https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/20/war-crime-israel-bombs-gaza-church-sheltering-displaced-people
Israel is reviewing reports on casualties after Hamas says church attack killed and injured a ‘large number’ of people.
"Eat shit, women and chidren!"
We are all aware this is genocide right?
The smart ones are. I've been seeing a lot of US folks head over heels for Israel through this.
That's because they're religious fruitcakes who are dying for the second coming because they can't fucking stand the world they made for the rest of us
The Order of St. George, an associated order of the church, issued a statement confirming the strike. “Archbishop Alexios appears to have been located and is alive, but we don’t know if he is injured,” the Order of St. George stated. The blast hit “two church halls where the refugees, including children and babies, were sleeping.”
Just a quick note, we're seeing reports on this post complaining that it's coming from Al Jazeera.
AJ is a left of center source and does tend to lean on loaded words, but they are not considered to be factually dishonest. Well, as long as it's not about Qatar. They do have an obvious blind spot there.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/al-jazeera/
"These media sources have a slight to moderate liberal bias. They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes) to favor liberal causes. These sources are generally trustworthy for information but may require further investigation. See all Left-Center sources.
Overall, we rate Al Jazeera Left-Center biased, based on story selection that slightly favors the left, and Mixed for factual reporting due to failed fact checks that were not corrected and misleading extreme editorial bias that favors Qatar."
Also why Israel is after actively banning Al Jazeera. They are trying (desperately) to hide their war crimes and the genocide.
The reports were asking for removal because they consider AJ to be a propaganda source. I'm clarifying that we do not concurr and won't be removing posts simply because they come from AJ.
All media is a propaganda source, either explicitly or implicitly. Calling for removal because of "propaganda" is nonsensical.
Well, some are worse than others. :) We're working on a list of unacceptable sources. Epoch Times, places like that. Regardless, AJ is not unacceptable.
Sure, but what differentiates "propaganda" from media that simply falls outside of the Western Overton window? Given the absolutely terrible coverage we've had of the Palestine-Israel conflict from supposedly "reliable" and "factual" Western sources (among other instances), it's hard to argue that the Western Overton window represents "reality" so much as it represents "what's acceptable."
That's actually what we're discussing right now. There are a number of sites that rank media bias, we're deciding which ones to use and what the threshhold is for cutting off a source.
I don't want to be in a position of removing a link because the source "makes me feel icky", I need to be able to point to a demonstrable metric that says "Yeah, doesn't meet our bias standards."
Bias standards are also widely different depending on the topic covered. For example, Al Jazeera is well-known for not criticizing the Qatari government, but that doesn't invalidate their reporting of international issues. Similarly, the bandwagoning that happens when certain American media outlets cover international news doesn't invalidate their reporting of domestic issues. I don't think bias is a very good metric for assessing news sources so much as facts are. If a paper reports all the facts, verifies those facts, but puts their own spin on it, that's valid reporting. If a paper just grabbed a Reuters wire or official government statement without verifying the details, that's not really reporting at all.
We've seen that shockingly often: in the case of the Indian moon landing, good chunks of American media was using the headline "India lands on the South Pole" despite being 21 degrees off because Reuters said so. In the case of the supposedly beheaded babies, those same chunks of America media used the headline "40 babies beheaded" and cited a single IDF source that wasn't supported by the statements of journalists on the ground. Moreover, in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, depending on whether you read AFU or MoD reports, you could have entirely different opinions of the war (both reports are almost certainly wrong).
There's a problem much greater than that of spreading "biased content" and that's the one of spreading misinformation or unsubstantiated/poorly substantiated claims. I think it's the responsibility of moderators of a community to police the latter first and to allow the community to attempt to form consensus on the former. It might be good to keep track of the record of different news outlets as well (e.g. when later news reveals that previous reports were inaccurate, to determine how often news sources "jump the gun" and report claims with poor evidence). Skewing facts is the entire purpose of reporting, but making shit up or citing government claims as fact show laziness and a lack of journalistic integrity.
FWIW, most sites which rank media bias and factual reporting evaluate it from a Western perspective. As has been pretty well-established by various UN resolutions (e.g. the recognition of Palestine), the world does not consist solely of the West and world news should not consist solely of Western news outlets. Even as a Canadian (and most definitely in the West), some of the "centrist, unbiased" American sources sound like loony right-wing warhawks and some of the "centrist, unbiased" European sources are extremely racist. People in the rest of the world do exist and claiming that they don't know any better than the enlightened West is, frankly, racist.
tl;dr I think policing bias before policing misinformation is putting the cart way before the horse. As a community focusing on world news, it should actually consider perspectives from around the world.
Isn't the Gaza hospital at the very least confirmed to have been a relatively minor explosion in the parking lot?
major explosion killing 200+ people
Is there any proof of that? From what I saw the estimates kept going down and down, with various OSINT groups claiming likely proof of merely tens of people and actual intelligence agencies more conservatively 100+, but not 200. It seems unlikely that if Hamas had the bodies of 200+ people they would not even take photos for propaganda purposes.
from a failed rocket launch by neither Israel or Hammas but by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group.
The US said "Israel likely isn't responsible" one time, and this is what people are repeating....
I'm sorry, what?
The IDF pinned it on the Palestinian Islamic Jihad almost immediately, not Hamas. Israel doesn't really care that much about the distinction between Hamas and the PIJ and doesn't gain anything by conflating them. If anything, the PIJ is even worse than Hamas, and they literally have the word 'Jihad' in their name, so if anything, Israel would be incentivized to label more things as self-admitted jihadists.
That was the latest that I saw. Not to excuse the rest of Israel’s actions. Really hard to discern the fake news and propaganda from reality on that one though. And it’s a moot point anyway. It’s blamed on Israel now, because that’s the story that is sticking.
Yeah, but there was a bunch of people who were gathered there because their homes had already been bombed...
UNRWA schools have been confirmed, by the UN itself, to store weapons in the past. It's a known technique by Hamas to store military items in civilians infrastructure in order to maximize civilian damage.
You've obviously already decided that anything the IDF says is necessarily false, which I probably don't need to say is strictly irrational.
Yes, the IDF is incentivized to lie, and they have lied in the past. That does not mean that everything they say must be false. Hamas does intentionally conduct military operations from civilian sites, and this is widely recognized. That doesn't mean that you have to trust the IDF when they say it - you actively should not - but it's just as illogical to accept the opposite case as truth.
And if there were, in fact, military operations being conducted at the site, which again is something that we do not know for sure either way, it would be a valid and legal military target, with the culpability lying with the party using the site illegally.
No no, the culpability lies 100% with the person doing the killing.
What they are saying when they do that is that they don't mind killing children to get what they want.
Period.
Full stop.
I'm not talking about personal morality, or even making a moral claim. I'm speaking strictly about how international law treats war crimes. You can believe that those rules are morally wrong, evil, or what have you. That's not what I'm talking about.
The counter-argument, if you care, is that if you refuse to do military action because your opponent has endangered a child, that tells your opponent that the only thing they have to do in order to win is to point guns at children's heads, thus only further incentivizing the risk to them. The problem, the argument goes, is that if you refuse to act because a child may be at risk, your position is essentially that someone can do literally any atrocity at all, and as long as they also ensure that a child will be harmed in the response, you won't do anything about it. This allows the behavior to continue unimpeded and will result in net more harm.
Under your framework that killing children must always be verboten, you're saying that the Allies should not have conducted any operations that put children at risk, and that so long as the Nazis ensured that any retaliatory attacks would harm children, they should have been allowed to continue their reign of horror forever.
they are saying when they do that is that they don't mind killing children to get what they want.
Yes, that is what it's saying. It's morbid and terrible to ever have to make the decision, but I think most people would generally agree that there does exist a level of consequence that would justify putting children at harm's risk, but also, that the blame lies with the people that have made the choice necessary to begin with. Just to take the most exaggerated ridiculous example possible, if a rouge terrorist somehow acquires a nuclear bomb, plants it in the middle of New York City, threatens to detonate it and you have the power to stop it by sending a missile to his house which will kill him and the group of kidnapped children he's taken hostage, most people (and I'm not speculating; this has been studied) will say that you would be morally justified in sending the missile, and yes, killing the children. They would say that the blame lies with the terrorist that made the choice necessary in the first place.
I don't want to get into the details of this current conflict because it's just about the biggest geopolitical clusterfuck the world has ever known, but I hope you can at least understand the perspective behind the legal framework here, even if you still disagree with it.
Hamas uses schools, churches, and hospitals to store weapons. That much is not argued.
Double Speak - (satire) The church was bombed to punish Hamas for bombing the hospital... (/satire)
Though to put on a serious hat for a second, forcing half the population to move, so you double the number of people in the south of gaza, just means there will be more civilians everywhere including "legitimate" military targets.
What happened to the whole roof knocking warning system?
So Israel got away with bombing a hospital
If you're going to just lead with things that are, at the very least, not at all clear facts, I'm going to have a hard time taking anything else very seriously.
For the Hospital bombing...
The TLDR is that it's not enough visible damage to have been an Israeli bomb. The entire article is worth a read, Bellingcat actually does video and image analysis to figure out what likely happened.
As for the church bombing, Israel has taken responsibility for it, but are quibbling on the damage.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/20/gaza-church-strike-saint-porphyrius/
The Israel Defense Forces said in an emailed statement that a strike targeting a Hamas control center “damaged the wall of a church in the area” and that it is “aware of reports on casualties” and is reviewing the incident.
For anyone else who doesn't like Al Jazeera, here is an article they wrote 4 days ago about this very church being the last refuge for hundreds of displaced civilians who had nowhere left to turn. Thankfully it's hosted on MSN, so it's not fully taboo to read about the horrified people who were at their wits end trying to escape death and largely accepting the futility of the effort.
Any strike on the church “would not only be an attack on religion, which is a vile deed, but also an attack on humanity”, Father Elias said. “Our humanity calls us to offer peace and warmth to everyone in need.”
George Shabeen, a Palestinian Christian and a father of four sheltering in the church with his family, said they had nowhere else to go; their streets had been targeted by three Israeli air raids.
“Coming here saved our lives,” he told Al Jazeera. “During the night, we huddle together, Muslims and Christians, old and young, and pray for safety and peace.”
If someone at the IDF read through some of this propaganda then maybe they wouldn't have put a bomb right next to the church.
Oh well, everyone makes mistakes.
Al Jazeera has biases, like every media organization, like Reuters, like the BBC, like the guardian. They're supposed to be one voice in a choir of voices. The reporting is excellent. While they demonstrate their biases by what they cover, I've always found the reporting to be professional and excellent.
Hard to see what's what in there. I'd be interested in confirming or disproving Israel's account:
The Israeli military told AFP that its fighter jets had hit a command and control centre involved in launching rockets and mortars towards Israel.
“As a result of the IDF [Israeli army] strike, a wall of a church in the area was damaged,” it said, adding “we are aware of reports on casualties. The incident is under review.”
Witnesses said the attack damaged the facade of the church and caused an adjacent building to collapse, adding that many injured people were evacuated to hospital.
If this is true, then you would think most of the church is still standing.
Lots of Christians dead for a church that's "still standing"
The church is still standing. However, a wall was knocked down, and that was what caused the casualties.
It's still fucked up and Israel is to blame, but it doesn't appear to be a targeted attack on a church, like many are claiming. The target was the building next door.
From the Washington Post:
The Order of St. George, an associated order of the church, issued a statement confirming the strike. “Archbishop Alexios appears to have been located and is alive, but we don’t know if he is injured,” the Order of St. George stated. The blast hit “two church halls where the refugees, including children and babies, were sleeping.”
Given what we saw with the last IDF statement (doctored audio, inconsistent claims), and the last IDF statement ("totally dead babies!"), the IDF statement isn't worth the air the sound travels through.
Absolutely, I won't take the IDF's account, I want confirmation. However before you commented with your video /u/stankmut@lemmy.world claimed that there were photos showing that the building in your video is the adjacent building. Presumably there are two halls that use the church wall that was collapsed. I've not disputed that the air strike damaged the church and caused unnecessary civillian casualties. I'm disputing that the church was targeted.
Furthermore, your video appears to show a part of the church, still standing.
The IDF lie through their asses, but that doesn't mean everything they say is a lie. I'm after the objective truth, which requires considering all accounts and not dismissing them out of hand just because of the source. The best lies have elements of truth, after all.
There are dead babies, and you can find the pictures of them if you like. I can't comment on whether their heads are attached to their bodies or not because I value my sanity, but I really don't think that detail matters all that much to the greater picture.
To be fair to the IDF, The people who built the church really should have built it in a better place 1600 years ago if they knew that there were going to be legitimate targets in an adjacent building. Also, it's not like Israeli intelligence could have known the church was filled with Palestinians who had nowhere left to run
Daytime photos show that this is the building next to the church. The church itself is still standing, though one wall was destroyed.
I like to shit on Israel as much as the next person but looking at Al-Jazeera as a source when it comes to Israel vs Palestine conflict is like citing RT as a source for Russian vs Ukraine.
How about this one?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/20/gaza-church-strike-saint-porphyrius/
It has a quote from the IDF saying it was their bomb, but claiming that it struck a "Hamas Stronghold" and "damaged a nearby Church Wall".
Or you could read it and the hundreds of other clearly pro-israeli western cum rags we call newspapers these days and make up your own mind. Calling one of the few news sources not openly shilling for the Israeli side of the conflict biased, seems a little... Biased.