Hamas’s Qassam Brigades has threatened to execute Israeli captives if Israel continues to bombard and kill civilians in Gaza.
“Any targeting of innocent civilians without warning will be met regretfully by executing one of the captives in our custody, and we will be forced to broadcast this execution,” said Abu Obeida, a spokesman for Hamas’ Qassam Brigades.
“We regret this decision but we hold the Zionist enemy and their leadership the responsibility for this,” he said.
Snark aside, I do completely agree, and there’s a lot that I would criticize Israel for. That list does not, however, include mass murder, rape, and kidnapping of random civilians.
It does include apartheid, genocide, belief in racial superiority and murdering journalists though. We can’t equate what one side has done with the other as one side has generally held all the power while one side has been persistently oppressed. Also, it’s pretty hard to say whether mass murder, rape and kidnapping civilians is as bad as, worse than, or better than genocide.
The Israeli government regularly commits atrocities and crimes against humanity. Hamas regularly commits atrocities and crimes against humanity. There are no good guys here, just bad guys in charge being funded and goaded by other bad guys and innocent civilians being needlessly murdered.
Rape and kidnapping maybe not but did you just say that Israel hasn’t been murdering Palestinians? Or are you saying they’ve never murdered more than 200 at once
You know as well as I do that the IDF does not go around Palestinian villages slaughtering everyone they see.
Israel’s hands are not remotely perfectly clean, and there have absolutely been actions that are reprehensible, but the operations of the IDF and Hamas are not remotely equivalent, as you’re perfectly aware.
Yes I’m aware it’s different but I’m wondering why you phrased it like there hasn’t been violence against (non-hamas) Palestinian citizens by Israel.
Because the scale and level of intention to harm civilians are completely incomparable. Israel is generally not trying to murder every Palestinian citizen it finds. Meanwhile, that is Hamas’ explicit reason for existing, as literally stated in their founding charter.
Israel has done a lot of shit, and I don’t deny that. But it hasn’t acted the way Hamas does.
Why would you want to rephrase “mass murder of civilians” (as in go shoot up a couple hundred teenagers at a music festival, with some rape mixed in) to “violence against citizens” ?
Because that’s their only talking point