By Alice Cuddy BBC News, Jerusalem
The call to Mahmoud Shaheen came at dawn.
It was Thursday 19 October at about 06:30, and Israel had been bombing Gaza for 12 days straight.
He’d been in his third-floor, three-bedroom flat in al-Zahra, a middle-class area in the north of the Gaza Strip. Until now, it had been largely untouched by air strikes.
He’d heard a rising clamour outside. People were screaming. “You need to escape,” somebody in the street shouted, “because they will bomb the towers”.
The problem is that what he’s saying is not true at all. The IDF is just carpetbbombing Gaza at random. You can see the satalite images of Gaza being completely flattened. Even the Russians had far greater precision than this when attacking Ukraine.
The “Hamas forces them” narrative is always completely made up IDF propaganda. Israel tells people to go south. Then ISRAEL bombs the south. Palestinians don’t trust israel again (because they’re not morons). Then all the IDF trolls come in pretending Hamas forces innocent civilians to stay north.
Also the IDF intelligence recently bombed a car with a grandma and her 3 grandchildren in Lebanon. This should tell you how amazing their intelligence is before they decide to blow up a family.
… considering Russian doctrine is literally flatten the area with artillery, versus IDF precision airstrikes which the Russians were completely unable to do due to lack of air superiority let alone supremacy.
Carpet bombing is the complete and indiscriminate bombing of an area. I’ve seen no evidence of this. I have seen evidence - e.g. the above article as an excellent one - if precision bombing of multiple buildings across a wide area, whilst leaving neighbouring buildings relatively untouched.
I am not here to defend the IDF or the Israeli State, but using such obvious inaccuracies makes it an uphill struggle to appropriately criticise their real actions.
Your latter two points though I agree with broadly, though I don’t doubt Hamas does attempt to stop civilians from leaving conflict zones.
Both Hamas and the Israeli State are responsible for propogating this mess and both continue to try to do so, whilst the world watches and argues about who is the most responsible / who deserves support. Neither side gives a flying fuck about Palestinian or Israeli innocents, at least above and beyond that where they serve the goal of optics and support for wiping out the other side.
citation ^^^desperately ^^^needed ↩︎