much the upvotes and downvotes are fluctuating on this. I couldn’t care less about the points, but the threshold for a downvote is higher than an upvote so it does show a certain tendency, and it’s disgusting that such a large part of this community values nitpicking of words over empathy and human lives.
Not that that was in question. HN is, after all, in too large a part a reflection of the greedy US tech industry. It has shown time and again that it’s selfishly OK with human exploitation and supremely susceptible to being manipulated by the right amount of technicality while simultaneously arrogantly believing it is immune to being influenced.
Some days I’m truly ashamed of this community and find myself incapable of defending it against the mockery and contempt it receives from the rest of the internet.
> seems bonkers to me that we’re nitpicking what to call a given mass extermination of human lives
The OG genocides involved deaths in the millions [1]. That requires killing with industrial efficiency, something that made it categorically unique from the "wipe out the village" warfare that goes back to, probably, before civilisation. (Chimpanzees do it. To my knowledge, they're the only other species that annihilates versus merely fighting off enemies.)
At lower kill volumes, even in the tens and possibly even hundreds of thousands, the line between conventional warfare done conservatively, conventional warfare done brutally and a process that, if left unhindered, will reach a million-man death toll.
(Then you have the ambiguity, one which does not apply in Gaza, introduced by displacement also being included in genocide and it starts to intersect pretty much perfectly with war.)
If we want these words to keep having meaning, we have to nitpick around their use. Otherwise, overinclusivity will consume them.
Nitpick all you want, but at some point you should also ask why this is being debated so widely in the first place, and whether it's time for the international community to step in. Those approaches aren't mutually exclusive.
> you should also ask why this is being debated so widely in the first place
Because there are lots of wars burning all over the planet. We tried to carve an exception into international law, after WWII, about it being permissible to intervene in the internal affairs of another sovereign state if they're doing genocide. So this is a real debate that should be had. The problem is by practically every definition, there are at least a handful of active genocides happening in multiple theaters around the world.
The abhorrence of genocide is one that needs to be refreshed with action if we're to restore the norm that it's not okay. But to do that, you have to set the new threshold.
> The OG genocides involved deaths in the millions
So if less than a million people are killed it's not a genocide? Seems like a very obtuse understanding of the word, which is also defined in the wiki you linked.
> if less than a million people are killed it's not a genocide?
Nobody said that. OP asked why this is being debated. That's why. It's not clear what generally constitutes a genocide in a way that is separate from warfare in general. (Gaza and Ukraine are simpler, to me, because Russia and Israel explicitly message genocidal intent in a way New Delhi, Beijing and Washington do not.)
I did not. I lamented (it was not a question) that we’re nitpicking (it’s not a debate) the definition, especially when the person in question suggested an alternative which is not defined.
I do wonder if you’d care about this conversation if you and your family were the ones being killed. If one of those people were in front of you crying for their home and life and asked for your compassion and help in fleeing the genocide, would you turn to them and say “ackchyually, someone on Hacker News said this is merely an ethnic cleansing, you’re on your own”?
> do wonder if you’d care about this conversation if you and your family were the ones being killed
No. At that point, whether it's a genocide or not is kind of irrelevant. They're being killed. War doesn't need extra bits attached to it to be horrible.
> No. At that point, whether it's a genocide or not is kind of irrelevant. They're being killed. War doesn't need extra bits attached to it to be horrible.
Right. So what I’m saying is let’s have some empathy and compassion for other people. Let’s focus on how horrible it is and what we can do, the same way we would hope others would do for us if we were the ones in that situation.
It's incredibly ambiguous. There are very few sets of people who agree on the list of ongoing genocides, much less historic ones. The only places where there is even a semblance of agreement is in Europe and urban America, and that's largely due to deferral to our institutions.
> There's no ambiguity as to what Israel is doing
I agree. That doesn't mean it's beyond discussion or debate. I think it's a genocide. I also think that term has been mangled, particularly online, to the point that it's virtually meaningless. (One of the problems with the term is it's grammatically odd. A homicide is a completed murder. Attempted murder is different. A genocide, completed, is an extermination or annihilation. But we give the ongoing project the same grammar as, in other cases, an act.)
>A genocide, completed, is an extermination or annihilation.
Which is why zero armenians remain after the armenian genocide
oh wait no nevermind, your definition is just bullshit. Only one set of people define what is or isn't a genocide: historians. The ICC only covers crimes against humanity. Historians are also in wide agreement (except for the Israel aligned ones) that it is a genocide in Gaza.
The legal definition of genocide is precise and includes an element that is often hard to prove: "intent."
Determining whether a situation constitutes genocide is factually and legally complex. It should only be made following a careful and detailed examination of the facts against relevant legislation.
This examination is carried out to establish State responsibility or individual criminal responsibility for the crime of genocide. It must be done by a competent international or national court with jurisdiction to try such cases, after an investigation that meets appropriate due process standards.
Correct. If no such court case has delivered a verdict, then by definition no one can rightly claim genocide has occurred.
As for whats happening, the over represented proportion of male combatant age deaths, the well below average ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in complex urban warfare, the war being in response to an atrocious attack on civilians, stopping for polio vaccines, population numbers remaining stable etc puts a question on the "Only Reasonable Inference" standard.
What would you consider a proportionate response given Hamas's initial charter, the rockets fired over the years, the IRCG commanders statements about a co-ordinated attack from Gaza, southern Lebanon and the West Bank and the abhorrent attack of October 7th?
Major General Gholam Ali Rashid—commander of the Khatam ol Anbia Central Headquarters, which is the highest Iranian operational command level and responsible for all joint operations— expanded on this concept in a May 2024 interview and demonstrated how Iran is continuing to learn from Hamas. Rashid argued that the Hamas attack into Israel in October 2023 highlighted how effective and valuable ground attacks could be.[iii] Hamas’ attack demonstrated, Rashid said, that the Axis of Resistance could destroy the Israeli state by launching surprise attacks from Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank simultaneously—echoing Salami’s comments. Rashid stated that such an attack would need 10,000 fighters from Lebanon, 10,000 fighters from the Gaza Strip, and 2,000-3,000 from the West Bank. Rashid’s interview is particularly noteworthy given his importance in Iranian military decision-making and planning as Khatam ol Anbia Central Headquarters commander.
You know what, it's been a while since I took the piss out of the hasbara, let's have fun.
> the well below average ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in complex urban warfare
Ah, yes, the very urban warfare art of bombing hospitals and refugee camps. Very urban. Much warfare. And you also get to claim that the civilians didn't die from the fighting, merely from the starvation!
>the war being in response to an atrocious attack on civilians
Yep. Nothing happened before October 7. 1947 ? Doesn't exist. Nakba? Probably some arab term that means nothing. Close to a century of warfare, torture, humiliation and putting Gazawis into concentration camps ? Naaaah. Hamas is responsible. Bad Hamas.
> population numbers remaining stable
There has been no accurate population counts for three years. But thank you for being so generous and letting palestinians reproduce while you park them in camps. Very kosher <3
>Hamas's initial charter
No shit, the armed resistance group that was formed to resist with arms against an attacker wants the attacker gone ? Silly Hamas. They should have done like Bibi and kept the actual plan quiet in cabinet meetings.
Hint: armed resistance against an occupier is legal and encouraged under international law.
>the rockets fired over the years
Yep. Israel did nothing. Didn't shoot children in the head, didn't regularly murder palestinians in prisons, didn't conduct raids on Palestinian territories or encourage settlers to colonize more. Poor little Israel.
>the IRCG commanders statements about a co-ordinated attack from Gaza, southern Lebanon and the West Bank
You regularly bomb another country, and you think that the other country is in the wrong for finding literally any way to make you eat shit ?
> the abhorrent attack of October 7th
A regrettable event and a needless loss of life. I'm not fully sure it justifies a retaliation that causes fifty times more death, destruction and horror, nor will the tribunal that will judge you for your crimes against humanity.
I'm not a genocide scholar, so may be way off the mark here, but imagine a language that only has a few 100 native speakers left. There's one person who really hates them, writes in his diary about how he longs for that culture to cease, and then he murders the only remaining historian or language teacher of that group. Is that attempted genocide? A little bit?
My point isn't "yeah it is" because I don't know, but I'm very certain that I'm still closer to whatever the heart of it is, than sheer "kill volume". We already have a word for massacres and mass murder, and genocide usually comes hand in hand with those and many other crimes, but it's not those crimes.
.. any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group; (check)
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (check)
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (check)
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (check)
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.[8] (check)
Israel is a genocidal, apartheid state and the biggest threat to the stability of the middle east. Whataboutism will not change facts.
