The White House said Sunday that “it’s the right time” for Israel to scale back its military offensive in the Gaza Strip, as Israeli leaders again vowed to press ahead with their operation against the territory’s ruling Hamas militant group.
The comments exposed the growing differences between the close allies on the 100th day of the war.
I’m no defender of the US or anything but I doubt they’d be bombing refugee camps and hospitals.
I get the feeling, given that Israel has killed more civilians in 3 months than the US did in Afghanistan in 20 years, that the US doesn’t go out of its way to deliberately target civilians.
Whats fucked up is the US did kill a lot of civilians too. You can look up interviews with marine Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey who details some really brutal standard oeperating procedures on some of the cities most occupied by the terrorists forces. He describes pulling bodies from cars ‘time and time again’ that turned out to be civilians just trying to flee the city(which is a possible reason why they ignored the US troops warning shot). It’s some horrifying stuff, and what makes me sick is that by the numbers it’s so much worse in Gaza still. I can’t fathom the lack of regard for life it takes to do what Israel is doing, even giving them every benefit of the doubt it looks worse than what the Staff Sergeant admitted to and in his own words called genocide.
While US sponsored military committed atrocities in Afghanistan it served their overall goal to avoid it as much as possible. We have plenty of examples where that wasn’t the case, but generally the US prefers to arm counter-revolutionaries and fascists to do what they do.
They’ll get to those once they are done bombing all the weddings.
was there more than one wedding bombed?
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/us-has-bombed-least-eight-wedding-parties-2001/
Sounds like there’s still a bunch of weddings left to hit if your framing is taken seriously. Seems like they aren’t as comparable to Israel in bloodlust as you imply. Israel got more civilian kills in 3 months than the US got in 20 years in Afghanistan after all.
Bad people and organizations are still bad even if others do worse, you don’t need to falsely equivocate the two.
“Refugee camps” is something of a misleading term when it comes to Gaza. While there are several settlements that did begin decades ago as camps of tents, which is the image the term conjures, at this point they are essentially cities like any other. Due to some unique legal circumstances, a huge chunk of the population of Gaza are legally considered refugees by the UN, but this is a unique status that’s even inheritable by the descendents of the people who originally fled during the establishment of Israel.
This isn’t to defend bombing civilians, to be clear. It’s just that, frankly, it’s difficult to throw a dart at Gaza without hitting what is legally considered a refugee camp.
The valid response to that is not “Oh well, guess lots of civilians are gonna die”, it’s “Shit, guess we can’t bomb the place then.”
My point is that, in this context, “bombing a refugee camp” is not meaningfully different than bombing any other urban environment.
Which is to say, very deadly and terrible and generally a bad idea unless there are literally no other options, which I would say isn’t really the case here.