well that escalated quickly! Business as usual or the tip of the iceberg?

Go back up and reread my response to your post. You asked if it was a war crime, I said absolutely. Pretty sure I made my stance on that explicit, no?

Who said it was fine?

Do you guys always have to argue against strawmen to feel like you accomplished something?

And while I emphatically agreed it was a war crime, if AQ had allowed evacuation of the 2977 people on 9/11 who died from 77 separate countries, the events of the next few years would be very different. It unified virtually the entire world against them in a way that simply doing property damage did not.

After all, property is not as important as lives.

You did a hell of a lot of equivocating and made your position less clear. You basically said "yes it's a war crime, but it wasn't the worst war crime."

Giving notice before blowing up the building is pointless if you're trying to get mobile weaponry or combatants. This is blatantly about destroying the media presence.

It isn't. What is it you guys talk about with conservatives and a lack of nuance?

The attack that hit the refugee camp and killed 10 in my opinion is a far worse atrocity, and very little is made of that because the press is fixated on property damage, because it personally scared them.

Scared is not as bad as dead.

And I also think that firing many hundreds of rockets indiscriminately into Israel is pretty fucking bad. If there was a failure of the missile defense system, that too would be large scale indiscriminate damage against civilians. That is clearly the intent.

weaponry sufficient to deter/destroy enemy aircraft or incoming munitions that is mounted on the top of a building (or even inside) isn't exactly mobile. Also if for argument's sake the building was full of combatants "hiding in plain sight" * they are still giving the non-combatants time to get out, while still destroy most of the weaponry stored there. Technically the point of war is to destroy the enemy's ability to wage war, not to kill them all. Ideally a complete surrender is preferable to even waging war. The ultimate victory is "the sheathed sword" as they say.

* a common tactic of some enemy forces (Hamas included) is to use civilians as a human shield. Insurgents in Iraq would do this. They would fire mortars at our base out of the back of trucks from right in the middle of populated areas knowing we wouldn't be able to do much about it.

That said the Israelis very well might have destroyed the building under false pretenses - none of us were a fly on the wall in the mission briefing.

That's not the stated goal. Communications equipment in a HQ building that was coordinating missile strikes.

Do we know that's true? Nope, we don't.

But if it is a falsehood, it is internally consistent.

And, of course, this was stated already. Do try to read the posts before commenting Bailey. Someone might get vexxed.

"After all, property is not as important as lives" hmmm.....where and when have I heard that before?

Firing into refugee camps is fucking disgusting, but also it's harder to disprove when Israel says they thought that terrorists were based there and it was worth blowing up a bunch of children to get them.

A building occupied by well established media companies with cameras and journalists has a lot more evidence of their real intentions to point to.

It's not the stated goal, but it's blatantly the actual goal.

Yeah, but it's not like their building being blown up stops them from reporting.

They were outright warned that they shouldn't try and evacuate their equipment.

Different ways to assess. Unless that created a blanket over cell communications, and I haven't seen that put forward, we'll still get live footage out of the combat area.

IMO it's a far higher bar to attack a refugee camp with children than it is to take out a building with warning, even if that inconveniences the press. After all, the press covered the attack on the building in real-time, didn't they.

Dead kids are far worse.

If the building was being used as a HQ to coordinate attacks, we'd possibly see a drop off in rocket attacks for a few nights.

Guess we'll see.

in this case they had a lot more evidence anyway.

Oh it's absolutely worse, but when you call them out on things like it all that happens is that people start asking if you don't think Israel has a right to exist.

Since the media broadcast live footage of the building coming down, it seems like it was somewhat ineffective on that front.

Discussing the reason for the ongoing bloodshed is not an endorsement that it continues.

And no, the post of yours I responded to was not discussing the ongoing bloodshed, but was you listing possible resolutions.

So I guess we are now to the point of asking you to read your own posts.

No, it did what it intended to do. Just like the US, Israel answers to no one, and it doesn't matter how many cameras you have to capture the atrocities, there will always be a justification. Those buildings being blown up are a clear warning to journalists who might think they have some kind of protection. They don't. Israel was so damn sure of that they gave them an hour's notice. Both the AP and Al-Jazeera's equipment was destroyed in the purposeful bombing of that media building. The IDF's message is clear: "what are you going to do about it?" and the answer from the US is "not a damn thing, here's more money."

To support Israel in this is to support apartheid and genocide, because that's what they're doing to the Palestinians.

The US (alone on the UNSC) vetoed a resolution calling for a ceasefire, giving the green light for this slaughter.

Meanwhile, the IDF continued their crimes by bombing the two main roads to Gaza's hospital.

Yes. It's the typical fallback when they don't want to acknowledge that their side might be doing bad things. Why some here are so hell bent on making Israel the lone bad guy while excusing Hamas is beyond me.

Hamas is not "my side". Their firing of rockets into Israel is very wrong indeed.

Now let's hear the same from you about blowing up kids, vital infrastructure and news organizations.

Israel typically gives notice to evacuate before they destroy an area that is certainly occupied by the general population. That in itself is not unusual at all. Would anybody prefer that they did not?
The objective was to destroy whatever is in that building, not whomever is in it.

And it's not like Hamas is above "strategically locating" its military operations for maximum PR value.

It's definitely in their playbook.

Medium length article from Atlantic on how Israel and we are not helping.

Gives the conflict better meaning, at least for me.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/israel-palestine-gaza-hamas-history/618896/

good article - and the best thing is NO PAYWALL!

Yes, that's excellent.