This is obviously veering way off course of the topic of AI at this point, but I imagine the residents of kibbutz be'eri and the 100+ hostages still held in Gaza would disagree that Isreal is fighting for "basically no reason." I'm interested in analysis and criticism of Israel's use of AI in this case but suggesting Israel has no causus belli is absurd.
I never understood why the argument that only war can bring hostages back, or that it is the most reliable way, was allowed to be propagated in public for so long.
> but I imagine the residents of kibbutz be'eri and the 100+ hostages still held in Gaza would disagree that Isreal is fighting for "basically no reason."
On the contrary, I think that those exact people would agree the most.
Do you think that they do not wish that Israel did a hostage exchange instead of starving and bombing them together with their captors?
To bring the "low hanging fruit" example, do you think that the three hostages who were waving white flags nearly entirely naked, and who were subsequently murdered by the IDF; do you think that they or their families prefer(preferred) this devastation that lead to their deaths instead of a simple hostage exchange?
What do you think would happen if IDF killed most of Hamas and had their last few forces cornered with no escape, and were getting close to them? Do you think the hostages would not be killed by either their captors or by IDF as collateral damage in such a scenario?
Claims that the systematic destruction of Gaza and genocide(-lite?) serves the goal of bringing back the hostages is such an obvious cover for bloodthirst that it is honestly intellectually-insulting to keep reading it over and over again.
> the argument that only war can bring hostages back
The war has explicilty been about removing Hamas from power for a while now. To the degree there is opposition within Israel to the war, it's in the hostage-retrieval prerogative having been subsumed.
In 1999 Yugoslavia killed ~12 thousand Albanians and displaced ~85 thousand more. Bill Clintons secretary of defense had no problem calling that genocide: "The appalling accounts of mass killing in Kosovo and the pictures of refugees fleeing Serb oppression for their lives makes it clear that this is a fight for justice over genocide.". This led NATO to drop bombs on Yugoslavia [0].
In this conflict Israel has killed ~31 thousand Palestinians and displaced ~2.3 million more [1]. For all its tough talk the Biden administration has responded by selling Israel jet planes [2].
I'm not saying bombing Yugoslavia was justified. But there is plenty of historical precedent to call this conflict genocide.
I, at least, had sources. I tried looking evidence of this new fact about Yugoslavia you presented but could not find any.
It was called the Kosovo war. Why can we not compare the two? They seem VERY comparable to me.
But if Wikipedia and Al Jazeera are not good enough for you then you will see the following orgs also posted these numbers: NPR [0], BBC [1], NYTimes [2]. And if your worried those numbers are inflated there is an article in the Lancet that shows if anything it is the opposite [3].
It sounds like you are unaware on the attack on Israel in October that intentionally killed about 1.5k civilians of which the current action is the consequence.
It's hard to speculate on the circumstances of their deaths given there is no reliable independent reporting on it, but I'll give it a go as you asked.
Certainly starving civilians are being killed by the IDF. I'd be shocked if some of the deaths aren't related to self-defence. Given there look to be credible reports of the IDF operating kill zones, and allowing on the ground soldiers to set their own rules of engagement, as well as making it generally clear it's little issue in collateral deaths it's difficult to have much empathy with those numbers.
A number will be attributable to friendly fire and accident too. It wouldn't surprise me if that's a significant proportion, potentially the majority given the level of sniping, significant munitions and general anarchy.
Finally, I'm sure some are as a direct result of actual engagement with Hamas.
Any reporting by the IDF is obviously security checked propoganda, filtered through multiple levels of approvals and inspection.
That figure was corrected a number of months back to 1.2k was it not. The most accurate figure I've seen stated is 11,600, although it doesn't seem to be in widespread use, although the 1,200 figure is often caveated.
The total isn't all civilians. No official figures have been released on the split is my understanding.
It's also not clear how many are attributable to Israel's response, but it's clearly non-zero and may well be a significant proportion.
OP didn't say Israel is fighting for basically no reason.
You're twisting their words, I'll assume out of a misreading. Read the comment again. They clearly said that there's no good reason to bomb Gaza the way that they have been doing, resulting in the murder of thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of civilians.
There is a great reason for doing it: nothing else has worked.
Unilateral withdrawal from Gaza led to the tripling of rocket attacks. Multiple peace offers have been rejected. Limited Israeli retaliation and extensive international aid has meant the Palestinian civilian population is sufficiently insulated from the violence that they have no incentive to demand peace from their leaders.
When Palestine was sending children as suicide bombers, Israel decided to play defense and built walls that dramatically lowered the efficacy of suicide bombings. So the Palestinians switched to rockets. So Israel again played defense and built the iron dome. So Hamas switched to Oct. 7th. Do you think they should play defense again?
Tell me: what peace offer do you think Israel could make the Palestinians that would lead to a lasting peace? Tell me: if Israel surrendered unconditionally to the Palestinians, would the Israelis live in peace?
You don't get to massacre tens of thousands of people because they fight back against brutal occupation and repeated massacres, then paint yourself as the victim.
The world's eyes are open. We've seen what happened to those WCK aid workers; to Hind Rajab, to Reem and Taleb, and all the others. We've seen the mosques, churches, hospitals destroyed, and the wilful, wanton disregard of international law and basic decency.
What Israel has done over the last six months hasn't made Israelis safer, nor Jews. These atrocities won't ever be forgotten.
There has been no period in the past nearly 100 years[0] when these two groups have not been fighting. I'm not assigning anyone "victim" status. I'm saying Israel is trying to end the conflict, and has run out of other options.
What happened to trigger the events of last October which in turn triggered this.
Hamas had the run of Gaza and could have built whatever society they wanted there. They used that chance to built up for explicitly slaughtering civilians instead.
To dismantling Hamas and armed resistance from Palestinians? Stop ethnically cleansing the West Bank and remove the boot from their necks so that people in Gaza see that there is a better way and that going down fighting is not the only choice.
Plenty of alternatives to death and destruction when those are not the actual goal itself. Of course those alternatives do not go hand in hand with the idea of an ethnically-cleansed Greater Israel, so here we are.
All that is just an internet search away, and provides an endless list. Let us ignore the major bombings of Gaza in 2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021, 2022. How about the following few:
You mix Gaza and West Bank and conveniently ignore the fact that each of those bombings in Gaza came after indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians.
