Freed Israeli hostages erupted in anger during a tense meeting on Tuesday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that they were terrified they would be killed by Israeli airstrikes on Gaza instead of their Hamas captors.
“We were in tunnels, terrified that it would not be Hamas, but Israel, that would kill us, and then they would say Hamas killed you,” the woman from the southern Israeli village of Nir Oz near the Gaza border said
Would the hostage exchange have happened already if not for the airstrikes? I suspect that the answer is no. Given that the airstrikes didn’t kill the hostages, it seems unreasonable to blame Netanyahu for a counterfactual.
There were direct offers for hostage exchanges from Hamas before the airstrikes. If anything the demands from Hamas after the airstrikes became higher than before them.
There have been confirmed hostages killed by Israeli airstrikes, under which the bibas family with the 10 month old baby and the mom.
Some hostages were held above ground and it doesn’t seem like israel cares about retrieving them alive.
What’s your source for this?
8 October 1 day after the attack. already in the newspapers : Hamas Demands Total Prisoner Release, Leaving Israel in a Catch-22
The demands are higher since Hamas rejected israel’s demand of only alive hostages. The ceasefire ended because the israelis didn’t want the dead Bibas family back that they bombed to death themselves.
Are you referring to the demand to release “all Palestinian prisoners” in exchange for the hostages? That would have been a ratio of Palestinian prisoners to Israeli hostages much less favorable to Israel than the ratio they actually got during the ceasefire.
But, based on your own justification, that would be fine, wouldn’t it? At least they’d have the hostages back alive, right? That’s justified because you get the people back alive, right?
Or can you only justify killing with the return of hostages?
My justification of what? The airstrikes? I’m not justifying them by by connecting them to the release of the hostages - I think they’re justified as part of the war that’s going on and their effect on hostage negotiations is secondary.
The best strategy for winning the war is not the same as the best strategy for getting the hostages back. Netanyahu appears to be prioritizing winning the war and for that he’s getting a lot of criticism from people who would prioritize getting the hostages back. I’m just saying that this particular criticism, which focuses on the counterfactual scenario in which the hostages that have been released were killed by airstrikes instead, is not reasonable. After all, they weren’t killed and they’re free now; in their case, Israeli policy has been successful.
They are not just demanding the Palestinian prisoners. They also demand the release of all Palestinian hostages kidnapped by israel.
The ratio during the ceasefire was for non-combatants. Zero soldiers have been exchanged so far.
Looking at past conflicts israeli soldiers have gone for a 3-1000 rate and Hamas currently has like 60 soldiers in captivity.
I love how you’re not questioning why Israel has political prisoners.
I didn’t use the word “political” anywhere.
A large number of Palestinian prisoners is political prisoners held without trial.
Yeah the airstrikes if anything delayed the hostage exchanges
Ends justify the means, you mean?
I mean, sometimes, yes. That is how war works.
People don’t generally kill people for shits and giggles. They do it because they think something is so important that it’s worth killing for. The tricky bit is of course that people tend to argue quite a lot about what falls in that category.
No one would criticize you if, when defending yourself from a random attacker, you accidentally pushed him off a ledge and he fell to his death, or even if you intentionally did it to save yourself.
War tends to be more complicated than that, but the vast majority of people can find some ends that will acceptable justify quite a lot of means.
I dunno. That’s an easy line to cross for most military orgs. For me personally I couldn’t live with it.
We should be counting the cost before making choices that end up murdering innocent people simply because we’re afraid of them.
so as long as you feel it justified, killing is ok?
if China were to just shell Taiwan with phosgene in order to break the island defenses, that would be fine? I mean, in this hypothetical it was required for China to liberate their island, and China does inherently believe that they are the rightful owners of Taiwan.
what about nukes? if Russia says it had enough in Ukraine and nuke Kyiv, is that acceptable? because by your logic it is.
because to those respective people, these atrocities are in the goal of something worth committing them for.
your argument boils down to; “if someone did something, they must have good reason to have done so, and how can we criticize them for that?”
Either you believe that killing can be justified in a non-zero set of circumstances, or that it can never be justified.
The vast majority of people fall into the first camp, and most in the second camp will change their minds when a gun is pointed at them.
You seem to be ignoring the existence of objective reality and responding to the strawman of literally everything just being subjective vibes, which isn’t worth the time it’d take to respond further.
so you present a false dichotomy of accepting the most depraved realpolitik understanding of the world or radical self-destructive pacifism
This isn’t about “objective reality” though, it’s about subjective thought. You present a case that justifies killing that has no bearing on the situation. Israel is not under existential threat from Hamas, no matter what rhetoric they spawn. They’re not fighting for life, for existence. They’re killing to control. To have ultimate say of everything in what they perceive as their domain. That’s not self-defense, that’s aggression, pure and simple.
You can justify self-defense when your life is truly in danger, but that wasn’t the case. The case was that they found an excuse to kill people to justify their own authority. To blame someone else for all the evils of the world, and take no blame themselves. They killed for the glory, for the power, for the control. Not for defense. That’s a cheap excuse to shield from objective reality.
Yes, but we’re not talking about accidentally killing someone who’s attacking you, we’re talking about willfully ignoring the lives of those in the way of you and the person you’re trying to kill.
First war or exposure to a history book?