A team of United Nations experts tasked with gathering information on sexual violence linked to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel found “reasonable grounds to believe” that some victims were sexually assaulted, including rape and gang rape, according to a U.N. report released Monday.
“In most of these incidents, victims first subjected to rape were then killed,” a press release announcing the report’s findings said. “The mission team also found a pattern of victims, mostly women, found fully or partially naked, bound, and shot across multiple locations.”
The 23-page report said the team also found “clear and convincing information” that some of the women and children taken back to Gaza that day by Hamas as hostages were subjected to “rape and sexualized torture and sexualized cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” There were “reasonable grounds to believe,” it said, “that this violence may be ongoing.”
There’s a lot of history of terrorism from both sides - Netanyahu is clearly more in the wrong here but Hamas are still a bunch of assholes. On both sides civilians are suffering from this war - Palestinians are certainly suffering more, but even Isreali civilians are suffering from family members lost and the ethical turpitude of living in a genocidal state when most of them do not want their state to be enacting a genocide.
I’m not saying that both sides are suffering equally, I’m saying that civilians on both sides are suffering… and their governments have no desire to lessen any of that suffering.
I think it’s insulting to say what the Palestinians are going through is comparable to the Israel population having to feel bad about being the villains.
So outside of Oct 7th itself,
Has there been substantial numbers of Israeli citizens being harmed?
Yes? Or no?
Was Oct 7th a terrorist attack? Does anyone contend otherwise. And yes, I understand how losing loved ones to terrorism is hard.
But I find it patently ridiculous that I’m expected to sympathize with a nominally democratic nation when their leaders go full fascist; when they were elected with the full knowledge that they’re fully fascist.
Sorry. But as a whole, they voted for that.
This is in direct comparison to the fact that the majority of people who are dying in Gaza, weren’t even around to vote the last time there was an election there.
Hamas was too voted into power. Do you believe Palestinians deserve their fate then?
The last election in Palestine was in 2006.
Over half the Palestinians that are alive today were not alive then. Even then; less than half the voters voted for Hamas- they used a plurality system and Hamas had ~40% of the votes.
Further, Hamas was given/allowed funding by Israeli leaders (Netanyahu in particular saw to it) specifically to destabilize any Palestinian state.
So, no. I wouldn’t describe the government in Gaza as “democratic”; when the last election in Israel was about a prior to Oct 7’s attack.