Azalea
verbose kirtThis is me trying to piece together what is going on from bits and pieces of contradictory biased news.
The #HamasCommander who the #IDF killed in #AlShifa this week seems to have been a #civilian #police officer. He's described as "head of internal security" in the more reliable Israeli media.
#ArabicLanguageMedia is reporting that the "Hamas operations" (extremely vaguely described in most #English reports) that he was coordinating were trying to get aid all the way to the north of the #GazaStrip
So, what he was doing was counter to Israeli military objectives (be that "destroy Hamas" or "annex Gaza" or "starve Palestinians" it fits all of them) but not #terrorism by any reasonable definition.
I think the #Hamas steeling aid story is possibly half true, but very distorted.
What the #HamasGovernment MIGHT be trying to do is evenly distribute inadequate aid to the whole #GazaStrip
This is described as "steeling aid" by Israeli #propaganda and possibly some disgruntled locals, if you trust Vox pops in #IsraeliPropaganda
(By the way, I use the term "propaganda" broadly i would describe a lot of art and music that I like and agree with as "propaganda". By my definition it is either mostly factual or entirely a subjective opinion. The lies I refer to as #disinformation instead.)
Getting aid to the north is an objective that has international support, including from Western liberal countries. #NorthGaza is the most severely deprived area. That is where the air drops have been focused.
But obviously people at the places where the aid arrives (who could get more of it if it wasn't distributed evenly) will not like it. I started writing this based on a #Memri news clip of an old woman who was angry at #Hamas "We came from Gaza City, it's for us" (refering to the aid that arrived where she was), i.e. she doesn't want it going north to the people who stayed north?
Some of those #civilians who stayed North are there because they don't want #Palestine to lose any more territory (or they personally don't want to lose their home or their home town), and some are there because they were too scared to travel south through a very active war zone. Saying they "support Hamas" if they stayed north is another half truth, they probably do, sort of, but only because they agree on the objective of keeping #GazaCity #Palestinian and Hamas are currently the people doing most to ensure that (after an initial move that seems to have been extremely counter productive).
Hamas want to keep Palestinian control of the North, they are resisting #annexation (an escalation from current situation of occupation), but that is not an offensive operation against Israel. So calling the cop they killed in Al-Shifa hospital a "terrorist" is not justified.
And, from all the information they've shown, killing him was unjustified. He was armed, but they've not provided any info to say it was with anything inappropriate for his position.
The IDF are have been systematically killing police, who are part of the Hamas government controlling Gaza, but they've provided no evidence that they are involved in attacks on Israel.
Also (now that most of Gaza's police are unwilling to get murdered by the IDF while trying to distribute aid optimally) most of the people with guns taking the aid, particularly after the IDF shot so many of the cops, are just petty theives and #profiteers from the kind of crime gang that exists in every densely populated area.
cc-ing my other profiles @kirt @kirt @kirt @evolving_string
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