Gaza's Irrational Hatred

[Robert]

Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military action in Gaza since, October 7. That number is probably low because it doesn't take into account the bodies that haven't yet been recovered in the rubble from airstrikes.

Who is validating that number? Not challenging, just asking.

Why are the civilians still in the area? Why did they not leave? Why did Hamas not help them leave to keep them safe? Why is Hamas using hospitals and civilians as shields?

Why is Hamas still holding captives that they are raping and torturing on an ongoing basis?

[HondurasKeiser]

Why doesn’t Egypt open its gate and allow aid in and civilians out?

[Ken]

Why doesn’t Egypt open its gate and allow aid in and civilians out?

Egypt is perfectly happy to allow aid in. Most of the aid and normal goods and services that enter Gaza during normal times comes from Egypt. No aid is being blocked by Egypt. There are trucks lined up for miles in Egypt just waiting to get in. It is Israel that is blocking them not Egypt.

But Egypt also understandably and correctly knows that were they to allow millions of Gaza refugees into Egypt they would be accepting them PERMANENTLY since Israel has never allowed displaced refugees to return. That is why there are still refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon. Egypt doesn't want to aid in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza which is what this would be. Nor do they want to permanently settle millions of Gazans in Egypt. which is what letting them in would amount to. What they want is for Israel to stop the war.

Also, Hamas is really a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood which is an outlaw organization within Egypt that seeks to overthrow the current civilian government in Egypt. So the last thing the Egyptians want is a whole bunch of Muslim extremists moving into Egypt to cause trouble there. And yes, Palestinian revolutionaries have caused MASSIVE trouble everywhere they have gone. They nearly managed to overthrow Jordan in the 1960s when the PLO was there and operating more or less as a state within a state. And the PLO launched a decades-long horrifying civil war later in Lebanon.

So here we are.

The BETTER question is why doesn't Israel let Gaza civilian refugees into southern Israel to seek shelter there. That is an equally valid question if not more so. There is lots of empty space down there. They can let in vast numbers of Gazan refugees while they conduct their war. But they have chosen not to for less valid reasons than Egypt.

[Szdfan]

Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military action in Gaza since, October 7. That number is probably low because it doesn't take into account the bodies that haven't yet been recovered in the rubble from airstrikes.

Who is validating that number? Not challenging, just asking.

So the data is from the Gazan Health Ministry and is believed to be reliable. It's based on reporting from hospitals and morgues in Gaza and may actually be an undercount.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-ea ... e%20burial.

The data recorded by Al Najjar and his colleagues is collated by workers at a central information centre set up by the health ministry at the Nasser Hospital, which pools information from the functioning emergency departments and hospitals across Gaza. Ministry staff fled their offices at Al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza after Israeli forces entered it in mid-November.
Ministry spokesperson Ashraf Al-Qidra, a 50-year-old doctor, said the team uses a computerized data system established in consultation with the World Health Organization (WHO), which obliges hospital workers to fill in mandatory information before a death can be registered.

"The numbers used by the Ministry of Health reflect verified data," said Al-Qidra, noting that many bodies were not being recorded due to lack of information or because they did not pass through hospitals before burial. In Al-Shifa hospital, for example, there are currently no staff so no deaths were being registered, he said: "The real numbers (of casualties) are much greater than this."

Since early December, the ministry has said it was unable to collect regular reports from morgues at hospitals in northern Gaza, amid the collapse of communications services and other infrastructure in Gaza due to the Israeli offensive. According to the WHO, only six of Gaza's 36 hospitals were receiving casualties as of Wednesday, all of them in the south.

The U.N. health agency cited this as one reason it believes the ministry's tally may be an undercount; the toll also excludes dead who were never taken to hospitals or whose bodies were never recovered. The WHO and other experts said it was not possible for now to determine the extent of any undercounting.

Both the UN and Israel believe the data is accurate:

However, the United Nations – which has long-standing cooperation with Palestinian health authorities - continues to vouch for the quality of the data. The WHO noted that – compared to previous conflicts in Gaza – the figures show more civilians have been killed, including a greater proportion of women and children.

Israeli officials this month said they believe the data released to date is broadly accurate; they have estimated that one third of those killed in Gaza are enemy combatants, without providing detailed figures.

The primary problems with the data is that it probably is an undercount and it does not distinguish between civilians and Hamas deaths.

Why are the civilians still in the area? Why did they not leave? Why did Hamas not help them leave to keep them safe?

Where are these civilians supposed to go? Prior to the war, Gaza was sometimes called the world's largest open air prison. Israel and Egypt control the border, not Hamas. People are trapped.

Why is Hamas using hospitals and civilians as shields?

Prior to the war, Gaza was the third most population dense region in the world -- two million people living on a strip of land twenty miles long. I don't doubt that Hamas uses hospitals as shields, but with that kind of population density (and no place for the population to escape to) there was always going to be a high amount of civilian casualties with the type of military operations Israel launched.

[Josh]

On the plus side for Gaza, with all that population density we don’t have to worry that single family zoning is driving up their cost of housing!

[Ken]

On the plus side for Gaza, with all that population density we don’t have to worry that single family zoning is driving up their cost of housing!

I would pretty much expect they don't have any zoning. Except perhaps the most rudimentary. It is just one big zone.

[HondurasKeiser]

Why doesn’t Egypt open its gate and allow aid in and civilians out?

Egypt is perfectly happy to allow aid in. Most of the aid and normal goods and services that enter Gaza during normal times comes from Egypt. No aid is being blocked by Egypt. There are trucks lined up for miles in Egypt just waiting to get in. It is Israel that is blocking them not Egypt.

But Egypt also understandably and correctly knows that were they to allow millions of Gaza refugees into Egypt they would be accepting them PERMANENTLY since Israel has never allowed displaced refugees to return. That is why there are still refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon. Egypt doesn't want to aid in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza which is what this would be. Nor do they want to permanently settle millions of Gazans in Egypt. which is what letting them in would amount to. What they want is for Israel to stop the war.

Also, Hamas is really a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood which is an outlaw organization within Egypt that seeks to overthrow the current civilian government in Egypt. So the last thing the Egyptians want is a whole bunch of Muslim extremists moving into Egypt to cause trouble there. And yes, Palestinian revolutionaries have caused MASSIVE trouble everywhere they have gone. They nearly managed to overthrow Jordan in the 1960s when the PLO was there and operating more or less as a state within a state. And the PLO launched a decades-long horrifying civil war later in Lebanon.

So here we are.

The BETTER question is why doesn't Israel let Gaza civilian refugees into southern Israel to seek shelter there. That is an equally valid question if not more so. There is lots of empty space down there. They can let in vast numbers of Gazan refugees while they conduct their war. But they have chosen not to for less valid reasons than Egypt.

Paragraph one and paragraph three don't seem to concord. Additionally, Paragraph three seems to explain the rationale for what you detail in paragraph four.

[Ken]

Why doesn’t Egypt open its gate and allow aid in and civilians out?

Egypt is perfectly happy to allow aid in. Most of the aid and normal goods and services that enter Gaza during normal times comes from Egypt. No aid is being blocked by Egypt. There are trucks lined up for miles in Egypt just waiting to get in. It is Israel that is blocking them not Egypt.

But Egypt also understandably and correctly knows that were they to allow millions of Gaza refugees into Egypt they would be accepting them PERMANENTLY since Israel has never allowed displaced refugees to return. That is why there are still refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon. Egypt doesn't want to aid in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza which is what this would be. Nor do they want to permanently settle millions of Gazans in Egypt. which is what letting them in would amount to. What they want is for Israel to stop the war.

Also, Hamas is really a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood which is an outlaw organization within Egypt that seeks to overthrow the current civilian government in Egypt. So the last thing the Egyptians want is a whole bunch of Muslim extremists moving into Egypt to cause trouble there. And yes, Palestinian revolutionaries have caused MASSIVE trouble everywhere they have gone. They nearly managed to overthrow Jordan in the 1960s when the PLO was there and operating more or less as a state within a state. And the PLO launched a decades-long horrifying civil war later in Lebanon.

So here we are.

The BETTER question is why doesn't Israel let Gaza civilian refugees into southern Israel to seek shelter there. That is an equally valid question if not more so. There is lots of empty space down there. They can let in vast numbers of Gazan refugees while they conduct their war. But they have chosen not to for less valid reasons than Egypt.

Paragraph one and paragraph three don't seem to concord. Additionally, Paragraph three seems to explain the rationale for what you detail in paragraph four.

I'm not sure what you are talking about.

Not wanting a whole bunch of revolutionaries or terrorists in your midst is not the same thing as wanting a civilian population outside your borders to starve.

Look at our own southern border. A lot of Americans don't want to open the door to a flood of Central Americans into our country. But that doesn't mean Americans want to see Guatemala or Honduras blockaded and the population starve.

[Robert]

I suspect if Hamas laid down their arms, there would be peace. If Israel laid down their arms, there would be a massacre.

[HondurasKeiser]

Egypt is perfectly happy to allow aid in. Most of the aid and normal goods and services that enter Gaza during normal times comes from Egypt. No aid is being blocked by Egypt. There are trucks lined up for miles in Egypt just waiting to get in. It is Israel that is blocking them not Egypt.

But Egypt also understandably and correctly knows that were they to allow millions of Gaza refugees into Egypt they would be accepting them PERMANENTLY since Israel has never allowed displaced refugees to return. That is why there are still refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon. Egypt doesn't want to aid in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza which is what this would be. Nor do they want to permanently settle millions of Gazans in Egypt. which is what letting them in would amount to. What they want is for Israel to stop the war.

Also, Hamas is really a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood which is an outlaw organization within Egypt that seeks to overthrow the current civilian government in Egypt. So the last thing the Egyptians want is a whole bunch of Muslim extremists moving into Egypt to cause trouble there. And yes, Palestinian revolutionaries have caused MASSIVE trouble everywhere they have gone. They nearly managed to overthrow Jordan in the 1960s when the PLO was there and operating more or less as a state within a state. And the PLO launched a decades-long horrifying civil war later in Lebanon.

So here we are.

The BETTER question is why doesn't Israel let Gaza civilian refugees into southern Israel to seek shelter there. That is an equally valid question if not more so. There is lots of empty space down there. They can let in vast numbers of Gazan refugees while they conduct their war. But they have chosen not to for less valid reasons than Egypt.

Paragraph one and paragraph three don't seem to concord. Additionally, Paragraph three seems to explain the rationale for what you detail in paragraph four.

I'm not sure what you are talking about.

Not wanting a whole bunch of revolutionaries or terrorists in your midst is not the same thing as wanting a civilian population outside your borders to starve.

Look at our own southern border. A lot of Americans don't want to open the door to a flood of Central Americans into our country. But that doesn't mean Americans want to see Guatemala or Honduras blockaded and the population starve.

What I mean is this. Your claim that Israel won't let aid trucks through the Rafah Gate is dated. NPR has a story saying that aid does come through that gate.

I think the real reason Egypt doesn't want Palestinians is because of the facts you detailed in paragraph three of your response. Nothing more and nothing less. Which incidentally, might also be the reason Israel doesn't want them within their borders either.