#or the video of what they did to Shani Louk’s body

[labelma]

The next chapter I have to write for my fic involves two characters being held hostage and tortured, and the thought of writing that right now makes me want to throw up.

I just saw the bodycam footage released of those five girls being taken and tortured by Hamas. How can I write about my favorite characters being held hostage, tortured, and eventually rescued, when 128 of my people are still being held and tortured with no end in sight? Shani Louk never got to be rescued.

Who am I to be writing fanfiction when there are still children being held hostage? It so easily could have been me. Had I been closer to Gaza, had Hamas made it to Jerusalem. But instead I’m in my apartment in Jerusalem, and there are girls younger than me who have been in hell for seven months.

I’m not giving up on the fic, I know writing it is my way of coping, I just feel like I need to acknowledge somehow the unfairness of it all. I wish my people could be rescued as easily as my characters.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Dahlia Lithwick, Masua Sagiv

he casual verbal slippage between war photojournalism and crime scene photography is manifest in another simple trick: In announcing the AP’s win, the award organizers reposted the unblurred image of Louk on their Instagram page but neglected to include her name. Her name did, however, appear in the prize announcement on the award website, in which the chosen caption says it all:

Heavy Israeli airstrikes on the enclave has killed thousands of Palestinians. Palestinian militants drive back to the Gaza Strip with the body of Shani Louk, a German-Israeli dual citizen, during their cross-border attack on Israel, Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023.

That caption reorders the sequence of events, as if the subsequent bombing of Gaza were the cause of the cross-border attack. In this telling, these militants found themselves with a half-naked female “body” in the bed of their truck in some accident of war. It distorts the fact that Louk was murdered during a cease-fire and her corpse taken as bounty. Deliberately conflating Hamas’ sexual violence, kidnappings, and burning of women and children with acts of combat gives away the game from the start. However you opt to perceive it, an atmosphere that celebrates this image sets back decades of international legal advances recognizing the dignity and rights of women.

Perhaps the photo merits an award by sensitively capturing the plight of the victims of Oct. 7? That was the line the AP’s vice president of corporate communications, Lauren Easton, gave following international outrage about the prize. “Documenting breaking news events around the world—no matter how horrific—is our job,” she said. “Without AP and other news organizations, the world would not have known what was happening on Oct. 7.” But that is also untrue. In this case, the perpetrators filmed their own acts in viral videos captured on GoPros and livestreamed them to the world, screaming “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is great!”) and driving through the streets. In other instances such footage was shared with the victims’ families using the victims’ own phones. One could well ask whether we should consider a journalistic image of one of the most photographed violent pogroms in modern history to constitute essential newsgathering or whether we should instead regard it as prurient rubbernecking. Yet the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute saw fit to reward the impulse with a prize.

Images of war can be aimed at producing empathy for the victim or anger and disgust toward the perpetrators (or both). Indeed, most of the photos that garnered this prestigious prize do just that. This photograph does neither. The victim, Louk, is an object, almost illegible as a person, reduced by her captors to a trophy. The perpetrators delight in that fact. Most remarkable about the picture is the extent to which it manages to simultaneously deny the crime and celebrate it. On its face, the photo and the caption accompanying it evince no interest at all in how she came to be a “body,” instead observing the time-honored adage invoked whenever a female victim is involved: ���She deserved it.”

[al-kol-eleh]

I haven't watched this, but pay attention to the title. "Growing Evidence of Hamas' Sexual Crimes Against Women During the Attack, Israeli Investigators Say"

There has been evidence of sexual crimes during the October 7th attack from the very beginning provided by Hamas themselves. What else can you reasonably call the footage of Shani Louk's naked body being spit on in the streets? Naama Levy barefoot, and being dragged by her hair with her pants soaked in blood? Noa Argamani screaming in terror as she's being abducted on a motorcycle? As soon as bodies started to be recovered there were reports of women and girls whose pelvises were broken and whose genitals and internal organs were mutilated. There were videos of interrogations where captured terrorists admitted to raping women-I believe one man expressly said "dirty them". The IDF screened footage captured from the terrorists' GoPro cameras. There were survivor testimonies.

And what did you do?

When the euphoria of "resistance" wore off you alternated between denying every piece of evidence, claiming that if any rapes did occur they were justified, and most despicably accusing the victims of racism. Video evidence of dead women unclothed from the waist down meant nothing, you insisted on seeing them raped on camera or else claiming atrocity propaganda. (Too bad for you; our sisters' agony is not your porn.) UNWomen waited nearly 60 days before offering one of the most tepid responses in history that managed to add insult to injury by making it about all women Israeli and Palestinian. (Yes, men who gang rape women are probably likely to rape a little closer to home. We've been saying that.) So, no, you don't get to present this as though it is a new and developing story. You don't get to present this as finally coming to light. The evidence has been there from day one. We have been talking and then screaming about this for two months before you deigned to notice. You are not the heroes.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

[ Full video: https://youtu.be/5Ad77jEdZDY ]

The scenes from before the festival radiated love and kindness. That 10-second clip of Shani Louk dancing, you watch it and you think, this is what they fought for.

And then there's the image of Shani Louk on the back of that truck and the one of her being dragged through the streets of Gaza, thousands cheering and running after her desecrated body. Can you even imagine a starker contrast of good versus evil? It was joy, love, life versus violence, rape and death. Surely, I thought in my naivete, the left would see themselves reflected in these music-loving young people who looked like they had stepped out of the Haight Ashbury in the 70s. Surely Noa Argamani begging for her life as the butchers ride off with her would Inspire in the left a sense of identification and a corresponding sense of fear and anger. How could it not?

Friends it did not. Leftist women found nothing in their hearts to say about it for months. There was a total failure of the international feminist community to stand up for the Israeli women who had been brutalized by Hamas in a particularly sexual way. Despite the preponderance of evidence, there was a code of cilence from the usual suspects. Some would even deny it. YouTube personalities formed what I like to call an "Our Hamas Would Never" Brigade to defend the butchers and the rapists from the evidence of their crimes, insisting it was all war propaganda.

Now this would be bad enough. But you have to remember, these women, these publications, these YouTube personalities, you have to remember who they are. These aren't people who, in general, feel that one should have a high standard of evidence before making an accusation of rape. The exact opposite is true. These are the people who demanded that all standards around evidence for accusations of sexual assault be completely suspended. These are the people who demanded that a standard of affirmative consent be deployed to judge whether a woman had consented to sex, and without that affirmation, any sexual encounter was to be deemed rape.

These are the people who recoded bad sex as rape, sex one regretted as rape, flirtation as harassment, regrettable kissing as assault. And then they turned around and said, well does shooting nails into a woman's vagina truly count as rape? Does chopping off a woman's breasts really count as a sexual war crime? Would our Hamas, who after all are very religious people, ever rape anybody?

Never mind that Hamas had filmed themselves committing these atrocities, had bragged about themm had GoProed them and sent the images to these women's families, never mind that they had little booklets with helpfully translated phrases into Hebrew like, take off your pants. The left was silent, the feminists were AWOL.

How could this possibly be? How could it be that just six years after the MeToo movement, which gave voice to the outrage women felt at being sexually harassed at work, which upended gender relations and wreaked havoc on workplace after workplace because men had complimented their female co-workers, how could it be that these same women who demanded "believe all women" could turn around and say, actually don't believe the confessions of terrorist rapists? The same women who demanded men be fired for asking women out and driven from public life for having consensual sex with underlings, were now defending, with their words or with their silence, the mass rape of Israeli women, siding with men who had driven nails into women's vaginas and cut off their breasts to play with them. The same women and organizations who turned flirting at the office into the civil rights issue of our time, when presented with evidence of the mass rape of Jewish women immediately began to say, we need more context, we need more evidence, remember the plight of the true victims here, who it turned out, were the perpetrators.

They took their standard of "believe all women" and turned it on a dime to "don't believe the bragging of rapists" because their victims were Jews. And this isn't just on the leftist fringe unfortunately. On CNN Dana Bash asked Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, who I believe is the head of the progressive caucus, she said to her, "I have seen a lot of progressive women generally speaking that are quick to defend women's rights and speak out against using rape as a weapon of war, but downright silent on what we saw on October 7th and what might be happening inside Gaza right now to these hostages."

"Why is that?" she asked Pramila Jayapal. To which Jayapal replied, "I think that rape is horrific. Sexual assault is horrific. I think that it happens in war situations. Terrorist organizations like Hamas obviously are using these as tools. However, I think we have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against the Palestinians. 15,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air strikes, three quarters of whom are women and children," she said. Because "Our Hamas Would Never" lie about such a thing.

Meanwhile, the New York Times, which had an extensive article outlining the mass rapes, then shelved an episode of its popular podcast "The Daily" about the rapes due to internal pressure from its leftist newsroom, which apparently is chock full of members of the "Our Hamas Would Never" Brigade. the New York Times refused to stand by its own reporting when its sociopathic woke employees demanded that their audience be protected from knowing about this.

How is this happening? It's easy say this is just antisemitism. And I want to be clear: of course it's deeply fucking antisemitic. There's also the political calculation of trying to satisfy multiple constituencies and the fact that, and I think this is very important, the women's movement has been severely weakened by the transgender agenda, which has gotten women used to being asked to defend transgender rapists, for example in prisons, or transgender athletes beating up women in sports. I think that being forced to defend this has had a huge impact on the women's movement.

But it goes beyond that to the core of leftist ideology, which is built on a belief system that has erased the difference between right and wrong. Now, this belief system is one you will know well if you have been to a university in the last 40 years, or an American newsroom or on Tik Tok or in a meeting with any cultural institution in America, or any progressive organization including any liberal Jewish organization, or if you're on the board of a museum, or even in a writer's room in Hollywood.

People call it Critical Race Theory or Marxism or Social Justice. I call it Wokeness. Wokeness is when you take a worldview that was once based on the difference between right versus wrong, virtue versus evil, and you replace it with a worldview that does not distinguish between right versus wrong, but instead suggests that the world is built on the primary binary of powerful versus powerless. They ascribe inherent virtue to those they see as powerless and evil to those they see as powerful and they superimpose some characteristic onto the binary, whether it's race or gender or sexuality or national origin or religion, rendering all people, for example who they see as "people of color" powerless and oppressed and thus virtuous, and all white people powerful oppressors who are inherently evil and compromised.

This woke worldview absolutely dominates the left which means it dominates the cultural and intellectual output of the United States these days. Once our Elites were eager to offend the powers that be with their art and their scholarship or their journalism. Now they will conform at all costs. And the thing they conform to is the view that "people of color" are inherently virtuous no matter what they do, because they have no agency and are oppressed and marginalized, while white people are inherently evil, the root of everything bad and responsible for any ills that befall us. This is the source of 21st century leftist antisemitism. Every Jew is is coded as white, and thus they are the oppressors and thus they are bad, and every Palestinian is coded as a "person of color" and thus oppressed and thus inherently virtuous.

And that includes Hamas. Every Palestinian outranks every Jew on the oppression scale, and thus any Palestinian in conflict with any Jew is the one the left must side with. The Jew has all the agency and is the oppressor and the Palestinian has no agency and is the oppressed. Anything bad that happens between them must ergo be the Jew's fault because you cannot blame someone with no agency for anything. They are an innocent, like a child. To the woke, the less powerful has no responsibility to act ethically because their rank on the oppression scale means they cannot act at all. And thus they are inherently imbued with virtue no matter what they do.

Their abjection is their virtue and that goes for the terrorists among them as well. Because to the woke, "people of color" have no agency, when a so-called "person of color" commits a heinous act against a so-called white person, the agency of their actions must be reassigned to their victims, who have agency.

What this means is that when a Palestinian rapes a Jewish woman, the agency was her. It was not his. She remains the oppressor. His act was her fault and her suffering does not release her from the burden of her status as oppressor, even in death. That is why leftist feminists cannot side with raped Israeli women. To do so is to betray everything they believe.

They truly see the Israeli women as deserving of everything that happened to them and having brought it on themselves. Like the conservatives of yore who blamed rape on the miniskirt worn by the victim, the left today blames the fact that Israel has more power than Hamas for everything Hamas does. They simply cannot think their way out of seeing Hamas as virtuous, because to do so would be to admit that their entire worldview is not only wrong but is fucking disgusting.

-

"There's nothing more delicious than pretending to be good while acting in a sadistic manner." -- Nina Power

[wanderrnest]

@mercurialcreatur3 Answering here because it was too long for replays on the previous post i reblogged. sorry for my English.

What you said is the most painful to me. People walk among us after they went through these unspeakable horrors, and people still find ways to deny or underestimad it. This is equivalent to Holocaust denial for us. Except now, unlike Nazi Germany, even Hamas terrorists themselves filmed things and uploaded them, sometimes even to victims' social media. There are photos and videos that I wish wouldn't be true, but they are. When there's a terrorist investigation where he said they were told to murder, behead, and rape. There are videos of sexual assault. They found sexual assault evidence on dead bodies. I'm choosing not to go more graphic, but there is so much more graphic. Many people can't tell you what happened because they're dead, like entire families; we won't hear their stories (again painfully similar to the Holocaust, where in some cases there was not one left to tell); they only left butchered bodies behind them, but even that is not enough. read on shani louk, it's one exapmle out of many. look on Hadas Kalderon that her mother and niece were murderd and her two children are kidnapped in gaza without her. they uploded one thing to her daugther's tik tok - "goodbye". it's diffrenet when you know the faces and you hear the first hand stories.

Hamas is a terror organization; it thrives on propaganda. You are fed with propaganda about Israel that comes straight from their scripted messages and false information and the dehumanizing of israelis and jews. The amount of misinformation in the pro-Palestinian circles and the Muslim world is truly off the charts. Israel did not use photos of Palestinian children. Hamas burned babies and beheaded and raped Jewish people and paraded with their bodies. It's a fact; it's documented; people saw it. i can't even think about making this up because it's too terrible to even be imagined; it's hard for me to even say it. It's people's families! I can't believe I have to try to convince a fellow Jewish person that it's not a lie, that innocent Jews actually were brutally murdered. It may seem hard to believe, and you refuse to believe the photos, but is it really that hard to believe when it's literally their declared written goal? Slaughter Jews? c'mon What else do you need? why would you choose to believe the messages of a terror organization?

Yes, she said they treated her nicely; she's like 85. I'm so glad she is physically unharmed, and I believe she wisely managed to interact with them (which to me, shows more about her humanity than theirs, since kindapping a 85 years old or breaking into a house of an old lady and holding a grenade up her head (different story of rachel adri) pretty much cancels ones humanity. not to mention shooting elders in the head. I guess some of them were interactable (also, please don't forget that her HUSBAND is still there, which might be a reason for her words). but it doesn't make their crimes against humanity any less terrible, it doesn't bring back 1,400 people who are brutally murdered. they didn't treat nicely the other elders they shot, the women they raped and murdered, the babies they burned or beheaded, and the children that are still held in Gaza. their morals are entiraly diffrenet then ours in ways we cannot comprehend. they justfiy and call to do all those things to jewish people, in all ages, including rape.

Those people also understood really quickly that bragging about all their horrifying acts wouldn't give them the West support that they love, they are not stupid, so they try to minimize damage, and it's working.

As much as I'm not a fan of the Israeli government (before it all happened, I protested against it every week; again, a leftist), and I'm the last one to defend it, but this is still not some version of Russia with fake news and censorship. We are a small country with a mandatory army, where everyone knows someone who knows someone who's been affected, who was there in some way or another, during or after. Our media is still free and diverse. Please believe me; I know what happened an hour's drive from where I live. If the TV news leaves out details, and it does, it's in order to keep us sane because the ideas are too much to handle and are feared to cause massive hysteria, but everyone knows anyway. Sometimes it's even scarier to watch the news reporter knows something but stops themselves from giving the details because it's too terrible to air on TV.

Honestly, there is so much evidence and testimonies and there will be so much more. i hope that even if not now, one day you'll understand the horrors; I don't know what else will make you believe after all that. I understand you are for the weak now, but if we were weak now, we wouldn't be alive. We were weak on October 7th, and we aren't going to be weak again. Gaza could've been free without the terror organization that rules it. That was the intention from the beginning when Israel withdrew completely from Gaza, giving Palestinians autonomy. Once it got controlled by a terror organization, it naturally got complicated and violent. But we can't protect them from their own now; I'm sorry. We'll have to protect our people from being murdered. we have no way of "freeing" anyone without sentencing our own death (casual reminder of the sea of muslim countries around us, that wouln't miss a chance to join our destraction). And it feels like it's comfortable to you as a Jew that doesn't live in Israel to underestimate this need and join your friend by judging from afar, but you aren't in this danger. anyway i hope you won't be beacuse antisemitism is getting worse and worse everyday.

But if you'd be here, and these horrors were at your doorstep, believe me you'd understand the need to defend yourself. that's why i'm so anxiously try to make you understand. Israel is not comitting genocide, i'll say it again and again. it fights a terror organization thet hides behind their civillians, and it would not have done that if this terror organization stopped murdering israelis. we have no interst in killing palestinians just because they are palestinians. none.

this is the propaganda.

and if anyone from our dozens of neighbor muslim countries truly cared about palestinians and not just interested in destroying us and the western values, they would actually help them and not encourage hamas.

This comes from a leftist who, until very recently, believed wholeheartedly in a two-state solution. i don't know what i think now.

[adhdnojutsu]

The difference between people from the Arab peninsula colonizing and isreal, is that they aren't broadcasting their war crimes like the idf is. There's no racist ass TikToks that mock the people being genocided. isreal does that.

Not that I'm agreeing with what you insist arabs are doing, but plenty of fucked up shit happens in every country. isreal is uniquely fucked up and sick with its propaganda.

Besides, looking back at the area, the Indigenous people were Caaninates, who are both ancestors of Palestinians and Israelis.

Bloody Balfour was a british colonizer, and a treaty breaker. Herzl, and Jabotinsky even referred to the Arabs as natives and Jewish people from europe as colonizers. The founders of isreal said it themselves. They are colonizing the land.

Indigenous people with a true connection to the land wouldn't rip out Indigenous olive trees.

I'm opposed to all state hoods and hierarchies. What you call naive, I call forward thinking. I will not live to see a world without hierarchy, but I'll fight for one anyway.

This is in response to your question on twit

"They don't broadcast their crimes" did you miss all the videos and photos Hamas took? I mean, of course you did, they'd shake your worldview. Though you can't tell me you really missed the image of Shani Louk's abused body surrounded by grinning savages.

But just in case you did miss something, here's examples of "Arabs not broadcasting their war crimes".

And did you miss the part where Israel is fighting in Gaza in the digital age and the Arab world didn't have broadcasting services when they colonized the land?

And aside from ALL ARMIES having criminal cases like the IDF, who, unlike Hamas, investigates and regularly jails its soldiers rather than just saying "Yeah things kinda got out of hand", none of that invalidates Israel's right to exist. As long as the Kingdom of Israel predates Mandatory Palestine, Israel's right to exist trumps Palestine's.

Also, it's not a genocide. Genocide has the intention to eradicate a people, this is not the case here or else Israel wouldn't have 2 million thriving Palestinian citizens and be sending goods and money into the territories whenever it's safe to do so. Urban warfare has extremely high casualty counts. Everywhere, always. Gaza is densely populated and hard to flee, hence those numbers. It's horrible, but it's not genocide.

Since genocide is defined by intent, every missile Hamas fires at Jews is an act of genocide. I don't care about their charter. Actions over words. Likewise, what a few radical Israelis say is irrelevant as long as the Palestinian population is growing rather than shrinking.

Balfour, Jabotinsky etc. are also 100% irrelevant. As long as Jews, as a whole, are indigenous to Canaan, Judea, Israel, Palestine, whatchamacallit, Jews are entitled to calling that land their home, founders be damned. This whole argument of "your leaders were from such and such European country" is like saying "America had a Black president, so it's a Black, post-racism country". The vast majority of Israelis, some 61%, are of immediate Middle Eastern heritage, and since Jews in ME diaspora were persecuted, people weren't dumb enough to mass-convert to Judaism, so those Middle Eastern Jews mostly descend from exiled indigenous "Canaanite" Jews. And just because many got bleached in Euopean diaspora doesn't erase their roots, either. Even 500 generations later, if they can retrace their lineage to Israel, they get to call it theirs.

And no, Palestinians do not descend from Canaanites for the most part. The spike in population following the conquest of Gaza and the West Bank proves a significant portion of them is Jordanian, Egyptian, and as their own commander Zuheir Mohsen admits, from other surrounding countries.

And miss me with the olive trees, when the first thing Hamas did when they took power, was destroy greenhouses in the Gaza strip because "Jews built them". Also did you see the immense animal abuse at Gaza "zoo".

Measuring indigeneity by the treatment of nature is insane when Israel was the one to introduce drip irrigation to turn deserts into farmland and planted whole forests, and you're here talking about a specific bunch of hillbillies committing acts of vandalism. It's not about the trees, it's asshole zealots taking their hatred of Arabs out on their property, be that olive trees or cars or livestock. It's no deeper than that and the fact that you'd rather talk about that than about amply documented mass rapes by the people YOU want to be indigenous, speaks volumes.

[goodluckdetective]

*sigh*

Gang, please cite your sources. There is some real info here (the babies report though I will say, unlike OP implies, babies and kids did die in the attack. However the beheaded rumors were untrue and racist). The top two posts might be real or fake, but I couldn’t find reports on either from any news source and that includes ones outside Western interests (I combed through Al Jazeera and if i find it, I’ll update this. I’m not debunking these OR confirming them. So don’t take this post as an argument either way.) However some of this stuff is debunked with like one Google search.

She was found dead just this morning. I can’t fault OP for not knowing this at the time of posting but they’re framing (she’s alive and totally safe) is disingenuous.

And while the mass rapes claim is false and racist, sexual assault did happen. While folks (rightfully) don’t trust the IDFs word, they released body cam footage of Hamas fighters that was watched by international news orgs. (And before someone says it, yes the fact the video was released by the IDF means it has obvious bias, however it’s ludicrous to say none happened). I think it’s fair to put this claim down as a mix of truth and false: the scale of which is unknown but claiming either extreme is false.

Now before anyone accuses me of supporting Israel War crimes let me be explicitly clear: I don’t. What the government of Israel is doing Palestinians is an atrocity, apartheid and covers multiple war crimes. I support Palestinian’s right to freedom.

However, I don’t have to lie to do that. Two things can be true at once: the government of Israel has done and continues to do horrific things to Palestinians and they have reacted violently to non-violent protest. They are currently killing the people of Palestinian indiscriminately (with mass punishment which is a war crime) and have in the past. That’s a fact. Also, Hamas appears to have killed people in-mass indiscriminately on October 7th. That also is a fact. Scale and firepower is obviously different, but both events are real.

And one fact among all that OP seemed to miss: Palestinians are not fucking Hamas. They’re people who need help right now. And when you make these posts trying to erase real atrocities by Hamas (which echoes a lot of antisemitic narratives that Jewish people are “liars” working in a “mass conspiracy”)and equating them to Palestinians you are literally making the same equillivance fucking Bibi is making.

Anyway, I’m a white American and thus I don’t want to speak about this more than a fact check because you really should listen to those this impacts (and if anyone has more information for me or something I got wrong in this post PLEASE let me know. I’m only responding to this because this seemed egregious and I couldn’t find someone who already fact checked it.). So here are some a link to a well accredited Charity providing medical care to those in Gaza, here’s a link on how to contact your reps if you’re an American and here’s a link to an upcoming protest to put pressure on the government to call for a ceasefire.

"noticing a lot of the propaganda about alleged atrocities committed by Palestinians in this attack being retracted lately while at the same time I've seen news of Palestinians providing reassurance and safe passage to frightened Israeli women and children it's real funny how that works"

[old-school-butch]

The evidence of rape that I saw was sourced from Hamas fighters, many who were equipped with chest cams and live streaming during the Oct 7 attack. I would be banned for posting links to any of the footage on here, but the videos still circulate on Telegram. Shani Louk's body was paraded through Gaza naked from the waist down and with both of her legs broken, there's other videos of Hamas fighters sorting women to rape or take hostage, encouraging other men to join them and take whatever they wanted including Israeli women, and yet others videos of hostages being forced onto motorcycles with blood stained pants. I'm not sure why any feminist finds it hard to believe men do bad things when they get a chance. Israel has this footage too and are using those images to locate the men who did this to press criminal charges.

Yes, Hamas leaders are billionaires. The fighters aren't exactly 'barely armed'. Israel has seized over 10,000 RPGs, mines, sniper rifles, drones, thermobaric rockets, and other advanced weapons smuggled into Gaza. Hamas makes as many rockets as they can make by ripping up the water pipes. The initial volley on Oct 7 was around 5000 rockets fired in 20 minutes, which is a lot of water pipes. Why yes, now that you mention it, there IS a shortage of water in Gaza now. Must be Israel's fault no doubt...

As for the '75 year genocide', the Gazan population has doubled every 20 years, you are spreading disinformation to characterize this war and this history as genocide when they're no evidence of this. Hamas is willing to negotiate with Israel because they're being killed and want more time to re-arm to continue fighting.

Hezbollah, not being contained by a blockade, has an arsenal estimated to be 40,000-120,000 rockets from Iran, a budget of $700 million and they have not yet launched their attack. Israel's weaponry is better because they know they have no defensive depth geographically and that losing a single war means the end of their nation, that's all. It's not that Hamas (and Iran) isn't trying to kill everyone in Israel, they're just losing and they aren't too concerned about how many of their own people die along the way. Maybe if their leaders spent some money on their people, it would be more of an even fight. And maybe if they spent some time renouncing violence and negotiating for mutual recognition, their people would have decent lives.

I'm glad to read your last paragraph though. Most pro-Hamas people say they want peace and freedom for Palestinians, and in truth they've usually been led to believe that 'ceasefire now' sounds a lot like 'peace now' and not a call for a break in the fighting so Hamas can re-arm, conquer Israel and create an Islamic police state in its place. This helps people avoid the difficult contemplation of what exactly they think would happen if Hamas won this war. Killing every Jew they encountered on October 7th was a pretty clear indication of what would happen is Israel fell.

But here we are and you're happy to say it - Hamas is the legitimate leadership of Gaza, violent resistance is justified and was justified before Israel even launched it's counter-attack, Oct. 7th was justified and it wasn't that bad, violent attacks will continue as long as Israel exists, and that the ultimate goal of Hamas is the destruction of Israel and death or displacement of its citizens. Those are the stated goals and views of Hamas, at least you're honest about who you're cheering for and what they stand for.

"pro-terrorist encampments" what in the actual fuck is wrong with you?

I sometimes forget most of you missed 9/11. Terrorist attacks happen on a weekly basis around the world, you're insulated for the moment. But yes, you're rooting for terrorists. Did you not notice that part? You skip past their war crimes and support their war - and when they lose its someone else's fault.

Did the Iranian people's movement of 'women. life. freedom' not resonate enough with you? Was it too, idk, democratic and liberal or something? I didn't see you staging mass protests and encampments to keep that movement for liberation in the media and pressuring for change to finally come. But you're happy to cheer on the start of a war and then complain that wars cause death, like this is fucking news to you. You support terrorists and their ambitions to establish a totalitarian state. You want to hand over power to Hamas, have you got any idea what it's like to live under that regime? You tell Jews to leave Israel but none of you are leaving North America. Hypocrisy and gullibility are what's actually fucking wrong with you. And in the long run, it's not going to protect you.