Jeff Dachis

Worse than Hamas propaganda. I have now seen the documentary NAZA in its entirety, and it is worse than I imagined. Over three years, I’ve tried not to be surprised by ignorance, disinformation, and distortions relating to war, but this is at the top for many reasons. I will write a detailed analysis soon, but one of the worst, a massive claim displayed in the middle of the film, in bright yellow against a black screen: “Israel has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza.” Not even Hamas says this. Meaning not even Hamas claims Israel has killed every Palestinian that has died in Gaza since October 7th. Hamas has publicly killed Palestinians to maintain power in the Gaza. There have been battles between Hamas and anti-Hamas clans. Up to 20% of the 12,000 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad rockets fired at Israel fell inside Gaza. Recent Hamas reporting shows natural deaths on their list. To say every person that died in Gaza was killed by Israel is a vulgar lie. There are a lot of other lies, lies by omission, and lies of ignorance in NAZA, but this claim is unique and follows the lies, damned lies, and statistics for accusations that go against the actual number put out by Hamas or reality. More to follow on Naza.

At this point if you still claim Israel is committing genocide in Gaza you are either stupid and ignorant or antisemitic. The antisemitic version usually means applying a double standard on the definition of genocide and the laws of war just to delegitimize Israel’s existence or right to pursue legitimate goals in a war it did not start or/and dehumanize every IDF soldier as a monster. I have tried to argue basic definitions. Genocide requires intent to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such, in whole or in part. The evidence does not show that intent toward the people in Gaza. What it shows is the opposite. Israel has taken extraordinary steps, often at real cost and risk, to prevent civilian harm while fighting an enemy that hides among them, uses hospitals and schools as bases, and treats its own people as props in an evil grand political strategy of martyrdom to eliminate all jews on the planet. In the middle of the fighting Israel has let in huge amounts of food, hundreds of thousands of tons, sometimes more than the world food specialists said was needed. Water lines from Israel have stayed open, three of them supplying tens of thousands of cubic meters a day. They have coordinated repairs, kept desalination plants running by sending fuel and even electricity to key ones, and allowed generators so water systems, hospitals and bakeries can keep working. Medical supplies and equipment have poured in by the tens of thousands of tons. Field hospitals coordinated. Patients have been evacuated for treatment outside. When polio showed up for the first time in decades Israel halted fighting every day and worked with WHO and UNICEF on a mass vaccination campaigns. Over a million doses given. That is not how you try to wipe out a people. Then look at the misinformation machine. Almost every big claim about Israel deliberately targeting journalists or medical staff or children falls apart, and a lot of the time it falls apart because of what Hamas itself admits, sometimes before anyone even finishes basic fact checking. The “journalists” killed for example. Plenty of the names on those lists later show up in Hamas or Islamic Jihad martyr posts as actual operatives or commanders. Dual roles are common in Gaza’s information space. Same with medical workers. People mourned as nurses or doctors get claimed later by the terror groups as fighters. Hospitals have been used as command centers and weapons storage over and over. Hamas officials have even said it out loud at times. Manuals found on how to use the hospitals as Hamas military sites. The casualty numbers and the “they are targeting children” stories. The Hamas health ministry figures get treated like gospel, yet their own underlying data and later admissions undercut every trending statistic. Combatants get left out or reclassified. Claims of IDF snipers or drones hunting kids usually fail basic reality of sci-fi sniper drones that don’t exist or injury patterns coming out of the same hospitals. These stories do not need years of investigation to collapse. Often Hamas’s own words or the available evidence do the job within days or weeks. But the first maximalist version is what spreads and sticks and then gets used to accuse the whole country of Israel and its army of genocidal intent. It is not illegal or wrong to target and destroy your enemy in a war, especially one that started with a massacre, held hostages, and fights from inside the civilian population it claims to protect. Gaza is an awful war with awful conditions, conditions shaped heavily by Hamas’s tactics. That does not make it genocide. The aid that kept flowing, the vaccination campaigns, the water and power facilitation, and the way the propaganda claims kept falling apart all point the other direction. If you ignore all of that and still yell genocide the explanations left are ignorance or a double standard aimed only at Israel. But this entire stupid campaign every war in history is a genocide. If you actually want to engage in the debate of "intent" or actions in Gaza, see earlier writings: "I’m a War Scholar. There Is No Genocide in Gaza," nitter.gq/SpencerGuard/status/19… "Israel Is Not Committing Genocide: Exposing the Distortion of Law and Truth," with @Ostrov_A nitter.gq/SpencerGuard/status/19… "Israel's Aid to Gaza Is Historically Unprecedented," nitter.gq/SpencerGuard/status/19…

ICYMI, There is/was never a genocide in Gaza. The opposite actually, one side (Israel) vaccinating, feeding, helping with all services (medical, drinking water, power) while taking extraordinary steps to protect civilians in the worst urban warfare scenario arguably ever seen and the other side (Hamas) doing everything it can to get civilians killed, stealing food, targeting civilians that do not do their demands.