By Alice Cuddy BBC News, Jerusalem
The call to Mahmoud Shaheen came at dawn.
It was Thursday 19 October at about 06:30, and Israel had been bombing Gaza for 12 days straight.
He’d been in his third-floor, three-bedroom flat in al-Zahra, a middle-class area in the north of the Gaza Strip. Until now, it had been largely untouched by air strikes.
He’d heard a rising clamour outside. People were screaming. “You need to escape,” somebody in the street shouted, “because they will bomb the towers”.
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You can be anti-Hamas without needing to be pro-Israel, though
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I don’t have a solution. I’m half a planet away, and geopolitics is not my field. I’m not a world leader, nor a military strategist, or anything that would qualify me to make a decision or have an informed answer.
I might be a spineless fence-sitter, but I don’t like what Israel is doing, and I don’t like what Hamas is doing. For that reason, I wouldn’t call myself pro-Israel or pro-Hamas.
Do you think the number or recruits increased or decreased after incessantly murdering innocent civilians?
I just want to ask also, how do you stop more Hamas by killing people? You don’t. The Hydra effect will guarantee that any one terrorist killed will breed two more. Yesterday my partner looked at me and said, “If Israel had killed my entire family, I would probably join Hamas”, and he’s an atheist and a Brit who learned most of what he learned about Hamas this year.
What Israel is doing is creating more opportunities for massacre in the future. I am not sure why, but I’m convinced there is a genocidal agenda here.
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Yes Hamas is a terror organization, no, that does not allow you to behave like a terror organization when fighting them.
If you have read the article this is not about innocents which where at the wrong place a the wrong time. This article is about deliberate destruction of civilian buildings without giving any justification besides ‘There are some things that we see that you don’t see.’ in some cases evacuation was allowed, in some cases no time for evacuation was given. There is in my eyes no justification for this.
I never said that Israel should stand idle. So don’t push that opinion on me.
What could be done? Attack military targets only, give civilians time to evacuate. (Yes a civilian home becomes a military target if it is used as weapons stash/factory, but there was no indication at all in the cases listed in the article), support the more moderate Fatah in regaining control. Support new democratic elections. Provide help in forms primarily targeted at civilians: Food, water, education. Allow students from the Gaza Strip to study abroad. Part of that is already done, but hampered by the military actions.
Destroying peoples homes and basic utilities will only ensure that hate on Israel grows and support for Hamas remains steady.
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Did israel bomb the south of Gaza after telling people to go south or not?
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But should Israel kill all these civilians for “revenge” or what exactly is their plan in your opinion?
This is the thing that gets me - what would you do if someone barricaded themselves inside a house next door, kept taking pot shots and you and stealing people off the street? I would shoot back.
That analogy breaks down when you’re the guy that locked them in the house.
Until you realise you locked them in the house after them and their friends tried to take your back yard when you were having a domestic with your partner, and a founding part of their cult is that you need to die.
(Hamas not cult, just analogy)
Israel is literally the one stealing backyards, and when it can’t, it bombs them.
Not just the backyards, but the front and side yards too
Nah if we’re gonna continue this analogy, it’s like if you come across a village of 50 people then force everyone into one house so you can have your friends move into the other houses. Then 1 of those 50 starts shooting at you. So then you drop a grenade in the house, kill a bunch of their kids and shoot their dog.
And would kill 10 innocents in the house just to get to that one guy?
Honestly, probably.
So how are you any better than the terrorist you condemn, by openly admitting you are ready to shoot 10 civilians? At what number of civilians do you make the cut 20, 50, 100, 500, 1000?