Israel / Palestine News Thread

[carterfelder]

I've never heard that claim. That's a wild one.

[Raze]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/09/the-gaza-family-torn-apart-by-idf-snipers-from-chicago-and-munich
 

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Daniel Raab shows no hesitation as he watches footage of 19-year-old Salem Doghmosh crumpling to the ground beside his brother in a street in northern Gaza.

“That was my first elimination,” he says. The video, shot by a drone, lasts just a few seconds. The Palestinian teenager appears to be unarmed when he is shot in the head.

Raab, a former varsity basketball player from a Chicago suburb who became an Israeli sniper, concedes he knew that. He says he shot Salem simply because he tried to retrieve the body of his beloved older brother Mohammed.

“It’s hard for me to understand why he [did that] and it also doesn’t really interest me,” Raab says in a video interview posted on X. “I mean, what was so important about that corpse?”

 

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“They’re thinking: ‘Oh I don’t think [I’ll get shot] because I’m wearing civilian clothes and I am not carrying a weapon and all that, but they were wrong,” said Raab, who majored in biology at the University of Illinois before joining the Israel Defense Forces. “That’s what you have snipers for.”

After Salem was shot, his father, Montasser, 51, rushed to the site, and tried to collect his sons’ bodies for burial, but was also fatally injured by a sniper.

The need for a dignified funeral for loved ones is a core human instinct, protected in law and explored in art for millennia. It is at the emotional heart of Homer’s Iliad, one of the earliest surviving works of literature.

But on that day, Raab treated love and grief as cause to kill. “They just kept on coming to try and take these bodies,” he said.

The video of Salem’s killing, and footage of other attacks on unarmed Palestinians, was posted online five months after his death, part of a montage made by a soldier called Shalom Gilbert to celebrate a deployment in Gaza.

 

 

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Mohammed, who was 26 when he was killed, had a high school diploma and supported the family by gathering waste metal and plastic for resale. Salem had dropped out after 10th grade and joined him.

Fayza Doghmosh recognised her two sons – Salem’s olive-green shirt, Mohammed’s black clothes – when she was shown Gilbert’s footage. She cried uncontrollably as she watched, 18 months after her boys were killed.

Mohammed, who loved chicken wings and helped his mother knead dough for family bread each day, was the first to head out. He picked up his cousin Youssef* at his home nearby, and the two men headed out.

His last moments may have been filmed by Israeli forces. Gilbert’s montage includes two grainy videos of targeted killings. Youssef says he recognises himself, walking with his hands in his pockets beside Mohammed, his lifelong friend.

 

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When asked how his squad decided whether to shoot unarmed Palestinians, Raab said: “Its a question of distance. There is a line that we define. They don’t know where this line is, but we do.”

 

 

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After Mohammed was killed, Youssef ran to tell his brothers, inadvertently sealing Salem’s fate. Raab describes on camera how he shot the teenager when he came to collect Mohammed’s body.

The recovery of dead bodies is protected under international law. The Israeli military’s own regulations also stipulate that people collecting bodies are not legitimate targets, according to former soldiers and Asa Kasher, who co-authored the Israeli Defense Forces’ ethics code.

“If you see someone recovering a body or helping a wounded person, that’s a rescue operation, it should be respected,” Kasher said. “Someone like that should not be shot.”

The next victim was Salem and Mohammed’s father, Montasser. “My boys,” was all he could say when he saw them lying dead in the street. He tried to approach them and was shot.

Then, snipers targeted a cousin, Khalil*, who raced to help Montasser. “I had taken about eight to 10 steps carrying him when I was shot and it felt like my arm was blown off,” said Khalil, who managed to stagger out of range before losing consciousness.

The two men were taken to hospital, but Montasser died the next day. The family decided they could not risk more loss, and the brothers’ bodies were left in the street until a ceasefire began on 24 November.

 

[hundreth]

29 minutes ago, Raze said:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/09/the-gaza-family-torn-apart-by-idf-snipers-from-chicago-and-munich
 

 

 

 

 

 

That's fucked. Hurts to read stuff like that. Dehumanization for sure.

[Nivsch]

@hundreth Soldiers in the field are in a constant survival mode and therefore act from their amygdala. The result is either fear of any Palestinian whatsoever, or an emotional flattening. Does this make their actions justified? Of course not, but it is worth looking at the cycle of dehumanization we can see from the same tweet - soldiers demonize Palestinians and anti Israelis demonize Israelis in the same way and fall to the exact same cognitive traps in their perception of the other side.

Edited September 10, 2025 by Nivsch

[hundreth]

4 hours ago, Nivsch said:

@hundreth Soldiers in the field are in a constant survival mode and therefore act from their amygdala. The result is either fear of any Palestinian whatsoever, or an emotional flattening. Does this make their actions justified? Of course not, but it is worth looking at the cycle of dehumanization we can see from the same tweet - soldiers demonize Palestinians and anti Israelis demonize Israelis in the same way and fall to the exact same cognitive traps in their perception of the other side.

Of course many Palestinian Hamas combatants dehumanize Jews and Israelis the same way. It's always awful.

This goes beyond in the moment battle reaction though. His cluelessness months later about why they might care about their loved one's body shows that. That guy has permanently shut off part of his humanity.

[Nivsch]

36 minutes ago, hundreth said:

Of course many Palestinian Hamas combatants dehumanize Jews and Israelis the same way. It's always awful.

This goes beyond in the moment battle reaction though. His cluelessness months later about why they might care about their loved one's body shows that. That guy has permanently shut off part of his humanity.

I was referring to anti-Israelis / pro-Palestinians / protestors abroad comparing to Israeli soldiers and Israelis. Not about hamas. hamas is far beneath the bar to even be compared to anyone.

Edited September 10, 2025 by Nivsch

[hundreth]

I came across a silly propaganda image suggesting that all of Israel would be Jordan if Israel lost, so I asked ChatGPT to rebuke it and it resulted in a kind of funny result.
 

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That image makes a very one-sided claim. Let’s break it down:

 

Historical Context

In 1947–48, the UN proposed partitioning the British Mandate of Palestine into two states: one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem as an international city. The Jewish leadership accepted; Arab leadership and surrounding Arab states rejected it.

When Israel declared independence in May 1948, armies from Egypt, Transjordan (Jordan), Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded.

Their goals were not unified. Each country wanted different things:

Jordan’s King Abdullah sought to annex the West Bank and parts of Jerusalem into his kingdom.

Egypt occupied Gaza and had ambitions in southern Palestine.

Syria and Lebanon hoped to gain territory along their borders.

The Arab Higher Committee (Palestinian leadership) envisioned a unitary Arab Palestine.

 

If Israel Had Lost

 

It’s unlikely the land would have become a single independent “Palestine” or entirely “Jordan”:

Most historians agree the land would have been divided among the invading states. In fact, that’s exactly what happened in the areas they managed to capture:

Jordan annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Egypt took control of Gaza.

No independent Palestinian state was created.

The map in your screenshot simplifies this into “Jordan takes everything,” but that erases Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Arab leadership’s ambitions.

 

The Claim in the Image

The suggestion that “all of Palestine would have been Jordan” is misleading.

A more accurate statement is: If Israel had lost in 1948, the land would almost certainly have been partitioned among Jordan, Egypt, and possibly Syria/Lebanon—with no guarantee of a sovereign Palestinian state.

 

👉 So, the image is not a fair or balanced reflection of what would have happened. It’s a political cartoonish simplification.

 

Would you like me to sketch a more historically accurate alternative map of what the land division might have looked like if Israel had lost?

SO then I said:
"So there would still not have been palestine?"

And she replied:
 

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Exactly — at least not in the way most people think of it today.

 

Why Not?

In 1948, there was no serious plan among the Arab states to create an independent Palestinian Arab state.

The Arab League and neighboring countries were more interested in absorbing territory than in supporting Palestinian sovereignty.

What actually happened in reality shows the pattern clearly:

Jordan annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem (1950).

Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip (without annexing it, but never allowing it independence).

Palestinians themselves had no independent state structure and were largely sidelined in political decisions.

 

So If Israel Lost in 1948…

The land would almost certainly have been carved up: Jordan in the east, Egypt in the south, possibly Syria in the north.

An independent Palestine, as envisioned in the UN partition plan, would have been even less likely to exist than it was after Israel’s victory.

 

👉 Ironically, the only time an internationally recognized plan for a Palestinian state was seriously on the table was the 1947 UN Partition Plan — and that was rejected by Arab leadership.

 

Would you like me to trace how the idea of a Palestinian state only really took off decades later (1960s onward, with the PLO), so you can see how it shifted from nonexistent in 1948 to central today?

The world is a fascinating place.

[Raze]

4 minutes ago, Nivsch said:

I meant to anti-Israelis / many pro palestinians / many protestors abroad Vs Israelis. hamas is too low in the bar to even mention and compare to anyone.

Right, you are delusional to the point where you think people protesting against slaughter of civilians are equal to someone who brags about shooting unarmed civilians because he’s in “survival mode”.

Ironically you are worse than the worst hamas supporters, as you excuse murders done by the occupiers who live lives of privilege in America and Europe who travel to Israel to shoot fathers trying to retrieve bodies of their sons, whereas they defend murders by the occupied population born in a ghetto.

Edited September 10, 2025 by Raze

[Nivsch]

@Raze I equated both camps' stances about each other in the way they are mirroring each other cognitively. Nobody justified anything. Read again more carefully before you choose to accuse personally.

Edited September 10, 2025 by Nivsch

[Raze]

2 minutes ago, Nivsch said:

@Raze I equated the cognitive stances of both camps about one another and how they are perfectly reflect and copy each other. Nobody justified anything. Read again more carefully before you choose to accuse personally.

And that is ridiculous, protesting something does not indicate they are cognitively on the same level as someone who calmly brags about murdering multiple unarmed family members on camera. 

[Nivsch]

@Raze This is about the typical soldier and typical protestor. At least the soldier - who mostly still doesn't do crimes- risks his own life, while the far left protestor demonizes an entire society risking his voice chords.

Edited September 10, 2025 by Nivsch

[Raze]

5 minutes ago, Nivsch said:

@Raze This is about the typical soldier and typical protestor. At least the soldier - who mostly still doesn't do crimes- risks his own life, while the far left protestor demonizes an entire society risking his voice chords.

A society that produces a typical soldier who brags about executing unarmed civilians deserves to be demonized. The idea protestors are on the same level as child murdered is laughable.

A serial killer also risks his life, that doesn’t make them any more moral. Protestors try to use legal means to voice against actions and israel supports crushing and deporting them. 

Edited September 10, 2025 by Raze

[Nivsch]

4 minutes ago, Raze said:

A society that produces a typical soldier who brags about executing unarmed civilians deserves to be demonized. 

He needs to be put in jail, but he isn't typical though you think he is, and that is exactly my point.

Edited September 10, 2025 by Nivsch

[Raze]

21 minutes ago, Nivsch said:

He needs to be put in jail, but he isn't typical though you think he is, and that is exactly my point.

There are countless reports, testimonies, and videos of idf shooting unarmed civilians 

The mindset that lead to this is typical, the constant victim hood and excuse making. You demonstrate it in your reaction where you immediately try to explain it by saying it’s because he’s in fight or flight and deflecting to random protestors. 

 

[Nivsch]

@Raze

Well IDF recruited 360,000 soldiers during this war, at least tens of thousands of them as combatants, many who do hudreds of reserve days with barely seeing their families who are normal families just like yours and mine or family in Europe or the US (imagine it. Humans).

And after we zoomed out, yes, many crimes, though by minority. Is there a systemic problem here? For sure.

What is the solution, to demonize? I think not. The solution is to target the government and its supporters who encourage the radicalization.

[zazen]

Crusaders were the security for the Gaza aid sites. Vile. 

[Hatfort]

Some Hollywood stars speaking out.

 

[zazen]

 

 

[Hatfort]

The devastation in Gaza may be even higher than what's reported.

https://www.thecanary.co/skwawkbox/2025/09/12/gaza-death-toll-lancet/

[PurpleTree]

Flotilla flotilla