Israel has been blockading the Gaza Strip by air and sea for 18 years. The Gaza Strip is, as far as I know, the only place in the world whose fishermen can't fish in the full extent of its territorial waters. This has been true since way before Oct. 7th 2023.
There are IDF troops on the Egypt side and a Egypt was forced under military threat to a sign a treaty allowing Israel to veto what comes and goes from the Egyptian side.
In the West Bank, whose Palestinian population is administered by an organization that fully collaborates with the Israeli occupation and does not engage in armed struggle, Israeli repression continues unabated (statelessness, restriction on freedom of movement, expansion of Jewish-only colonial settlements, arbitrary detention under Israeli military law, etc.)
Sure, maybe if Hamas surrendered there wouldn’t be a blockade, specifically, but given the example of the West Bank right next door it’s hard to imagine that repression wouldn’t continue in some form.
Ah yes, the west bank, where they have a leader who's graduate thesis is in holocaust denial[0] and where they incentivize murdering innocent civilians[1].
Until these things lose popular support among the west bank, I don't have a ton of sympathy. Yes we can get into tracing back the chain of causation -- these people grew up in an echo chamber and they had no outside source of information, and Israeli soldiers likely killed family members of theirs unfairly when they were little, so of course they're going to say things like Death to Israel [2] and have a countdown timer until when they want to genocide the entire country [3]
(These examples actually stem from Iran, where most of the funding for Hamas comes from)
But don't you think it's a little unfair to only defend one side with fatalistic determinism? Israelis are treated as humans who are making horrible decisions. Mahmoud Abbas is treated as a poor innocent bystander who is just the product of his environment, so of course he's going to think those things. I think he's a human too, and he has made very bad decisions too.
Somehow western people always forget this stuff, but luckily the religious fanatics just love to do religious fanatical things, so it makes it easy to point to examples.
That’s a pretty salient fact when you have the might of such a military on your side.
I find it funny how I am at the same time supposed to accept that Palestinian (leaders) are all terrorists and also that Israel justifiably act equally terrible.
The whole point of being a respectable state is to not commit crimes (and kill family members „unfairly“).
Indeed. Israel is free to act as barbaric as (or if we do the simplistic math of "the conflict started October 7 2023", 633x more barbaric than) Hamas butchers, but when they do so, they can't go around claiming the moral high ground...
Or, they can go around and do so, but their claim would be as valid as Hamas' claim to morality...
>The Gaza Strip is, as far as I know, the only place in the world whose fishermen can't fish in the full extent of its territorial waters.
well, you're leaving out the UK wrt French fisherman invading, thus depriving them of the full extent of their territorial waters. And Ukraine's territorial waters have been curtailed.
but the only place I can think of that's similar to what you're talking about would be the Houthis. I guess they do have free navigation in their territorial waters, and turns out they make great neighbors! https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3071vp2d8yo I guess nothing can go wrong!
