Nobody serious disputes that Gazan civilians are suffering enormously. The argument isn't about that. It's about whether Hamas represents them, and the answer is: less and less, given that Hamas hasn't held an election since 2006, has siphoned aid money into tunnels and rockets for two decades [1], and on October 7th sent men with garden tools to decapitate Thai agricultural workers [2] and film themselves doing it.
You can condemn Israel's conduct (and there's plenty to condemn) without pretending the people who started this particular escalation were freedom fighters having a bad day.
[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/hamass-october-7-attack-visual...
[2] https://www.nationthailand.com/world/middle-east-africa/4003...
Israel (and I want to be clear, I am referring to Israel the state) has blood on their hands. This went way beyond a "self defense" thing - flattening the entire country, indiscriminate killing of civilians and children, murdering paramedics and bombing ambulances, destroying schools hospitals apartment buildings etc. By a modern democratic state with the most accurate smart weapons available. It's simply unbelievable to me that they are getting away with it.
would be worse, but wasn't contemplated nor attempted so contributes no weight to the balance.
"from the river to the sea" on the other hand is a statement of genocidal intent.
But "wholesale genocide" and "the plan is obviously to drive them into the sea" are stronger claims than the evidence supports right now, and that matters a lot because the moment you overreach, everyone who wants to dismiss Palestinian suffering has a rhetorical exit. The ICJ's own careful language exists for a reason.
None of that touches the original argument anyway: that October 7th was not a "small blip." Israel's conduct after October 8th doesn't retroactively change what happened on October 7th. Both things are true simultaneously. That's the whole point I'm making.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/02/26/israel-not-complying-wor...
What was different this time was that it was Israel who was the victim, not the Palestinians. And the only way that Israel knows how to respond to these kinds of things is to kill and to destroy.
You've just described the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust [1] as a blip because, in your accounting, it was Israel's turn to absorb one.
The "continuum" framing doesn't hold up numerically either. In non-war years, OCHA records roughly 100–200 Palestinian deaths annually at Israeli hands [2]. Hamas killed 1,139 people before lunchtime. That's not a blip in a continuum, it's five to ten years of equivalent deaths in eight hours.
The youngest victim was 14 hours old [3]. The oldest was a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor [3]. None of those facts change based on who you think had it coming.
[1] https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-releases/museu...
[2] https://www.ochaopt.org/content/casualties-thousands-killed-...
[3] https://www.yahoo.com/news/youngest-october-7-victim-just-00...
What they learned was "never again to us".
Just because your family had a holocaust executed against them, doesnt give you any (legal, ethical, moral) right to run your own holocaust.
And Israel is running a holocaust in Palestine, and has been for decades.
"There's a genocide going on in Gaza? Yeah I know, you've been whining about it for years now."
Why isn’t it?
But since you're asking: go up four comments and you'll find it already addressed there in some detail. Keep up.
This is blatantly untrue. There are people who are saying there's no such thing as a "Gazan civilian".
An uncharitable person would easily debunk this by making claims about the idea that 'because of israel they can't have a state to be civilian of' and then the topic gets super muddy because that's technically not true and we go around and around and around.
It's one of the things that could be stopped to prevent us going "around and around and around."