> A rebuttal shared by Israel's mission in Geneva said Israel "consistently strives to minimize harm to children even in situations of conflict".
Well, it is certainly no question that Israel is killing children en masse.
Israeli officials are saying “but we are trying to minimize”. Well, these attempts clearly failed given 20,179 fatal cases, and let’s also consider all physically injured and traumatized children.
Still, as of today, Israel is killing a child per day in Gaza [1].
So either it is complete incompetence of Israels warfare methods, or it is done on purpose. No matter how you try to frame it, package it: this is not right and Israel should be sanctioned internationally.
Fundamentalists rule this nation. Sanction them, no weapon exports and their actions are not aligned with their official rhetoric.
Also, October 7, October 7, October 7. Yes, horrible, but at what point does the consensus become that October 7 starts to look like a small event in light of the death toll on the other side?
Spoiler: we should be way beyond that. Over 97% of all total casualties are on the Palestinian side [2].
Sanction Israel.
[1] https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/geneva-palais-briefing... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war
The only thing saving Israel is the US protection and the nukes. US protection can change. Nukes are harder.
South Africa successfully utilized "strategic ambiguity". They never explicitly acknowledged they had the weapons, while making sure world leaders knew they were a credible threat.
during South Africa's border wars (specifically against the Cubans in Angola), there were internal discussions about deploying tactical nuclear weapons. Because world leaders viewed that threat as entirely credible, it gave South Africa massive leverage.
Feels like world leaders view modern Israeli threats through the exact same lens and i'd agree given recent covert operations like the beeper bombings hence this UN posture.
Could we replicate the SA situation? probably not but maybe partially?
When the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, South Africa’s strategic leverage evaporated overnight. The US and UK no longer had a reason to shield them from crippling global economic sanctions.
Feels like we are watching this in real time with Israel post Iran war. If the US entirely removed its diplomatic shield and allowed full global economic isolation to set in, the economic cost of maintaining a pariah state might eventually outweigh the perceived security benefit of the weapons. ('might' doing a lot of heavy lifting there)
Also SA was also motivated by fear of the nukes getting in the hands of the incoming leftist government, Israel does not have that fear.
Then there various secular narratives around the Jewish homeland, the rebirth (and Germany's redemption) after the Holocaust etc.
For western politicians, it seems far easier to chime in to the dehumanization of Palestinians and either paint the daily suffering there as "tragic but necessary", make fun of it or dismiss it completely - than to object to those stories.
This seems to work on a different layer than geopolitics, so I have doubts that a shift in geopolitics alone would change this. (I may be wrong)
Though maybe the changed perception of Israel after the Gaza war might change it.
This blinkered view will reasonably leave you baffled and with a distorted world model, and a perception that people are stupid when they are actually seeing the bigger picture.
They are not family and often not even the same race. It’s a religious thing, but you only find two of the three religious alignments irrational, when these two are, at least in part, just reacting in response to the other.
Your analysis on nuclear use doesn't consider the lingering poisoning of people and land compared to conventional weapons. It's not Keyfabe. You would vastly prefer being attacked with conventional weapons.
There is no unanimous consensus on this issue at all.
Now after WW2, consensus is that the League of Nations may have outright caused WW2, and certainly contributed more than any other individual factor. The League of Nations was the embodiment of the treaty of Versailles. As if that wasn't bad enough, the League of Nations was also the league of nations that stopped most reactions against Hitler immediately before the war.
I'm not even going to bother drawing the obvious parallel with how the UN is treating nuclear powers, and people defending themselves against attacks by a nuclear (or trying-to-be-nuclear) power.
What is the lowest entity that can apply leverage? Regardless of what US or UN does or doesn't, you can start boycotting today.
When Hamas started the Gaza war, the IDF barely defended against Hamas. They feared they were about to face land incursions straight through UN lines from Lebanon. That, despite the direct UN mission to use weapons to prevent it from just about everyone, the UNSC, the UNGA, UN resolutions, Lebanon's government, Hezbollah built up an army right under the noses of these soldiers.
The IDF was 100% correct in their assessment.
So now what do we do? Nobody sane will pretend that hamas or hezbollah's stated reasons for fighting against Israel are even remotely true. And Iran? Iran still quite literally screams on state television they will massacre Israel and then the US (they have "hardliners" making speeches, which are really more like screaming)
So another attack will come again, that's for sure. How do we prevent the same outcome we had now? Nobody, not even Iran, wants this (although for Iran I'd bet the Palestinian casualties aren't anywhere near high enough). But they won't change. So ...
What now?
Pretty sure he died well before Oct 7.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_Waffen_Mountain_Division_...
Note the islamic emblem and the fact that the "muslim pope" (mufti of Jerusalem, a Palestinian) visited extermination camps while recruiting SS soldiers. There are rumors about what he said when he was there. Should I repeat them?
I think the emergence of nation states with democratic institutions and a strong system of law is actually a hopeful precedent here. Somehow we got from a world of fiefdoms and lords that literally stood above the law to states with checks and balances. (Yes, we're sliding back towards the "fiefdoms" situation right now, but we're still far better than things used to be)
So I'm gonna be a starry-eyed idealist and keep the hope up that we might archive the same on a global level at some point.
Apply the Apartheid South Africa treatament. Gather the larger number possible of complying members, and apply a coordinated boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign to put pressure in the party engaged in genocide, ethnic cleansing or other abhorrent actions.
If recent history is any indicator, UN isn't that structure; probably EU / G7 / BRICS & other such blocs are:
... we construct a new dataset covering all 43 very large mass atrocities perpetrated by governments or non-state actors since 1945 with at least 50,000 civilian fatalities.
This article introduces and summarizes these data, including an inductively generated typology of three major ending types: those in which (i) violence is carried out to its intended conclusion (37%); (ii) the perpetrator is driven out of power militarily (26%); or (iii) the perpetrator shifts to a different strategy no longer involving mass atrocities against civilians (37%).
We find that international actors play a range of important roles in endings, often involving encouragement and support for policy changes that reduce mass killings. Endings could be attributed principally to armed foreign interventions in only four cases, three of which involved regime change. Within the cases we study, no ending was attributable to a neutral peacekeeping mission.
Personally speaking, the is-it-a-genocide debate makes me tune out. It’s hyperlegal, clearly a moving target and selectively prosecuted by each side to the point of, often, absurdity.
If two people want to debate it, fine, but I have no obligation to pay attention. If we want to talk about harms and harm reduction, that feels more concrete and relatable.
And, of course, the problem is people don't agree. Turkey refuses to accept many of it's actions as genocidal (because that's how Turkey was created: when the last islamic state ("the Ottoman empire") got destroyed by Turks (who at that point were the ottoman army), they massacred a LOT of population groups, famously the Armenians but academics name more than a dozen separate genocides: Greeks, Kurds, Azeri, Jews, ...)
Oh and of course they kept doing it. Technically what Turkey did in Cyprus is also a genocide, and they have an active policy of replacing Kurd population groups but that's, if that's even possible, an even worse sore point.
The sad fact is that these genocides happened to gain territory. And, most of that territory, go look at Google Maps. This was mostly deep inland Turkey. And ... Turks obviously don't want it. There's no big cities there, and the more east you go, the less little towns, the less people, the less everything (except on the border). After the genocides what was a European landscape, a village every 5km or so is now empty. Hundreds of kilometers of nothing. Names on a map , with nothing or ruins below them. You don't really need a line to find the Armenian or Georgian border: where the farms begin, the rectangular fields, the villages, you've crossed the Turkish border. In other words: what repopulation the Turks did ... is a failure. And what little remains, mostly near the black sea, is losing young people at an astonishing rate. This is huge empty space, mostly ecologically destroyed land, not productive farmland. Not nature preserves. Nothing.
Also the reverse also doesn't apply. The UN may have trouble with Israeli actions, but where the UN took control to resolve the situation, where the UN took action, most famously southern Lebanon, it has not just failed but it systematically kept getting worse for 50+ years now. Whereas at least for Israel you can say: look at Tel Aviv. Look at Jerusalem. Look at Haifa. They really built something. Where the UN "helped" ... there's nothing.
And this veto nonsense needs to go away.
If not South Africa, who from Africa? Egypt? Nigeria?
The current composition of the UNSC is just ridiculous.
in theory its better if you don't give veto power to great powers because they'll abuse it. in practice it's what keeps the fragile system that prevents WW3 from total collapse, as happened with the league of nations.
1: The new nuclear powers should be included, I guess including N Korea, India, and Pakistan. And possibly Israel, if they admit to having them.
2: Rethink the whole thing. Are nukes really as important as everybody thought they were after WWII? If not, what should we look at to decide who to include?
That's not actually true, the 5 permanent seats on the UNSC were granted in 1945, well before any country aside from the US managed to develop nuclear weapons.
Those 5 countries did all eventually develop nuclear weapons and became nuclear weapon states under the NPT but that happened quite a bit later.
Possibly moreso. Nuclear sovereignty is demonstrably above the conventional type. At the end of the day, having a forum where nuclear powers with long-range delivery capability can veto things reduces the risk of them using that capability to veto in the real world.
By the range requirement, Tel Aviv and Pyongyang qualify for UNSC inclusion. New Delhi and Islamabad do not—they will mostly just nuke each other.
Out of the 9 current nuclear armed countries 5 have invaded another countries this century, and three of the most prolific invaders this century (Israel, USA, and Russia; each with over 3 invasions this century) are all nuclear armed. Out of the 4 countries which haven‘t invaded another country this century, two (India and Pakistan) regularly engage in border skirmishes and bombing campaigns. This leaves China and North Korea as the only two nuclear armed countries (out of 9) which don‘t regularly engage in foreign wars.
By our current experience, the proliferation of nuclear armed states is almost certain to end in a disaster at a previously unseen scale. We should be doing everything in our power to prevent this world of future horrors.
Maybe the UN should try to avoid releasing obviously biased reports.[0]
Keep in mind the UN has already effectively thrown away all credibility when it comes to anything related to Israel already due to well documented extreme anti-Israel bias.[1]
[0] https://unwatch.org/un-watch-legal-rebuttal-disproving-the-p...
[1] https://unwatch.org/2025-unga-resolutions-on-israel-vs-rest-...
Sadly, it's unlikely because they care more about keeping immigrants out.
I don’t see why this is controversial.
Pro-Palestine people have seen the overwhelming field reports that prove this and Pro-Israel people actually are in favor of targeting these kids because they might grow resentful of Israel and join Hamas.
This will never happen, and we know why. It's disgusting. The "enlightened," "liberal" west's principles have never been more clearly on display: "Why should we concern ourselves with the wholesale slaughter of innocent children in a pent-up captive civilian population? Not our problem."
The proposed reforms led by the likes of Brazil, Germany and India are not getting a lot of traction. Maybe if they included everyone else they'd have a better chance.
I don't actually live in Russia, if I did, it would be even worse.
We need more of that.
https://blog.xero.com/news-events/our-position-on-ukraine-an...
But they didn't do anything for Israel. Actually, at the height of the genocide, they decided to invest in an Israeli company.
slow claps
1. Or the UAE, which has shown interest in nuclear tech, perhaps for strictly peaceful purposes
2. I.e. attain nuclear latency, and finally make real what Netanyahu has been warning the world for decades: that Iran is "weeks away from a nuclear bomb"
Edit: I wonder if the (predictable) downvoters are following the news https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/22/politics/mamdani-aipac-new-yo...
It is even more sickening and outrageous if you view it through that lens.
But I never came to better conclusion about West Bank annexation that that it is pure imperialism. Basically what russians are trying in Ukraine. I'm still not quite sure what is the purpose, there is really not enough land or it's all just bs?
I wonder if this ends up Flagged.
Israel holds the territory with its army, and claims that neither Jordan (nor any country) owned it beforehand, which is a better-founded argument than some people may expect - the west bank was originally, by england, designated as a palestinian - not jordanian - state, arab leadership rejected it (to also reject an israeli state), england withdrew from it, and jordan occupied it, with very very limited international recognition.
It's a pretty crazy history, I hope I got it right, please fact-check me.
Not sure it's the same thing. Russians want political and territorial control in Ukraine, not expelling Ukrainians to resettle the place with "ethnic Russians". Israel wants to conquer the whole of Palestine (West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem) to replace the native population with its own. There is no possible equal integration of Palestinians or their descendants into a Jewish state, not in a thousand years, and by design.
But I wouldn't be sure about your claim regarding Israel. Even now there are millions of Palestinians with Israel citizenship. I understand the deeply rooted animosity with hamas but I do not understand the whole point of this type of colonisation of west bank. I suppose it have something to do with their extreme religious part of goverment?
You've had a point. Maybe it's more like Native Americans and colonizer type of situation.
Besides the obvious religious/ ideological motivation, there's also a simple matter of territory: Israel is a small country and the West Bank and Gaza have a lot of value, both for the country as a whole (more space for more people, more natural resources, nobody to share with) as well as commercial value- think developments, real estate, industrial and agricultural areas, seafront properties, etc. Very hard to keep your hands off this bounty, for decades, when the rest of the world basically allows you everything.
The similarity might be stronger than you suspect. Russia abducts and transports Ukrainian children to controlled territories [0], and actively encourages its own citizens to relocate to captured Ukrainian areas through economic incentives, subsidized housing, and aggressive long-term repopulation strategies.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz7g5xnvl2eo
[1] https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russias...
[[ Edit - added references in response to flagging ]]
What’s happening is evil. That’s relatable, both in the problem and potential solutions. Whether it’s genocide under some international convention strikes me as a counterproductive distraction that replaces something horrifying with something boring.
Boycott. Divestment. Sanctions. Use any legal means to stop funding this genocide and make Israel's leadership accountable. We all love our comfy white collar jobs and would rather not rock the boat, but not doing the little we can do (e.g. stop using Israeli suppliers and services) makes us supporters.
Because that which war criminals bring to their victims, they will also - ALWAYS - bring back to their own state.
Prosecute your war criminals. Now!
Needing so many years to get the courage to say the world genocide, where everybody had seen for years Israel turning little children into little flesh chunks, slowly unfurl in horrid technicolor in world TV, is just another part of the problem. UN is useless.
The circumstances of little Hind Rajab's death plays on my mind every single day, and haunts me. The fact something as brazen and blatant as that could happen, and the world did nothing.
Truly a stain on our generation.
ism.
You just did an ism.
The premie babies at Al-Nasr hospital.
Over a hundred bombed hospitals.
The Irish president's sister kidnapped and abused.
Assassinating negotiation teams and scientists.
Murders of whole families who dared to speak out to the world.
Running over a teenager with their hands zip-tied behind their backs with Caterpillars®.
The paramedic massacre in Rafah.
The hundreds of journalists. The tens of thousands of children. The doctors raped to death.
The people who never get mentioned in these lists of atrocities, buried in mass graves with their children, hands tied.
The people dying from n-order effects, slowly, painfully, barely noticed or counted.
...
And little/no sanctions from our civilized Western democracies. (Except on the people calling it out, who can't use a credit card or bank any more, or even receive donations.)
We are far worse than useless. The stain is set for all time.
A reminder for any Americans reading this: 98.15% of 2024 voters chose a Presidential candidate that supported the above.
It is no longer flagged.
UN is a useless clown show for a long time now.
Within the given context it is a valid question.
If the US can't do anything about it, what hope is there for the underfunded UN?
But the terrible tragedy is that this situation is not going to resolve until these countries actually prosecute their war criminals, who have been getting away with it in the current context for 20+ years. Which means the only ones with any power to do anything about the USA/Israels' war criminals, are the citizens of those countries themselves - which is why the situation is just so dire.
Until there is a real appetite for prosecuting ones own war criminals instead of bleating like sheep for the blood of perceived enemies of other states, there will not be the moral stance/altitude required for Americans to do anything effective about the war crimes of any other nation.
Until Americans prosecute their own war criminals they can do nothing effective about Israels', Russias', Ukraines' war criminals, either ...
Still, for me, doesn't add up to "Israel deliberately targetted gaza children" - is the claim that this is systemic? Or rampant? Or just by some individuals? And how do we know?
https://www.europeanpressprize.com/article/what-the-wounds-a...
Also, harming civilians is the norm in modern world. Russia absolutely deliberately is targeting critical civilian infra in Ukraine (e.g. grid during cold winter).