>Independent 3rd parties were brought in to verify, though.

Reuters was given an IDF escort as they were walked through the tunnel system, during which a room with some servers was called a Hamas data centre, and they nodded along. That's not quite the same thing.

>Lots of the footage in the early days of the war that was claimed to be from Gaza was actually recycled from the Syrian civil war.

Lots of footage that Hamas or advocates for Palestine released or Twitter randos? Not all of those things are equivalent to Israel making a claim.

Can you link to those reports?

I don't think Hamas started it, but they definitely escalated it.

Oh, I didn’t know that the whole conflict started on October 6th.

One side is governed by a death cult for sure, if you look at how many children they indiscriminately kill.

About 700 israeli civilians were killed, out of which an unknown number was killed by the IDF. Quite a few, if the large amount of hellfired cars are anything to go by, and the kibbutzim inhabitants weren't very happy about being shelled by tanks.

Are you referring to the jewish israelis by "death cult"?

The difference between Hamas and Israel is the magnitude of effect. And that for most of the war one party had much more capacity to change its course than the other. But either way criticism of the semantics and focus of media just seems irrelevant and overly abstract. It focuses too much on the group and not enough on the individual. Which drags the argument into the realm that ethno-nationalists of either side occupy. Death is always a tragedy and unnecessary killing is immoral. Anything deeper than that stinks of ignorance and is grotesque.

Here I thought leaving reddit would provide a break of low quality bait, yet here we are.

Even then, Gaza is far more dense than Grozny; almost certainly the Grozny campaign was conducted with far more deliberate indifference to any concept of morality.

What Israel is doing is genocide. The International Association of Genocide Scholars say so https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS... . Is there anyone who is arguing, in ”good faith” as you say, that the atrocities of October 7th were a genocide?

You could say that about Israel too you know. The other side just. Won’t. Stop. Attacking. Israelis can’t stop sniping children.

The fact that I just spent five minutes thinking about it proves that it's not ridiculous at all. The scale is different (so far), but I’m not convinced there’s a qualitative difference.

The only thing stopping Israel from doing that is international outrage. Israel is entirely dependent on its benefactor states like the US and, while it pushes the limits to the extreme, must at least contend with world opinion.

maybe because they are trying to act ethically toward a murderous neighbor that is conducting asymmetric warfare and those are the best tools to accomplish that.

or, maybe because they came to the conclusion that the repercussions on the world stage of even more horrific media coming out of Gaza is too steep of a price to pay.

i don't know which, but i do know it is naive to conclude that because they COULD end the war in a day and did not, they are driven by morality and ethical concerns rather than pragmatic ones.

because it would be admitting to the world that it has said weapons.

Israel has always said it doesn't have nuclear weapons. They would have absolutely zero sympathy going forward from any major nation if they decided to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza, and they want that land so rendering that land uninhabitable might not be a good idea.