The Israeli rescue service Zaka says its paramedics removed more than 260 bodies from a music festival that came under attack by Hamas militants.

The total figure of bodies found is expected to be higher, as other paramedic teams were also working in the area and Zaka added that the bodies “haven’t all been collected yet”.

Early on Saturday morning, Hamas targeted Nova music festival, a techno rave in the desert near the border with Gaza.

Videos shared on social media and by Israeli news outlets showed dozens of festival-goers running through an open field as gunshots rang out. Many hid in nearby fruit orchards or were gunned down as they fled.

  • e_mc2@feddit.nl
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    1 year ago

    And exactly how does your argument justify these atrocities? This is whataboutism pur sang. Don’t get me wrong, the atrocities Israel has carried out are equally appalling, but that doesn’t justify what happened at that festival. This will likely only weaken the support the Palestinians have in the west.

    • vind@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It doesn’t justify the atrocities, but to immediately drop your support of the Palestinian people due to the acts of a militant group (likely orchestrated by Iran) is just dumb.

      • ubermeisters@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It is what it is. The world needs some semblance of order and you can’t just go fucking killing this many civilians because somebody took your land. It doesn’t work and you can get fucked if this is how you think. Nobody’s saying Israel is the good guy here. Fact is, everyone here sucks, there’s no good guy just a bunch of innocent fucking civilians who don’t deserve any of this on either side.

        • Jaderick@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It is what it is. The world needs some semblance of order and you can’t just go fucking killing this many civilians because somebody took your land.

          So by this logic, Native Americans should’ve just accepted Manifest Destiny?

          The rest of your statement is fine, the first part is stupid.

          Edit: this isn’t support for Hamas’ actions, this is the consequence of Israel’s very real policies and actions that lead to stupid people with a lot of anger targeting civilians

    • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      I just think people talking about killing civilians at a music festival being an atrocity (it is!) were probably really quiet about the regular civilian casualties caused by Israel year after year. In 12 years, the UN counted 5,590 deaths. That’s not 5,590 dead terrorists, but people are acting like the atrocities just started now. I’m very much willing to say “what about”, not because it should make people think this one isn’t horrible, but because they really should answer “what about the other ones you ignored”.

      And one doesn’t even need to go backward. Israel’s already racking up civilian casualties, and you can bet there’s going to be some people who want to keep going until the Palestinian number is much higher than the Israeli number.

      • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Plenty of people, within Israel and outside, care quite a lot about those deaths and also consider them tragedies. You’ll remember that Netanyahu isn’t exactly an uncontroversial figure within Israel.

        That’s why this has been such an incredibly frustrating and disappointing series of events, because any possibility of peace has been thoroughly extinguished now, and Palestinian citizens are going to suffer even more. Hamas of course knew this going into it, and didn’t care because its aim has never been peace for Palestinians, but rather the extermination of all Jews within Israel (as explicitly stated in its founding charter).

        • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          Both Netanyahu and Hamas are probably riding a nice high right now. Both of their political positions improve the more people die on both sides.

          • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            There may be a real rally around the flag effect, but there’s a lot of anger at Netanyahu on the massive military and intelligence failures that made this possible. He may be able to stick around for this conflict, but he’s probably toast afterwards.

            Likud’s entire thing has always been that they’re the ones that can be trusted to keep Israelis safe. That view is now completely shattered.

            • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Perhaps there’s a glimmer of hope then. If a less conservative and radical party takes control, maybe we’ll see an independent Palestinian state that’s allied with Israel and jointly fights Hamas.

              Unfortunately that’s very unrealistic :/. We’ll probably see an even more radical conservative group take power, and make us think Netanyahu was a saint in comparison. :/

              • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                That assumes that there is a sizable portion of Palestinians that want to fight Hamas, and there’s sadly no guarantee of that.

                • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  I know, but I’d like to be optimistic. I’d like to think that becoming an independent state in exchange for helping hunt Hamas would be more than agreeable to them.

                  It saves me from the moral quandary – what if you’re right? What if the people generally support the group :/? I would need evidence to believe it, but I don’t know then. It’s pretty difficult to be neutral about them and not have a thought either way.

                  • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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                    1 year ago

                    The biggest hurdle with that is that it’s essentially been tried. The IDF had occupied Gaza just like it currently does the West Bank until 2005, when they withdrew as a token of goodwill towards peace.

                    Gazans immediately elected Hamas and started launching rockets at Israel. Israel is not going to repeat that.

    • be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Does the graph you just dismissed not make it clear they are absolutely not “equally appalling?”

      Seems to me by the numbers they are far more appalling.

      Edited to add: It does not justify the most recent attack, but it seems bizarre to pretend this is “both sides bad” when it’s “both sides bad, but one side objectively does a lot more bad”

      • drekly@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s because the media is super biased in the UK and US, I assume. The reporting on the BBC has been all about how bad Palestine have been acting but nothing about what Israel is doing to them.

        OF COURSE attacking a music festival is bad. But in context, I’m not fucking surprised they’re lashing out, and with more context, I think most people would feel pretty extremist if they were being killed and pushed out of their homes constantly for almost 100 years.

        But hey the UK/US has to pretend nothing ireal does is wrong because they created this mess.

      • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        but one side objectively does a lot more bad

        This is only true because Israel is good at stopping attacks, not because Hamas isn’t trying.

        Graph intentional attacks targeted at civilians and you’ll get a very different picture. Personally, if someone tried to murder my family but failed, I wouldn’t find them blameless just because they didn’t succeed.

          • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Israel had occupied Gaza like it does the West Bank until 2005 when it withdrew, in hopes that it would lead to peace.

            It was very shortly followed by a barrage of rocket attacks and the current blockade was enacted.

            So, that has been tried. It wasn’t very effective.

            • be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              Honest question because maybe what I think is the answer is not actually the answer.

              How much land does Israel currently occupy that is outside the bounds of what was originally agreed as belonging to them?

              • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                The 1967 borders are the most recent broadly recognized boundaries. After the Six Days War, Israel gained control of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and Gaza.

                As of today, East Jerusalem is a diverse but uneasy mix of Jews and Palestinians. Israel maintains that a unified Jerusalem is its capital, and this is the de facto situation. According to general peace plans, an eventual Palestinian state is meant to have East Jerusalem as its capital, so this is an obvious conflict point.

                The West Bank is divided into three areas: A - administered by the Palestinian Authority, B - jointly administered by the PA and Israel, and C - administered by Israel. Israel has been increasingly building more and more settlements within Area C, which are widely recognized as illegal and being incredibly counter-productive towards peace. The Israelis who move there are often extremely nationalistic and often commit violence against the Palestinians. The IDF routinely conducts operations throughout all areas in order to ostensibly maintain security, though they’ll always prioritize Israeli lives over Palestinians.

                The naive and now utterly hopeless idealistic peace plan is the creation of a Palestinian state consisting of the West Bank and Gaza with a capital in East Jerusalem, with the city being managed by a bi-national coalition of both governments. Israeli settlements within the West Bank would be either abandoned or annexed into Israel with an equal amount of land being swapped from Israel to Palestine. Some kind of stable passage would be created to connect Gaza and the West Bank.

                One issue is that a not-small portion of Israelis believe themselves to be entitled to the entire land by virtue of religion, and see continued settlement of the West Bank as furthering this goal. These people suck and aren’t that much better than Hamas, though they’re not quite as barbaric. The much harder issue is that no Israeli will never allow this solution to happen unless Israel’s security is guaranteed, and there is simply zero trust in that, especially now. Israel will not allow itself to sit next to a state run by terrorists that are hell-bent on killing every Jew in the country.

                On the matter of international law, Israel justifies its actions by accurately stating that no internationally recognized state lays claim to the West Bank - Jordan withdrew all claims in 1967 - and as such they have a right to settle it. Essentially no other countries have recognized that claim, and there has always been a general agreement that the West Bank will form the basis of a future Palestinian state. Israel certainly hasn’t acted in a way that furthers this, but as I said before, its red line is that it will not tolerate security threats to its existence. Militant Palestinian groups attacking Israel only makes peace more and more impossible.

                So long as many Palestinians see the mere existence every Jew in Israel as a crime and a target, Israel will see every Palestinian as a potential threat, and the fact of the matter is that Israel holds the guns.

                • be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social
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                  1 year ago

                  Kbin refuses to let me expand your comment to see anything after the sentence beginning with “the naive and now utterly…”

                  But this isn’t doing much to make me more sympathetic to the Israeli plight, and is more or less what I thought. I assumed I must have been wrong or misinformed, but you seem to have confirmed I really shouldn’t have much sympathy for Israel overall, even if I agree this attack on a music festival seems hard to specifically defend.

                  The West Bank is divided into three areas: A - administered by the Palestinian Authority, B - jointly administered by the PA and Israel, and C - administered by Israel. Israel has been increasingly building more and more settlements within Area C, which are widely recognized as illegal and being incredibly counter-productive towards peace. The Israelis who move there are often extremely nationalistic and often commit violence against the Palestinians.

                  • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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                    1 year ago

                    Weird, I’m also from Kbin. Also unfortunate, given that the rest contains a lot more context.

                    Ultimately though, I think the desire to label one side and fundamentally right and the other wrong is simply far too simplistic to be useful. Anyone interested in peace will criticize both sides as neither has done very much to move towards peace; Israel is just a lot better at protecting its citizens from harm. But fundamentally, peace will be impossible so long as Israel’s safety is threatened, and any acts that threaten that only make peace impossible.