Adding to the mountain of evidence that Israel is engaged in a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, Al Jazeera on Thursday aired footage of what the news outlet reported was an Israeli drone targeting four Palestinians in Khan Younis last month.
Those killed by the unmanned aerial vehicle in the rubble of the southern Gaza city appear to be unarmed teenagers or young men. According to a translation of the coverage, they were not identified in the reporting.
Tariq Kenney-Shawa, Al-Shabaka’s U.S. policy fellow, said: “This is among the worst footage I’ve seen. Not only were these boys clearly unarmed and present no threat whatsoever, but they were struck multiple times even after stumbling/crawling away. There is no way they could have been considered combatants. This is unreal.”
I want an objective, non-obsessive-downvoter, explanation as to how anyone in the world knows what really happened? I understand this question feels smarmy, but there so much emotion in this. But how do we know these guys weren’t Hamas?
Please just be chill, I’m not picking a fight or anything like that.
The problem is that according to due process, you need to prove somebody is guilty of something before they are jailed. These people weren’t jailed, they were basically executed from a distance. The burden of proof is on the Israeli military to prove that they WERE Hamas, not on people horrified by the footage to prove the negative. And so far (and historically) the IDF seems to not care to do so, and in lots of cases have given “proof” as justification for one action or another that later turned out to be bullshit.
Not to mention the numerous cases of the IDF killing people in “Press” vests and helmets, or people literally actively waving a white flag. In my opinion, they don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt given their record.
Staying on the topic at hand, and only that, this is war. Killing an enemy on the field has no system of public review. Everything is internal. Neither IDF or Hammas has to provide proof of anything to anybody for any reason except when propagandantistic PR is at play (like you mentioned). At least not now. There will surely be tribunals after this war is “settled.” The only direction proof goes is up the chain of command. I won’t pretend to understand the complexity of target selection and acquisition (especially foreign nations and certainly not terrorists), but I know that that’s how it works. There is no burden of proof, whatsoever.
Those are the cold facts.
Opinion, etc: I hope you don’t read this as some kind of defence or exoneration of any malicious, evil, callous, or accidental killing commited of innocents. I unequivocally do not want or excuse killing civilians. Anyone who does is hideously evil. However, I think a reality check is necessary.
The “burden of proof” is a security blanket most of the world enjoys and vaguely understands. When they see some horrible violence of war, fed to them without context by compromised sources, it’s easy to make assumptions and demand justice. And many of those times, you should, just ideally without the assumptions and propaganda. This isn’t one of this times. I know that the IDF is commiting war crimes, but this video is just war.
Killing obvious civilians is a warcrime. While there are circumstances where this is ambiguous, this example isn’t - Israel needs to overcome the very reasonable conclusion that these were civilians and prove that they were enemy combatants.
Understanding that 60-70% of the Palestinians Israel have killed are children, this will be a tall order.
What makes it obvious?
The video shows 4 people in civilian clothes casually wandering along chatting while unarmed.
Putting aside the thousands upon thousands literal children Israel has slaughtered in the past few months while spewing genocidal rhetoric (because Hamas?), what evidence do you have that this isn’t a warcrime and that they’re combatants? The video contains absolutely nothing suggesting anything of the sort, and no evidence has been presented.
When people say they want to commit a genocide, then kill tens of thousands of civilians, I tend to believe them - why are you so incredulous?
Stop being hung up on the unarmed thing. All the badguys in movies are armed to make it clear to the audience and make it “justified”. Unarmed soldiers and military personnel make up a much larger chunk of casualties than you realize. Terrorists don’t just toss their guns to the side and claim immunity. They are still targets.
Anyway, I’ve made my points clear, I’ve explained various things using traceable, sound logic. You seem to have to not read it or comprehended it. I’m not going to waste my time with unreasonable, volatile people.
Literally zero evidence that this killing is justified in the context of a genocide that the Israeli government and IDF won’t shut up about, where the majority of their targets are women and children.
Don’t go pretending you know a thing about reason or that you’ve made any meaningful point whatsoever.
You still really don’t understand how evidence works, huh?
They aren’t listening, they’re reacting, like the others.
Where’s the evidence justifying the killing of these people? Or do we not care about the rule of law?
I guess in the context of the genocide Israel is committing there’s not much room for that kind of thing.
You kill a bunch of people, you’d better be damn sure it’s justifiable - you know - by looking at the evidence. Basic rule of law stuff.
Where’s the evidence? We both know there isn’t any - much like there’s nothing that would justify Israel’s broader genocide.
How do you think evidence works?
“Know” lmao.
“Basic”, but too complex for you to understand.
I think that person has very strong pre-concieved notions… At this point a rock on the ground is “evidence” to them that the rock is in cahoots with Israel, because children in Gaza, because obviously.
That video is evidence of nothing, but certain death of 4 unknown people, at an unknown location, recorded at unknown point in time.
Again, disclaimer: There’s an active genocide in Gaza, performed by Israel against Palestinians. Hamas is a terrorist organisation.
What you are saying is just not true.
You can’t go and kill unarmed, non combative, un-uniformed people however you’d like.
You do need to prove that the people you are killing are actually combatants. Especially when you send a missile down someone’s head just walking on the street.
You’re right, you can’t do that.
Also you’re wrong, you don’t need to prove that. At least not publicly which is what you seem to be implying. Intelligence has to prove that these people, or some of them, are Hamas, likely of some significance, maybe not. Then they have to be identified, monitored, and tracked for a strike opportunity. Then, when the entire chain of command is in agreement that that’s their guy and this is the best time, they attack.
In your version, the drone operator seems to have infinite ammo and gleeful fire-at-will orders. Killing anyone who is “just walking down the street.” Maybe the soldiers on the ground operate that way, but not drones or jets.
“In your version, the drone operator seems to have infinite ammo and gleeful fire-at-will orders. Killing anyone who is “just walking down the street.” Maybe the soldiers on the ground operate that way, but not drones or jets.”
Where are you getting this story from? I sure as hell didn’t even come close to mention or talk about anything of the sort.
And regarding your statement
“Intelligence has to prove that these people, or some of them, are Hamas, likely of some significance, maybe not. Then they have to be identified, monitored, and tracked for a strike opportunity. Then, when the entire chain of command is in agreement that that’s their guy and this is the best time, they attack.”
Do you have any source for that being the way they operate at every single strike. Any source that this is how it went down from what we saw? Or are you just guessing?
My money is on the later.
Why do you assume there’s no proof?
Why do you assume I have that assumption?
Because of this sentence:
It’s absolutely true. We don’t know if IDF is collecting proof or not. And IDF absolutely does not need to provide proof to the public. Only to the people who are investigating the war. (Just like the person you are replying to stated)
“Neither IDF or Hammas has to provide proof of anything to anybody for any reason except when propagandantistic PR is at play”
That is simply not true. They do have to provide proof to somebody. You said so yourself. To the ones investigating. I can assure you. They are definatly included in these “anybody”
Why did you cut off the next sentence in the quote?
They don’t know, they are just making assumptions that people got killed in Gaza. Even location is just bombed houses, of which there are plenty in the region and doesn’t necessarily mean it’s Gaza. And you get down-voted for simply doubting because that’s what people here do, hate on Israel and grasping at straws. Meanwhile, no one asked why were they being filmed. How did the person filming know that bombs will fall on those 4 guys in 5 or so minutes. Why did that one guy keep walking in the same direction and not try to save his life by running somewhere and hiding. I personally find all those things suspicious. But that sort of thinking doesn’t fit into idea that Israel is having fun killing people. So you, and now me, will get down voted.
I would also like to know why this camera drone is there, and why it’s following these guys, and how the operator has the best luck getting perfect footage.
Edit: This seems to be leaked footage from an Israeli intelligence/targeting drone. If that’s true, then that would prove that at least one of these were military targets.
Based on the video and logical deduction, this scenario seems to be the most probable.
If someone has another hypothesis on this subject, I would be very interested to read it. Assuming you don’t just downvote and attack me.
It was also pointed out, and I somehow missed it, the fact there was secondary explosion which no one tried to explain. If they weren’t armed and this attack was done via drone, why would there be smaller secondary explosion?
Someone already posted slow motion footage of the missles in the comments. It shows a second missile hitting.
Nsfl https://imgur.com/a/e1XWdfY
Well spotted. I missed those.
https://youtu.be/2vI1il5DkQQ
This is very interesting.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/2vI1il5DkQQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Nobody knows. It’s just that people are now so riled up that they would amplify anything and everything that aligns with their view.
And titles like “Everybody needs to see this” are just annoying.
But seeing that two different accounts posted that on different instamces, with the same name… Who knows.
Best to take it all with a grain of salt and not become “we did it reddit 2.0”
Seeing as israel regularly bombs civilians without evidence they are military, and they also use an AI system to pick targets, and the fact that these guys are clearly not armed, makes it very unlikely they were Hamas and very likely they were civilians.
The IDF is welcome to provide evidence of the contrary. Their track record of mass slaughtering civilians, especially children, sure isn’t helping them.
This reasoning is based on emotional assumptions and simplistic, naive logic.
The IDF doesn’t have to explain anything, and neither does Hamas. This is war, not a riot.
The source you gave is from a biased organization.
Ah yes the biased Washington Post.
Trying to spread IDF propaganda while pretending to be neutral lol.
Global Village Space? Thats where your link goes.
Which quotes a Wapo article. And gvs has a good mbfc rating.
But anyone against israel is biased right?
Dude, I really don’t give a damn about Israel. Seems like a nice place to visit. I know they’re killing civilians and I’ve said that. So why are you pushing me like I’m some shill? Because this video? There’s no evidence of any kind except observation. Anything else is conjecture, but there’s useless emotional conjecture and detached, deductive, logical type conjecture. I use belong in the latter.
I don’t know your source but I looked them up and they seem fine, with a possible bias as the founder is Pakistani, but who knows. A quote from another org inside of an article is not how to win people over. If you like a quote, go to the quote directly.
You’ve turned me off the conversation, with your baseless and cliche accusation, however. Insufferable.
Edgy so neutral.
it was hamas IED not an IDF drone
the second projectile could also have been hamas as well
Even landmine would make more sense. You can usually see projectile falling from the sky in wide shots like these and there are none.
That’s speculation based on a tweet from Israeli propaganda. You can see the missiles in the video.
The video footage was from a month and a half ago, which means Al Jazeera should’ve been able to find out the identity of the men that were killed. They could definitely have gotten a comment from the IDF in that time frame.
Why didn’t they do that? Then we’d have confirmation that they’re civilian, or at the very least some explanation from the IDF. Whether someone is willing to believe what the IDF says is up to the viewer, but it should be included with the story. But they didn’t do that, and considered it unfit to air on their English language channels where it would face more scrutiny. Their Arabic channels are very different than their English language sites, and more willing to air straight up propaganda. The internet is also willing to share propaganda with no effort to verify they were civilians just an emphatic “there’s no way they can’t be cilivilians!!!” Most news organizations understand that Hamas routinely caches weapons and wear civilian clothing when thy move to other locations, but this isn’t given any consideration in this write-up.
Are they civilians? We simply can’t know because of the shoddy journalism at work here. But the point just seems to be to maintain outrage, and a lot of people aren’t looking for the normal information that should be there in a properly researched news story.
The burden of proof is on those doing the killing
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Cool. A murder apologist. There’s a reason the concept of war crimes exists, you ghoul.
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Fuck me. Suggest that killing unarmed people is bad and you’re a terrorist sympathiser? Buddy, you need to get a moral compass. You’re on the wrong side of history and humanity
I don’t know how things work where you’re from, but where I’m from, the burden of proof is on those making accusations.
Lmao this isn’t small claims court. Those people were straight up murderer from long distance with missiles that American tax dollars very likely paid for.
So when there’s a murder case, the prosecution doesn’t have to prove someone committed murder, it’s the accused has to prove they’re innocent?
Yeah, it doesn’t when the accused admits it and says “but they were all Hamas”. Since that moment the murder is proven, and “them all being Hamas” is what the accused is expected to find some court-worthy proof for.
Didn’t see any such comment in the article. You’re assuming an answer that wasn’t given and wasn’t even asked for. You’re building a fantasy story to prove guilt in your mind.
Meanwhile in the real world, there was at least $200K worth of munitions used in that video. You have to be really naive to think the decision to use such munitions didn’t go through the chain of command. So multiple people decided to use some very expensive munitions to kill some random civilians? Why? Because Israel is just that evil?
Stop inventing narratives in your mind and try to think more critically. The IDF isn’t going to have a drone following some random civilians, and then use three expensive smart bombs to take them out for no good reason. There are a lot of civilians in the area, there’s no need to use allocate that much hardware if the goal is to kill completely innocent civilians.
Your narrative depends on Israel not only being evil but also incredibly stupid in their use of resources. Given the lack of information given, lack of even basic levels of journalism, it’s far more likely to be propaganda.
Ffs I have been reading your apologist bullshit on Lemmy for far too long. Touch grass.
Burden of proof is on those making claims. If you claim this is Israel killing Palestinians, you need to prove it’s Israel. Otherwise it’s some poor guys who lost their lives from an explosive. I didn’t even see the bomb falling.
No, completely rational. This was probably Palestinian youths blowing themselves up to make Israel look bad. What was I thinking?
I agree with your points. I’m gonna reply to you but be talking to anyone reading too. Thanks for your comment and critique.
Flat out though, the IDF is killing civilians. This is known.
But based off the comments and videos, I don’t think anything is known at all, but it seems unlikely these were civilians. Bizarrely, nearly everyone in this thread, and everyone who is going to downvote me, seems to want them to be civilians.
I would assume people would prefer them to be Hamas, who are terrorists and at the very least complicit in the massacre and kidnapping of Israeli civilians.
Outrage eliminates critical thinking and then anything that reinforces that outrage must be true.
I trust Al Jazeera, and I mourned their closure of Al Jazeera America as I was a supporter. But I could never trust anything they wrote about Israel and Gaza. It was barely veiled propaganda. This video is incindiary sensationalism because we are given zero context, but lots of guessing. By releasing this grizzly footage without context, that shows intent to exploit emotions and let us fill in the gaps. People really suck at this.
I’m really glad a bunch people, especially people like you, replied. It was fairly easy to separate the wheat from the chaff (that doesn’t mean only people who confirmed my suspicions btw) They/you spoke in terms of fact, objectivity, not in guesses, assumptions, and emotion.
To anyone who reads this ramble: If any journalist, holy-person, video, podcast, head-of-state, or meme is demanding your outrage, do not trust them because that is what propaganda looks like. This is a foundational aspect of media literacy and resisting the influence of power.
Every military in pretty much every war kills civilians. There is a distinction made between collateral damage and a military that deliberately targets civilians.
On October 7 Hamas deliberately targeting and killed civilians. This is known.
What we’ve seen from “alternative media” is a deliberate attempt to create a false equivalency between what Hamas did (genocide) and what Israel id doing (war). The video we’re commenting under now is one of many such reports.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, But the non-stop barrage of disinformation that people are gleefully going along with eventually does lead to questions about the motivations behind this.
I mean Al Jazeera reports the casualties like a scorecard in a sport. The Hamas casualties are included in the same number of the total Palestinian casualty number. The Israeli casualty numbers are civilian casualties only. They don’t include IDF casualties in their numbers as they do with Hamas casualties.
It’s a war so there’s no way to know the exact numbers especially when the war is ongoing. Hamas has admitted 6000 of their fighters have died, and as with all wars we can assume the real number is much higher. And that’s 6000 fighting men they admitted to. There’s no number given for the military support personnel (which are valid targets in a war) that the IDF killed.
And I’ve noted that as the numbers for casualties have flattened nobody reports it anymore. Does fit the genocide narrative I suppose. If it were a genocide then you’d expect civilian casualties to increase as the “brave Hamas fighters” that are “protecting the civilians” are eliminated. But instead the civilian casualties are decreasing. Numbers simply don’t fit with the genocide narrative so they don’t get reported.
I just look at what both sides are saying and the truth is somewhere in between. The actions of Israel makes sense to me. Terrorists when into villages and murdered everyone they could find. That’s an act of war. Given the the casualties the inevitably come with a ground campaign, I wouldn’t want to do that. Unless of course the terrorists took hostages and I had no other choice. And since that’s what happened, here we are.
For the actions of Hamas they only explanation I have is that they’re psychopaths. If your goal is to negotiate, you don’t murder a thousand people. They wanted this war, and they took hostages to force Israel into a ground camping to maximize the Palestinian death toll to gain international sympathy.
What’s disturbing to me is how easily people are going along with the plan that was made by these psychopaths. They created a war which would inevitably lead to deaths and had their cameras ready to broadcast the propaganda. And a lot of people swallowed and got into a competition to prove how dedicated to the cause they are. To the point where they are being overtly being antisemitic now. What’s the goal? Keep Hamas alive so they can continue this cycle of violence forever.
Israel isn’t going anywhere, and hatred of Israel is only going to cause the deaths of even more people. Everyone needs to calm down with the constant outrage and think about the best way to end the violence. Spreading lies to keep everyone outraged and hating isn’t going to accomplish this.
It’s not helping Palestine in any way. There territory is shrinking as the continue to choose violence. I’m under no illusions that Israel is the good guy, it’s a country full of both good guys and bad guys like every other country. But when you choose violence the only thing that matters is which side has the stronger military. And that is clearly Israel. For the Palestinians the best course of action is to somehow let go of their hatred and negotiate for whatever they can get. What they can get at a negotiating table now is much less than what they would’ve gotten decades ago, but it’s more that they’ll get a few decades from now.
The dream of a Palestinian state is almost dead now and Biden is desperately trying to resuscitate it. Which is something that only people that get the news from reliable sources understand. The “alternative media” take is just that he’s “Genocide Joe.”
It’s gotten crazy how far the non-stop outrage has caused people to stray from reality. Most of the efforts of activists have been at best ineffective because they’re too disconnected from reality to have a message that makes sense to anyone that still lives in reality. At worst the activists are prolonging the war and are increasing the number of deaths in the conflict.
Ok now I’ve been rambling.
You said it. Though it’s definitely understandable to be outraged by something that happened, you gotta stop and think about why someone is putting it in front of you. The mainstream media it’s their job to report the news and they have an incentive to be considered trustworthy so they’re going to make an effort to get the story right. Even then they get it wrong sometimes. Random person on the internet? They probably want to get clicks and don’t care if what they’re saying is a straight up lie. Or worse, they want you to be a part of a cause that serves their interests but don’t actually care about you.
Blocked, bye
This is insanity. To be blocked about what I asked? How I asked if? Unbelievable avoidance.