JohnRawls wrote:Hamas are terrorist animals who started this and Israel are ethnic cleansing animals also, Gaza is 66% destroyed this is already reaching levels of Russian devasation in Ukraine. Mariupol is 70% destroyed, Bakhmut is 80% destroyed.
Hamas deserved a response and retaliation but not to this degree.
You forgot to mention that the US-led coalition reached similar levels of destruction to take Mosul, Raqqa, Kobani, etc from ISIS. You talk about Russia in Ukraine but this is something the West and NATO itself also do in similar situations. If you think an attempt to take Crimea from Russia won't leave places like Sebastopol like this, think again.
This doesn't happen just because the attacker wants to. It's the reality of urban warfare in the 21st century, even if some idiots like @late may just try to draw some proportion ratios (worse, counting both civilians and combatants as if killing combatants was somehow criminal).
You may find this article interesting, it seems even current international humanitarian law provisions are part of the problem. Specifically the ban on using tear gas and flamethrowers, which could have been used to force fighters holed up into a building to leave but, since they're not available anymore, militaries will instead opt to just bomb the building since that's their remaining legal option.
https://mwi.westpoint.edu/militaries-mu ... ties-save/JohnRawls wrote:Both sides are just bad faith actors in the sense of peace.
True and yet this is still an oversimplification.
Israeli settlement building is indeed an obstacle to peace. Not an insurmountable one but definitely a big issue, one that makes violence more likely than otherwise since it increases tensions and violence in the West Bank. The 2014 war (Operation Protective Edge) wouldn't have happened if there were no settlements for example, since the war started over the kidnapping and then execution by Hamas of two settlers who were hitchhiking. More generally, it makes it necessary for Israel to have a much larger military presence and more restrictions solely to protect settlers than there would otherwise be. Some people worry about building during negotiations but the real problem with settlements is that make it necessary to Israel to impose harsher restrictions than would otherwise be necessary. Even then, land swaps and evacuations are both options that can deal with this problem and of all the contentious issues settlements are actually the easiest one to solve as shown by the maps presented in the Annapolis talks in 2008. Jerusalem, refugees and security arrangements are all harder to deal with, in increasing order of difficulty.
But you're still missing the full nature of the problem, because it doesn't make sense to speak of "both" sides when the Palestinians are not united to begin with. There are at least 3 aides here, Israel, Palestinian moderates (the Palestinian Authority) and Palestinian irredentists (chiefly among them, Hamas). The situation in the West Bank isn't and hasn't been the same as the situation in Gaza since 2005, and it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise. They haven't even been governed by the same entity since then.
In fact, even if Israel removed all settlers and reached an agreement with the Palestinian Authority, there would still be the problem of Hamas in Gaza and it's clear that one cannot be solved through diplomacy. It's precisely why it's essential to topple Hamas to have any possibility of actual peace. The Israeli public understands this, and many who could otherwise be willing to give concessions to the Palestinian Authority and even get rid of settlements see these actions as pointless as they would not end the conflict.
Of course, toppling Hamas from Gaza means thinking about the day after. Since Israel can't be trusted not to resettle it and the Palestinian Authority can't afford to be returning riding Merkava tanks, it seems like the international community should play the main role here by sending peacekeepers and having
them hand Gaza to the Palestinian Authority.
Once this actually becomes an issue where there are two sides, real negotiations could begin. And the international community should pressure both to reach an agreement, or else - the type of resulting agreement will have to be an imposition that doesn't look like one. Arguably, the field is ripe for that, the US on one hand wants to focus on China and not deal with Middle East bullshit anymore, the key Sunni Arab states (Egypt and Saudi Arabia) want to focus on Iran, even Israel wants a peace agreement with Saudi Arabia to focus on Iran as well.