So much for dialling down the rhetoric. You know full well that even the most precise munitions can malfunction or, more likely, a human made a mistake with coordinates etc. Hamas have their wish. There'll be more attacks in Europe and the vicious cycle will continue to turn. We should all take a step back imo.
the simple answer is yes. Anything is possible. Because Israel has already hit civilian populated areas, schools, apartment blocks and a part of the same hospital last Saturday, people are assuming it’s the IDF. The truth is who knows. Regardless of who fired the missile, enough is enough.
between 3,000 - 5,000 rockets. The Israeli air defence system known as the Iron Dome’ destroyed a huge amount of these. that’s why so many rockets are fired, they try to overwhelm the system and hope some get through
Col, not on the scale that’s happened. Civilians have now been targeted by both sides. as for dialling down the rhetoric, sadly that horse bolted several days ago.
To try bring balance to this, that’s not confirmed yet. Hard to know if we’ll ever know the truth. Important to point out that while more and more Govts/Politicians are now calling for restraint from Israel, very few are piling pressure on Hamas to stop. They are still firing rockets daily into Israel.
I know it's not confirmed yet. My point is that our government gave its backing to Israel to take any action that it saw fit and that that could include bombing a hospital. We're certainly happy with 2 million people being starved of food and water.
Yea, the US, UK and EU ‘shot the load’ way too quickly. Our Taoiseach and President here have been very critical of those early comments. Unfortunately we’re too small to matter at all.
I mean no criticism of Ireland's foreign policy when I say it's easy for Varadkar to throw brickbats on Israel/ Palestine while maintaining a position of neutrality, including over Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The Archbishop of Canterbury does it too.
Tusk will smooth ruffled feathers in the EU to get EU monies, but there's one area where he won't compromise, and that is immigration. Poland won't take a quota of Third World migrants, believing its citizens are safer without it. It will remain the biggest stress factor in the EU imo
all fair and agreed. It’s written in our constitution that we are militarily neutral but we send troops all over the world in a peacekeeping and peace enforcing capacity. We actually have soldiers in Lebanon (UNIFIl), Syria-Lebanon Golan (UNDOF) and observers across 5 Middle East countries (UNTSO). We probably have more representation there than most countries. We have a long history in that area and have had soldiers killed by both sides. we may be militarily neutral but we’ve never been politically neutral including Ukraine.
Yes, fair comment, Nuts. Maintaining balance, whether militarily neutral or militarily active, is difficult indeed.
Actually it doesn't really matter whether the Israelis bombed the hospital or not - if you have an official policy of starving a hospital of food, water, electricity and all other necessary supplies with the consequence that patients will die then you may as well bomb it and speed up the process. The Israelis have bombed schools, refugee camps, residential buildings as well as using illegal weapons on a civilian population. Not hard to see why - their government told their soldiers (and the World) that Hamas had been beheading babies (without any actuall evidence of that coming out yet) and the Israeli defence forces took the field believing such lies and this is the result.
If the West wants to gain some semblance of neutrality in this affair of Israel and Palestine then it must compensate for the initial wrong of creating the state of Israel in the first place. Up to the 1930s most Jewish organizations were anti Zionist and had no interest in establishing a homeland in the Middle East - had they wanted it they had had 2,000 years to do it. At the time of the Balfour declaration Jews made up 5% of the population of Palestine - had lived there as a minority in peace with Arabs for centuries and also had little interest in establishing a state for themselves alone. Even after World War two the number one goal of Jews fleeing Europe was the USA and not Israel. The immediate result of the establishment of Israel was the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians the descendants of which are still in refugee centres now. We were active in creating the state of Israel - we must now be active in creating the state of Palestine, if necessary by placing it under UN protection. We have the mandate to do this because Israel has broken international law ever since 1967 by illegal continued occupation of territory outside its borders, and by the resettling of settlements there. We took Kosovo away from Serbia we must now do the same with Palestine.
As far as I understand it there are pictures of the Hamas atrocities and Blinken and others at least have seen them. Unless you believe they are faked. Best not forget that Hamas kicked off this latest round of violence with a spate of mass murders of people going about their daily business. Unless you think the Israelis faked that too, or actually committed the massacres to blame the Palestinians (I have heard equally stupid claims from the blinkered and small minded). And yes I know that Israeli ‘settlers’ are committing similar, smaller scale acts, in the West Bank as we drone on. Now, whatever the history, or daft attempts to make every conflict good v evil with zero nuance, this happened. Personally I don’t think responding in kind, which is what the Israelis are doing, but on a bigger scale, is going to help anything, and I don’t think that revenge/vengeance is a particularly satisfying emotion, sport aside. What we need is for these stupid ****s to sit down and talk to each other on the basis that everyone gets one life and to spend it like this is completely moronic. Ain’t going to happen though is it, with the prime actors being egged on by fools and manipulators from all sides. Desperate.
Creating the state of Palestine must be the goal, I agree. Attempts have failed and failed in the past, but this does not mean the aim should be abandoned. Different times present different opportunities. Although a solution currently looks further away than ever, it may just galvanise the power-that-be to insist the new state be created. I wouldn't put good money on it though.
