USA: we need to help defend Israel to prevent all-out west in the Middle East.
Netanyahu: CHARGE!
Iran has fired missles at isreal, from Lebanon.
What do they expect? That their tyranny and outright terrorism go unanswered. I guess they really think they are doing the right thing but I no longer care about isreal at all. What I don’t like seeing is violence against Jews in other parts of the world as well as violence against Palestinians anywhere in world.
Fuck Israel for refusing to stop slaughtering Palestinian civilians and forcing this escalation.
And especially fuck the US for claiming for a year now to be working tirelessly towards a ceasefire, yet sending 10s of billions of money and bombs to Israel as a reward for the continued slaughter.
Disgusting land grabbers.
Iran’s IRGC say attack on Israel response to killing of Nasrallah
Iran’s Fars news agency is reporting that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said the missile attack under way on Israel is in response to the killing of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah last week as well as that of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh earlier this year.
“In response to the martyrdom of Ismail Haniyeh, Hassan Nasrallah and (IRGC Guards commander) Nilforoshan, we targeted the heart of the occupied territories,” the IRGC said in a statement.
So seems like Iran intends this to be a one and done response for everything Israel has done the last few months.
So seems like Iran intends this to be a one and done response for everything Israel has done the last few months.
i.e. “Please don’t escalate this any further. We prefer this level of escalation and no more.”
Yeah, that’s been Iran’s position for a while. They don’t strike first, but they’ll return fire.
They do arm plenty of proxy groups, though.
… Yeah. Iran “doesn’t strike first”. They just back terrorist groups with funding, supplies, and planning so that they can strike instead.
Please do yourself a favor and actually educate yourself on the clusterfuck that is the middle east rather than just parroting whatever a twitch streamer tells you. This has been going in cycles for decades.
*centuries
Bit of it, yeah. But Iran in particular is a mid-20th century clusterfuck of British and US interference.
Honestly the best thing we can all do is wean ourselves off oil so it can go back to being a scattering of unimportant desert tribes.
Well. The current conflict with Israel only really goes back about 80-ish years. And there are strong arguments that the current iranian proxy wars are a different conflict with different root causes but… yeah.
The region itself? Most of that goes back to when The West decided to redraw borders with no real logic other than guaranteeing cyclic wars of ethnic cleansing between warlord. I want to say that is more 150-ish years, but I genuinely forget. So it very well could be centuries in that regard.
But the way to think of it? The former is why EVERYONE hates Israel. The latter is why nobody is actually interested in helping the Palestinians and just view them as a way to bleed IDF resources and give the government rope to hang themselves with.
I would say the current cycle of violence can be said to have begun after WWI and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. But there have been plenty more cycles of sectarian and tribal violence in the region over the centuries.
Yes. There are millenia of conflicts. There are millenia of conflicts around the globe. You get two groups of humans next to each other and they are going to start stabbing each other.
But it was normal (apologies for the negative connotations) tribal warfare. Different regions would fight other regions as both skirmishes and conquest. But it was largely when Westerners decided to draw up a bunch of maps with no willingness to understand the residents that we began the current cycles of horror. Because lets say you hate the Reds and the Reds hate you. But now? Now you live in a city with one Red and the rest of the Reds live in a city with one You. Eventually someone decides to do some ethnic cleansing which leads to retaliatory ethnic cleansing and more wars and so forth.
And, inevitably, warlords see an opportunity to gain power. Which leads to refugees which leads to ethnic cleansing which leads to…
There is a significant difference between proxies and a direct missile attack launched by a nation-state. Just as there is a significant difference between the US arming a genocidal state, and the US actually dropping bombs directly on civilians. Not to say Iran and the US are not blameless for the actions of their proxies, but there are degrees here that are significant. You kneejerk “Iran bad, Israel good” view of the world is devoid of nuance. Maybe you should get yourself a twitch stream.
Where did I ever say
“Iran bad, Israel good”
But hey, much easier to attack a strawman, right?
Believe it or not, but you don’t have to explicitly state something for you to be doing something. It’s extremely obvious that you approached this news with that bias.
A bias of… state sponsored terrorism bad and escalation bad? Or is the problem that I have cared about the dead civilians in the region for more than a year?
REALLY curious what you “sense” from that sentence.
So seems like Iran intends this to be a one and done response for everything Israel has done the last few months.
I think it’s highly unlikely that Israel will agree on that one. This may escalate and quickly.
The Washington Post is reporting, citing three anonymous Pentagon officials, that American troops in the Middle East were not targeted during the Iranian missile attack in Israel.
Iraqi group linked to Iran have previously fired rockets at military bases housing US soldiers in Iraq and Syria.
Another sign that Iran is trying to respond, as a deterrent, rather than with an intent to escalate. At least that’s what it seems like so far.
Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari just held a televised address.
In it, he said the Israeli military is “fully prepared to defend and retaliate” to the Iranian attack, stressing that it would be in a “timely manner”.
Hmm…
BBC says Iran has launched a smaller number of missiles than they did in April.
181 missiles were launched this time
How many last time?
https://apnews.com/article/strait-of-hormuz-vessel-33fcffde2d867380e98c89403776a8ac
Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Iran fired 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles and more than 120 ballistic missiles.
In Reuters they reported the following:
Pentagon spokesperson Major General Patrick Ryder:
…
Iran’s attack was about twice the scope of Tehran’s attack on Israel on April 14Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they used hypersonic ‘Fattah’ missiles ‘for the first time’ in attack on Israel, Iranian state TV reports
The BBC has some video. Looks like some missiles are being intercepted, some hitting.
BBC: “celebratory gunfire” in Beiruit.
What a fucked up part of the world.
Edit: the celebratory part isn’t fucked up. The doing it by shooting guns in the air is.
I mean I get where you’re coming from but you can’t honestly expect the people of Lebanon to be sympathetic to the Israeli’s given the events of the past 2 weeks.
It’s not the celebration. It’s the celebratory gunfire.
By all means, celebrate. Maybe don’t do it in a way that can hurt other people.
Parts of the US are no better.
https://apnews.com/article/grandson-shot-wedding-nebraska-texas-d615b0e20718c07fb9820d2dc1d05d12
If you want me to claim that the U.S. is not also a fucked-up part of the world, you have come to the wrong person.
Oh. Yeah, I agree with you. My bad, misinterpreted your comment.
Sorry. Edited to clarify.
Hezbollah have had this coming, they fired rockets at Israel on October 8th. So not because of what Israel was doing to the Palestinians, but in support of what Hamas did on October 7th.
As long as Israel is occupying land, they are in constant state of war
The moment the first news dropped on October 7 it was clear Israel was to retaliate with a bloodbath and they started bombing Gaza the same evening. If Hezbollahs goal at the time was to make use of the situation, they would have went for an all out attack while IDF was in disarray.
The goal was to increase the pressure on Israel for reaching a cease-fire agreement through keeping their northern settlers out of their settlements, rendering the region economically inactive and the settlers angry at their government.
It seems like no one anticipated this to go into a yearlong war. Initially Hamas seemed to have aimed to reach a ceasefire quickly through a hostage exchange deal, but Israel put genocide over having their hostages return alive.
“Something something, make excuses for terrorists.”
There’s been no evidence of genocide. I have plenty of criticisms of the Israeli government, and if you were arguing it’s indiscriminate you’d have a point. But genocide? No. We don’t call Hiroshima a genocide and that was far worse than what’s happening in Gaza. We don’t call Dresden a genocide. We don’t call shock and awe in Iraq a genocide.
Words have meaning.
There is overwhelming evidence of genocide, Apartheid, and disregard of civilian lives.
Genocide
Holocaust scholar to discuss his conclusion that Gaza campaign constitutes genocide
UN Expert Says Impunity for Israel Must End as ‘Genocidal Violence’ Spreads to West Bank
“A Textbook Case of Genocide”: Israeli Holocaust Scholar Raz Segal Decries Israel’s Assault on Gaza
800+ Legal Scholars Say Israel May Be Perpetrating ‘Crime of Genocide’ in Gaza
Human Shields
Hamas:
Intentionally utilizing the presence of civilians or other protected persons to render certain areas immune from military attack is prohibited under international law. Amnesty International was not able to establish whether or not the fighters’ presence in the camps was intended to shield themselves from military attacks. However, under international humanitarian law, even if one party uses “human shields”, or is otherwise unlawfully endangering civilians, this does not absolve the opposing party from complying with its obligations to distinguish between military objectives and civilians or civilian objects, to refrain from carrying out indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks, and to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and civilian objects.
Israel:
Additionally, there is extensive independent verification of Israel using Palestinians as Human Shields:
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Including Children (2013 Report)
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Israel “Systematically” Uses Gaza Children as Human Shields, Rights Group Finds 2024
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Breaking The Silence - Testimonies from IDF Veterans
Deliberate Attacks on Civilians
Israel deliberately targets civilian areas. From in general with the Dahiya Doctrine to multiple systems deployed in Gaza to do so:
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The Dahiya Doctrine & Israel’s Use of Disproportionate Force
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‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza
Israel also targets Israeli Soldiers and Civilians to prevent them being leveraged as hostages, known as the Hannibal Directive. Which was also used on Oct 7th.
Starvation
Prior to the current hostilities, 1.2 million of Gaza’s 2.2 million people were estimated to be facing acute food insecurity, and over 80 percent were reliant on humanitarian aid. Israel maintains overarching control over Gaza, including over the movement of people and goods, territorial waters, airspace, the infrastructure upon which Gaza relies, as well as the registry of the population. This leaves Gaza’s population, which Israel has subjected to an unlawful closure for 16 years, almost entirely dependent on Israel for access to fuel, electricity, medicine, food, and other essential commodities.
After the imposition of a “total blockade” on Gaza on October 9, Israeli authorities resumed piping water to some parts of southern Gaza on October 15 and, as of October 21, allowed limited humanitarian aid to arrive through the Rafah crossing with Egypt. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on October 18 that Israel would not allow humanitarian assistance “in the form of food and medicines” into Gaza through its crossings “as long as our hostages are not returned.”
Rights expert finds ‘reasonable grounds’ genocide is being committed in Gaza: https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147976
Human Rights Watch founder accuses Israel of genocide: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0j1rk0c
A top U.N. court says Gaza genocide is ‘plausible’ but does not order cease-fire: https://www.npr.org/2024/01/26/1227078791/icj-israel-genocide-gaza-palestinians-south-africa
The rate of bombing in Gaza has drastically slowed compared to the opening stages of the war. Israel can be accused of being too blase about civilian death, but there is no evidence of systematic attempts to eradicate the Arab population entirely. I have yet to see any credible evidence of anything but Israel having a disturbing willingness to kill 10 to get 1, if you get me. That’s horrific enough, you don’t need to exaggerate it by calling it genocide. There’s plenty of legitimate enough concerns about Israel’s bombing campaign without resorting to sensationalism.
Huge, huge, difference between not caring if you hit the next building by accident in an otherwise precise airstrike, and rounding up and killing them all. You should account for the inherent destructiveness of modern urban warfare also. Go on google earth and look at what the Russians did to cities in East Ukraine. Just because something is horrible, tragic, awful, doesn’t make it a genocide. It is impossible to fight a war against an entity like Hamas and not have innocent people hit in the crossfire. Israel is in an unwinnable position in that sense. It either lets hamas terrorize it’s population, or it fires back and risks killing innocent people.
It’s a complex situation is what I’m getting it. Let’s not pretend it’s anything else to suit some juvenile good/bad narrative
You understand October 7 was hamas response to Israeli settlers continually invading and stealing Gaza land, right?
This did not “begin” October 7th.
Israeli settler terrorists are just as bad as hezbollah.If your response to a disagreement about olive groves in the west Bank is to rape and murder 1200 innocent people I’m gonna go out on a limb and say you probably shouldn’t get the olives
You literally just reduced people’s entire lives and livelihoods to “olive groves” to justify everything they’ve been going through for decades. No matter which way you put it, that was an incredibly shitty thing to say. Not to mention just plain wrong and evil.
Literally nothing that has happened in the west Bank justifies what happened on 10/7. That was just sheer face to face animalism from hamas
Hezbollah has stated that they fired those rockets in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Cool. That’s an incredibly dumb reason to start a war with a country like Israel. There’s a reason Egypt and Jordan don’t do that anymore.
Hezbollah only exists because of Occupation by Israel, like Hamas, and the three previous invasions. Jordan and Egypt are allies of the US
1982
The 1982 Lebanon war began on 6 June 1982, when Israel invaded again for the purpose of attacking the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Israeli army laid siege to Beirut. During the conflict, according to Lebanese sources, between 15,000 and 20,000 people were killed, mostly civilians.
On 16 February 1985, Shia Sheik Ibrahim al-Amin declared a manifesto in Lebanon, announcing a resistance movement called Hezbollah, whose goals included combating the Israeli occupation. During the South Lebanon conflict (1985–2000) the Hezbollah militia waged a guerrilla campaign against Israeli forces occupying Southern Lebanon and their South Lebanon Army proxies.
Israeli Withdrawal
Throughout the painstaking process of confirming the Israeli withdrawal, Hizballah was at pains to declare its commitment to recovering the last millimeter of Lebanese territory, but it also acknowledged that it would not act hastily to reinitiate violence. In sum, Hizballah’s behavior and deference to state authority have worked to its political advantage. It reaped recognition in an unprecedented meeting between Nasrallah and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who praised Hizballah’s restraint and its promise of cooperation. The meeting with Annan offers a remarkable contrast with Hizballah’s earlier days, when it was hostile to the UN and especially to the UN force in the south.
Without an agreement between Syria and Israel, there will be little pressure on Hizballah to disarm. Syria’s calculated strategy is to allow Hizballah to serve as a constant reminder of the consequences of continuing to occupy the Golan Heights.This is a role that Hizballah is happy to play, given its enmity toward Israel. At the same time, it remains profoundly aware of the political costs of bringing destruction down on the heads of its supporters, and this further reduces the prospect that Hizballah will initiate attacks on Israel
2006
The doctrine is named after the Dahiya suburb of Beirut, where the Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah has its headquarters, which the Israeli military leveled during its assault on Lebanon in the summer of 2006 that killed nearly 1,000 civilians, about a third of them children, and caused enormous damage to the country’s civilian infrastructure, including power plants, sewage treatment plants, bridges, and port facilities.
It was formulated by then-General Gadi Eisenkot when he was Chief of Northern Command. As he explained in 2008 referring to a future war on Lebanon: "What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on… We will apply disproportionate force on it (village) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.” Eisenkot went on to become chief of the general staff of the Israeli military before retiring in 2019.
While it became official Israeli military doctrine after Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon, Israel’s military has used disproportionate force and targeted Palestinian, Lebanese, and other civilians since Israel was established in 1948 based on the ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians, including dozens of massacres to force them to flee for their lives.
2007 - Present
Until recently, the border had been relatively quiet. Occasional rockets or drones crossed from Lebanon into Israel without leading to serious escalation, while Israel violated Lebanese airspace more than 22,000 times from 2007 to 2022.
While the withdrawal was certified by the United Nations, Lebanon disputed it, arguing that the Shebaa Farms was part of its territory, and not part of the Syrian Golan Heights, which Israel continues to occupy.
So there are two separate issues here that lead to the current dispute: the first is that Israel occupies the Golan Heights and treats it as its own territory in violation of international law, and the second is that there was already a pre-existing disagreement between Syria and Lebanon over the border, prior to the Israeli occupation.
I don’t think standing up for human rights violations is a dumb thing to do. And Israel started this war. They didn’t have to slaughter innocent civilians indiscriminately, but Israel did. They didn’t have to assassinate key figures, perform acts of terror like blowing up pagers, or attack civilian areas in Lebanon. But Israel did do all that. They started this war, and they’re just crying victim because people are actually calling them out on their bs and fighting back.
Groups like Hezbollah don’t believe in human rights. They do not care if innocent people die. Their problem with Israel is not that it’s oppressive, they love oppressive regimes (Iran, Russia). Hezbollah engages in assassinations in Lebanon and abroad frequently. I can go on but my point is you don’t know who these people are or what they believe.
Groups like Hamas and Hezbollah believe in a borderless global theocracy. They believe in a world of public executions and state sponsored brutality against anybody who argues. They are authoritarians, human rights are western philosophical nonsense to them. Unislamic alien beliefs. They simply do not believe in equality or the sanctity of life.
Their problem with Israel is solely that Israel is Jewish.
I can’t bring myself to mourn for people like Nasrallah. That said things are undeniably going to get a lot worse for everybody before they get better.
I don’t see any indication of a reasonable end goal from Israel. They’ve remained uncommitted on an exit strategy from Gaza and opening a front in Lebanon rather then helping the security situation is as likely to get them bogged down in a quagmire. From what I can gather anyway they’re just going balls the wall trying to eliminate as many of Iran’s proxies as they can before they bow to international pressure like they historically have whenever things “escalate” too much
Wars have to end. If you go into them without an exit strategy they will backfire. Right now Israel’s government seems more concerned with keeping Bibi out of jail then it does with crafting any sort of humane way out of this mess.
How bad is this? Like WWIII bad or localized slaughter and ‘limited’ actions bad?
I don’t see how the Middle East war could escalate into a worldwide conflict. Ukraine, maybe. The Middle East conflict spiralling out of that territory? Nah.
Russia are not that bothered about Iran, and the US want to keep Israel around for the geopolitical influence they get from them, but I don’t think Israel is worth enough to the US to make them risk a direct confrontation with Russia.
Worst case scenario, Israel and Iran beat the shit out of each other while everyone else watches from the sidelines, making the occasional, half-hearted demand for a ceasefire. At most, Russia and US will continue supplying their respective friends with bombs and arms to profit off the conflict for as long as they can.
The middle east only spirals to a world war if other countries start their own shit hoping that the existing conflict is too distracting. The US putting boots on the ground in the middle east is a great chance for China to start shit in Taiwan or south Korea.
The saving grace is there aren’t that many countries that can escalate anything global besides the US and China. Russia seems fully occupied in Ukraine, and Europe is still a joke for military power currently.
My guess is it depends on the damage this attack will cause. If the missiles are all shot down or hit desert, it will be some punitive F-35 strike on an Iranian airfield somewhere. But if there’s significant damage and casualties it could escalate.
I don’t think Iran is going to risk all out war with Israel and the US. I suspect they expect most of their missiles (like the drones) to be shot down. Perhaps that’s wishful thinking though…
Depends on Israels response. When Iran did this in April in retaliation for Israel bombing an Iranean embassy, Iran was like “we have retaliated and are good now”, Israel responded but it was limited, and status quo was restored.
If Israel decides to escalate (which is their default play lately), or if Iranean missiles hit forcing them to retaliate, there could be all out war, including involving the US.
If you want a hint of what’s to come:
The far-right Israeli finance minister (Bezalel Smotrich) writes on social media: “Like Gaza, Hezbollah and the state of Lebanon, Iran will regret the moment.”
Well the last time Iran fired stuff at Israel, the missles were all intercepted and didn’t do anything. So we’ll see. It may end up being another otherwise nothing burger, but considering Israel is actively invading Lebanon right now, the chances for larger and larger exchanges that begin overwhelming the Iron Dome are growing by the second.
I guess that will depend on what the missiles are carrying.
Let’s just say a limited attack by Iran would be exactly what Netanjahu could wish for, to keep the war going and secure more support from the US. So this could be the start of another 30 year war in the middle east that draws in US ground troops at some point.
Biden’s not going to put boots on the ground in an election year. Americans are tired of meaningless, never ending, wars and nobody in government wants to find out just how tired they actually are.
That said, yeah, Bibi is trying to save his own skin as much as anything else. US officials have been quietly complaining to the media for months about this
Localized slaughter and limited intervention. Same as it has been for literally decades at this point.
BBC: Airspace over Israel has been re-opened.
BBC: No reports of damage or casualties so far. Missile attacks were on both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
The BBC shows video of missiles over Tel Aviv, but at this point 'll wait for confirmation from literally anyone else before I believe the IDF’s claim that they’re from Iran.
ABC News - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
Information for ABC News:
MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: High - United States of America
Wikipedia about this sourceSearch topics on Ground.News
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/israeli-military-iran-fired-missiles-israel-114391340
