Israel are going to start WWIII

An open air prison? Nice slogan bro. North Koreans live in an open air prison, and I don't see anyone worrying about them. Uighurs in China live in an open air prison- and sometimes an actual "re education" style real prison, for wrong think, and again, we're far too busy buying Chinese goods to care. Companies are even importing goods made in prisons in China, including in Xinjiang.

Meanwhile, here are Gazans complaining about how Israel has destroyed the lovely life they used to have before Oct 7th:

https://x.com/i/status/1755867401760166256

That video doesn't seem to copy over, maybe because they noticed just how bad it looked for the whole "open air prison" theory. Here's a screen grab though:

Here's another:

(Same problem - not sure if it's my PC or what. The link above still works though, I just can't make it come up as a video)

Well, sort of - if they are guilty then yes they are guilty, but OTOH the UN can only maintain its credibility as a court if it is seen to treat all countries fairly.

So if only one country is hauled up in front of them, and that country is in fact less guilty than several others (because they were attacked first, in 1948, and have been under attack regularly since, so that there is a need for them to preserve their own citizens' lives), then it's not like the cops stopping you for speeding. Rightly or wrongly, we believe we can trust the police's own internal investigation systems and the other arms of government to ensure fairness. There's nothing comparable with the UN. It's more like your neighbour carrying out a citizen's arrest on you - you might be guilty, or he might be abusing those powers.

And that is why the question of genocide of whom matters. If the UN doesn't take that into account, well again, that doesn't plead for their objectivity. Could the Nazis really have been accused of genocide of the Jews if they had only targeted foreign Jews of the countries they were at war with and had left German Jews in place?

Need to define who "that lot" is to be able to understand what you mean exactly.

Because in the case of Israel, the Palestinians they are accused of trying to genocide are the exact same people as the Arab Israelis fighting in the IDF and running Israeli hospitals. Just a few miles down the road, that's all. If they wanted to commit genocide, they'd need to start with the ones in their own back yard. Instead, they have them working in the legal profession and everywhere. Seems like an odd kind of ethnic genocide. The Serbs didn't attack Tunisian Muslims did they? Just the ones living around them.

Now mass murder, war crimes - yes I think that's very possible. Calling it "genocide" though is, TBF, ridiculous and just demeans the term.

The fact that he was killed was not a surprise. It was an inevitability ever since Oct 7th.

It matters how he went out though and as endings for bad guys go he got a Hollywood one.

Wearing a keffiyeh and covered in ash after staunching the bleeding from his own severed arm with wire. Throwing grenades at soldiers with his remaining hand and finally a plank at the drone filming him as a final act of defiance.

All you have to do is type his name into social media today and you'll see that he's being lauded for fighting to the bitter end.

That is entirely on whoever made the idiotic call to release that drone footage. They made him look like a bad ass. School boy error.

That's a fair point.

Personally I'm absolutely shocked at people lauding him, there are a whole lot of people making him out to be a hero but they are western and irish left wing people, he was not left wing. He was as far from left wing as any one, he was as violent and conservative a reactionary as existed.

I think they maybe don't give a ****, they took him out, will now finish Hezbollah and probably drop the Ayatollah as well, hopefully anyway.

They'll have thought it through but might still be wrong

The idea of giving up on statehood would be unpalatable to 99% of Palestinians (whether they are Hamas supporters or not). The Israelis themselves admit by their own words and deeds that they don't believe Palestine is really a part of Israel and that it exists as a subjugated colony only with a hostile population.

He wanted to die a martyr and not live into old age. By releasing the footage they seem to have turned him into an icon. Not sure what they were attempting to do but it was hardly that

The ICJ have stated the SA case is plausible (that Israel is committing genocide) and directed Israel to prevent genocide (because the evidence showed it was at least a possibility).

Ukraine and Gaza are two very different situations.

People tend not to side with occupiers. While there is anti semitism about from the far right and far left, most people's opposition to Israel would go away if they stopped the occupation and brutalising of Palestinians. They would win a lot more friends long term. It's a bad state of affairs when your closest ally is threatening to cut off weapons supply. Although that move is most likely electioneering with no real intent behind it. You are right about why Soleimani was killed. It's probably why there will be no attack on Iranian Oil facilities because it means oil facilities belonging to Saudi Arabia and other Pro western states will be attacked in reprisal. Were that to happen people here will soon forget about the giveaway budget.

And while we're on the topic of genocide, it's funny how neither the councils of Cork or Galway cities saw fit to "ban" Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping.

Because neither China or Russia are before the ICJ accused of genocide?

Or they simply reflect the wishes of their inhabitants?

Shoot a kid

Wait until people try to help him

Blow those people up

The most moral army in the world strikes again

If I had a cache of weapons I wanted to hide from the IDF, the last places I'd put them would be in a hospital, school or mosque (in that order).

Why would you try to hide your weapons by putting them precisely where they're gonna bomb first regardless?

Israel lost most public sympathy very early on.

Their economy is tanking, their people are leaving, international flights are curtailed, more people are protesting against them than for them, businesses are pulling out, external investment is falling, senior figures are being considered for sanctions and they are before the international courts for war crimes and genocide.

And then they started on Lebanon and the Un Peacekeepers.

Israel will be a pariah for decades and its people will suffer. That's all on Netanyahu, Herzog and the Israeli Government.

And they will still be surrounded by people that despise them for what they have done.

Bizarrely, they seem to be of a view that perpetual war with their neighbours for decades to come is the way forward (a bit like George Orwell's '1984'). Their defenders and actual Israelis are talking of the need to inject more and more violence and killings into the situation until Hamas is supposedly defeated. The idea that peace or stability could somehow come about, not through a peace process, but as a result of relentless and never ending violence seems very far fetched.