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speaker-of-the-void-cats · 1 year

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The EDZ saw paracausal conflict long before the Collapse

So you're telling me that a mere 14 years before the birth of Jakob Bohme, directly referenced in Unveiling,

One of your philosophers said, "It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost in sorrow. There is no sorrow. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness." He was a shoemaker. He was right, and it matters more than anything. According to him, the visible world is a manifestation of eternal light and eternal darkness, and it is in eternal opposition that eternity has revealed itself. The fall was necessary for creation to escape its first imperfect stasis and seek a truer form. Heresy? Well, then, I am the heresiarch. The philosopher died of a bowel disease. Those who do not exist cannot suffer and are of no account to any viable ethics. If the true path to goodness is the elimination of suffering, then only those who must exist can be allowed to exist. It is the nature of life to favor existence over nonexistence, and to prefer the fertile soil to the poisoned wind. Because those who open their mouths to that wind pass from the world and leave no descendant, whether of flesh or of thought. But imagine the abomination of a world where nothing can end and no choice can be preferred to any other. Imagine the things that would suffer and never die. Imagine the lies that would flourish without context or corrective. Imagine a world without me.

who said he saw the divine shape of the universe in a ray of light reflected in a pewter dish in 1600 and kept it to himself for years,

there were unexplained celestial phenomena in the skies of Germany described like this

In the morning of April 14, 1561, at daybreak, between 4 and 5 a.m., a dreadful apparition occurred on the sun, and then this was seen in Nuremberg in the city, before the gates and in the country – by many men and women. At first there appeared in the middle of the sun two blood-red semi-circular arcs, just like the moon in its last quarter. And in the sun, above and below and on both sides, the color was blood, there stood a round ball of partly dull, partly black ferrous color. Likewise there stood on both sides and as a torus about the sun such blood-red ones and other balls in large number, about three in a line and four in a square, also some alone. In between these globes there were visible a few blood-red crosses, between which there were blood-red strips, becoming thicker to the rear and in the front malleable like the rods of reed-grass, which were intermingled, among them two big rods, one on the right, the other to the left, and within the small and big rods there were three, also four and more globes. These all started to fight among themselves, so that the globes, which were first in the sun, flew out to the ones standing on both sides, thereafter, the globes standing outside the sun, in the small and large rods, flew into the sun. Besides the globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour. And when the conflict in and again out of the sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the sun down upon the earth 'as if they all burned' and they then wasted away on the earth with immense smoke. After all this there was something like a black spear, very long and thick, sighted; the shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west. Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows. Although we have seen, shortly one after another, many kinds of signs on the heaven, which are sent to us by the almighty God, to bring us to repentance, we still are, unfortunately, so ungrateful that we despise such high signs and miracles of God. Or we speak of them with ridicule and discard them to the wind, in order that God may send us a frightening punishment on account of our ungratefulness. After all, the God-fearing will by no means discard these signs, but will take it to heart as a warning of their merciful Father in heaven, will mend their lives and faithfully beg God, that He may avert His wrath, including the well-deserved punishment, on us, so that we may temporarily here and perpetually there, live as his children. For it, may God grant us his help, Amen. By Hanns Glaser, letter-painter of Nurnberg.

Different words in German can be seen on signs in the area, such as "Ausgang" (exit) and "Salzwerk" (salt mines). Since Austria, Germany, and Switzerland all have German as their official language, it is currently unknown which country the EDZ is supposed to be located in.

In German, Trostland may translate to "solace country"

O my Bridegroom, how well am I, now that I am in Union with thee! O kiss me with thy Desire in thy Strength and Power, and then I will shew thee all my Beauty, and will rejoice and solace Myself with thy sweet Love and shining Brightness in thy fiery Life. All the holy Angels rejoice with us, to see us united again. My dear Love, I now entreat thee to abide in my Faith, and do not turn thy Face away from me any more. Work thou thy Wonders in my Love, for which Purpose God hath created thee and brought thee into Being.

Jakob Bohme on the Love of Sophia (Wisdom)

The Descent of Ishtar, the Fall of Sophia, and the Jewish Roots of Gnosticism

Who am I? Call me Coyote. Call me mantis, serpent, Cagn, Anansi, call me Sri-cleans-his-brother's-stomach. Call me the grandmaster of semiosis, the jeweler's hammer which gilds the signal, a purposeful mob none of whose members know its purpose, the infinite regress of enigmas, a self-questioning answer, the word not spoken, black ice, cataract of mimes, the ache and fever of overthought while bedridden with illness, the intolerable thorn of frustrated inquisition, gray regret at the end of a fruitless day, the thing which is unlike your beloved but arbitrarily recalls your beloved to agonizing effect, architrave of the no-window, needle driven in flush with skin so that desperate fingers cannot pull it out, sweet petal, unmemorable, crystal death, the provably improvable.

Thank You

Your shoemaker philosopher was right, and it matters more than anything. Sorrow cannot survive death, and it cannot precede birth. Those who exist have moral worth, and those who do not have none. Think about it. Do you mourn the uncreated? Do you grieve for those who were never born in a nation that never developed around an ideology no one ever imagined on a continent that never formed? No! And from that self-evident truth, you must raise your eyes to the ultimate revelation: those who cannot sustain their own claim to existence belong to the same moral category as those who have never existed at all. Existence is the first and truest proof of the right to exist. Those who cannot claim and hold existence do not deserve it. This is the true and only divination, a game whose losers are not just forgotten but are never born at all. That which cannot claim and hold existence is not real. You do not mourn the unreal. Why should you care for it? Tend it? Guard it? It was the gardener that chose you from the dead. I wouldn't have done that. It's just not in me. But now that they have invested themself in you, you are incredibly, uniquely special. That wandering refugee chose to make a stand, spend their power to say: "Here I prove myself right. Here I wager that, given power over physics and the trust of absolute freedom, people will choose to build and protect a gentle kingdom ringed in spears. And not fall to temptation. And not surrender to division. And never yield to the cynicism that says, everyone else is so good that I can afford to be a little evil." The gardener is all in. They are playing for keeps. And they are wrong. Or so I argue: for, after all, the universe is undecidable. There is no destiny. We're all making this up as we go along. Neither the gardener nor I know for certain that we're eternally, universally right. But we can be nothing except what we are. You have a choice. You are the gardener's final argument. It would mean everything if I could convince you that I am the right and only way. I truly value you. To the gardener, you are a means to an end. To me, you are majestic. Majestic. You are full of the only thing worth anything at all. I am, by the only standard that matters or will ever matter, the winning team. Existence is a test that most will fail. Would you not count yourself among the victorious few? Don't hurry to deliver your answer. I'll come over and hear it myself.

Unveiling: The Wager

DECRYPTION KEY: 73XK5V2PG1$AUN-326

ACCESS: RESTRICTED

REP #: 002-A899OF-COC

AGENT(S): TRU-135

SUBJ: Intercepted transmission

SENSITIVE!! – CONTENTS BELOW SNIFFED FROM ENCRYPTED REEF DATACOMS – SENSITIVE!!

1. We are maintaining our containment posture at Cocytus. I assess no immediate danger to the system, and we have enough firepower to destroy the station and its mechanisms remotely if the on-site warheads fail. The station remains in the stable heliocentric orbit where it was parked after the destruction of Ceres.

2. I do not ask confirmation of these theories, and in fact I beg you not to address them. But I have reviewed the site records, and the fate of the Sophia's crew after they were herded to Cocytus stinks of Hive madness. The Cocytus apertures must—at the time—have opened into a Hive manifold associated with Crota. Whatever their original purpose, when Crota established his presence in the system, they became conduits into hell... and the Sophia crew's ugly end proved it. Whoever drove the Sophia to its doom then installed the Cocytus Instruments around the original Golden Age facility to study Crota's manifold.

3. Crota is dead. His hold on these gates has passed. Now something else is trying to pass through into our world... but it is so alien, and its sendings so bafflingly malformed, that I fear this can only end in madness.

4. The first "visitors" through the third gate, at event time 00:00:00, were simple hydrogen atoms. Over the course of 72 hours, the emissions developed from diatomic hydrogen to nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, water, and simple organic molecules. At the 80-hour mark, we received our first macroscopic visitor, a pellet of thick black hydrocarbon tar. Until 82:34:15 the gate vomited tar containing increasingly complex monomers and polymers.

5. The visitors then began to assume geometric form. A hail of cubes and hexagons, each built from molecular crystal of the same form as the whole. A series of fractal shapes that shattered under internal flaws. Several capsules or membranes of increasingly complex structure, containing water or oil. These may have been cellular precursors.

6. At 524:03:11 a living organism appeared. Death was immediate. Remote dissection describes a spherical body, radius approximately one meter, surfaced in thick hydrocarbon tar. Deep, evenly spaced "throats" converged on a central cavity perhaps intended to serve as lung and stomach. The body exhibited undifferentiated tissue of primitive plantlike cells, capable of spasming to pump air or fluid in and out of the throats. Without enzymes to catalyze metabolism, or internal structure to dispose of waste, the organism could not survive. Cell death occurred almost instantaneously throughout the mass. There were no provisions for self-repair or reproduction.

7. At 690:29:54 the gate emitted a tubular organism. For ninety seconds the organism moved across the gate chamber by contracting and expanding, then expired. Remote dissection describes a two-meter-long body with a spinal cavity full of energy-rich carbohydrate fluid. The organism's contractions forced this fluid through a capillary network, where simple cells catabolized the carbohydrates into energy to power further contractions. The buildup of heat and waste quickly denatured the enzymes required for metabolism, and the organism died. There were no provisions for self-repair or reproduction.

8. The gate has remained inactive since, barring short emissions of molecules which may be experimental proteins. Remote drones have registered similar ambient molecules within the Hellmouth on Luna, though we have been unable to identify their source. We will maintain the quarantine until otherwise instructed.

The overwhelming impression I have is one of learning, of increasing sophistication in the synthesis and arrangement of matter. The atoms in these structures were isotopically pure and impossible to date, but I have the uncomfortable sense that even they were freshly made.

9. Probes and instruments dispatched through the third gate do not return. Annihilation is apparently immediate, and so total that it seems to result from a fundamental failure of the ability to exist rather than any weapon or countermeasure. Yet something does exist on the far side, and it is trying to learn the rules of our world from very first principles. I do not eagerly anticipate its next creation.

SENSITIVE!! – CONTENTS ABOVE SNIFFED FROM REEF DATACOMS – SENSITIVE!!

Cf. reports #3209-3211-LUNA-HEL

MESSAGE ENDS

#follow the daito rabbit #unveiling #sorry to drag you back into this jakob #european dead zone #edz #the veil #destiny #destiny 2 #destiny the game #destiny2 #destinythegame #d2 #hey guys im not sure this winnower guy is the witness after all #destiny lore #harbinger #savathun #do you know the shape of your trial?#cocytus #cocytus oh shit oh god its over

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brontios-helm · 7 months

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Destiny 2: Echion And Shard

#destiny 2 #sunken isles #edz #destiny 2 edz #european dead zone #destiny 2 earth #earth #orobas vectura #echion vae #destiny 2 sunken isles #the cabal #destiny 2 the cabal #bungie #destiny 2 pc

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gil-notskajla · 1 year

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european gambit🛥️ | ko-fi

#study #destiny 2 #skajla #ko-fi #screenshot study #gambit #european dead zone #edz

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jimmy-carmine · 4 months

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Been hanging around the EDZ a lot today in between completing some missions and running Nightfalls. I love the aesthetic of this patrol zone, and really wish I had been playing pre-vaulting so I could have seen this during the Red War and all the extra content that's now missing. Would have been nice to get my hands on the Dead Zone Foliage back when it was available, I mean look at it!

I kind of love the idea of my Titan slapping some woodland camo on his armour and spending his freetime in the EDZ just patrolling and clearing out areas of Red Legion and Fallen forces. Doing his bit for Devrim's dream of a second city forming up around the Farm.

Maybe I'll get lucky and it'll come the Eververse or Eva-1 in the weekely shader sales.

#destiny 2 #destiny the game #dumbass space knight wizard dude #destiny headcanons #EDZ #Destiny EDZ #European Dead Zone

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purplexingpupp · 2 years

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“I bet Devrim’s got a nice kettle of tea going...”

Some gift art for @kayamari of her hunter caught in a storm!

#destiny 2 #destiny #destiny hunter #my art #edz #european dead zone #hunter

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not-that-taliesin · 1 year

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do you ever hear a song for the first time and it’s so beautiful you start crying? that was me arriving at The Farm in the EDZ just now 🥲

#destiny 2 #tali testifies #european dead zone

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catboyazem · 2 years

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video game scenery meme — [ 1 / 3 ] underappreciated locations

the european dead zone —the sludge

#vgscenes #destiny 2 #destiny #destiny the game #gamingedit #gamediting #destinyedit #d2 #mine #dailyvideogames #destinysource #dailygaming #the european dead zone #the edz #edz #post-apocalyptic

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laprimera · 11 months

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Good news is after getting tested ( and confirmed ) for ADHD inattentive amongst a plethora of other things I’m finally getting the help and medication to keep me focused on the day to day.

Bad news is I’ve been using tumblr rp as a ways of procrastination and distraction this whole time so now my time here has been even less on schedule. So my posting times might be relegated to very early morning hours or on weekend stints.

#ooc. ･ﾟ ✹#mobile mode #ask to tag #which fair it is. but I also love it 🤔#so my postings might be more at the dead of night more often lol #hey Europeans lemme join you time zone wise at 1AM #and I might just be more here on the weekends /shrug emoji/

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sportsthoughts · 4 months

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thanks pens!!!

#actually so happy this is I think 6pm my time? so I can finish work and actually watch a game while I’m awake and not half asleep #question is will the lb be dead because you’re all at work??#pittsburgh penguins #also European/uk pens fans hmu I really want to talk to more pens fans in my time zone

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zalia · 2 months

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When you're patrolling the EDZ and the Taken are having a dance party... (aka a very stupid thing I made in a few minutes this evening because the idea has haunted me for ages XD)

#destiny 2 #destiny the game #european dead zone #caramelldansen #destiny video

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cathkaesque · 1 year

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When it comes to understanding migration, this needs to be taken into account: if you are in a rural area in the global south, like Honduras, you have basically no access to social services, medicine, and education. In fact, the funding for those services is actually being cut, as the social security funds have been looted by corrupt politicans appointed by a military coup. Then you have to factor in that you likely have no access to the land, and no access to credit to buy seeds, and have to sell yourself for basically pennies to an agroindustrial giant. The peasants feed the local people; the agroindustries feed the Americans. In Guatamala, there is a neo-corporate fuedalism where you are allowed a patch of land if you are willing to work, unpaid, for coffee plantations which sell their produce to the German company Ritz. If you attempt to settle unoccupied land, a local businessman will claim it is his without any proof, and the police will take his side because the Agrarian Reform Institute, which issues land titles, is controlled by coupists whose main concern is squeezing as much wealth out of the country as possible. Thugs will murder a man and his wife in broad daylight, and the judge will respond by evicting you and your family from the land.

There is nowhere else for you to go but Tegucigalpa, where you can work trying to wash car windows or selling snacks to passing cars for a handful of lempira a day. Or perhaps you could work for a few dollars a day in one of the maquila factories making textiles for the American and European market, which are set up in special economic zones called Charter Cities where the constitution and labour laws do not apply, which can close down and spirit away whenever they like to another country when they are more willing to sell their people for even less. And then you have to factor in the hurricanes that sweep through the country, destroying everything, that the rains no longer come when they used to but when they do they come in flooding torrents. Much of the north of Honduras is currently underwater; most of the banana and coffee plantations have been destroyed.

And then you factor in when you tried to change this via electing a better government in 2006, he was overthrown in 2009; when you tried to get organised and resist the coup, your friends, your loved ones, your trade union leaders and peasant resisters all turned up mysteriously dead while the military and police worked with drug gangs disguised as agribusiness like the Dinant coproration to burn down villages that opposed them. For trying to change things in the way that you were supposed to, through non violently protesting, organising, and voting for something better, you were subjected to a decade of counterrevolutionary terror and violence that the “international community” not only ignored but gave its active approval to. All of the factors listed above have not only been ongoing for the last 10 years, they’ve been intensified, hothoused by the global counterrevolutionary terror that was the response to the 2011 wave of post-financial crisis uprisings and revolutions and accelerating climate apocalypse.

And at the same time, all of this is being done so more of the country can be turned into a massive cash cow for the benefit of foreign corporations and domestic oligarchs. The wealth of your country is siphoned off and flows around the American and European financial system, benefiting them and building a consumer disneyland that looks like paradise compared to your situation. That could, even if you are worked for nothing, give you a few dollars to send home that could build your abuela in the countryside a nice home for her to live out her days. What other option is left for you and your family other than joining the exodus of people heading north, to the countries where the wealth and profits and rewards of your homeland’s suffering are being kept. And after you cross mountains and rivers which freeze you to death and sweep you away, you are faced with a massive border wall of ahte and soldiers on horses which hit you with sticks. You are faced with an immigration detention centre that will chain you to your bed while you give birth and separate you from your baby who will be given away for adoption to a white couple. When you make a charge against the border fence in Melilla, fed up with being kept in shacks with nothing while the Northerners debate what to do about the problem people their greed has forced to move, the Moroccan police will beat 35 of you to death.

And then when you get there to that golden paradise, you end up doing work not dissimilar to the work you were doing back home, working for pennies (though pennies that are valuable enough back home to buy the family that remain the tiniest slice of comfort) for an agroindustrial giant that supplies supermarkets with cheap produce picked by cheaper people. While you work in the fields, a crop duster plane will spray you with paraquat; when support organisations try to raise this with OSHA they will ask for the plane’s number, and when this can’t be provided they will say nothing can be done. In fact, inspectors are ordered to stay away from the plantations on the Texas border. A member of the Border Agricultural Workers Project says she hasn’t seen a normal child born on the border in 20 years, such is the effect of agrichemicals. If you fuck up in the slightest, have any interaction with the state, you will be deported and sent back to square one. There are a 14 million migrants in the US in the same precarious state, effectively without any way of enforcing their rights. My aunt is a Mexican migrant in California. Her son was deported because he got a speeding ticket. It was 15 years before she saw him again, other than through the bars of the border fence, when she finally got her green card.

The situation in Honduras can be repeated for almost any other country. Syria, Venezuela, Iraq, South Sudan, Libya, all the headline countries are countries that have been subjected to a severe counterrevolutionary terror. The processes of dispossession and destruction of peasant economies and communities (primitive accumulation to use the Marxist jargon) have been hothoused over the last decade by war and violence. I just wish that relatively comfortable people in the imperialist countries realised that the “migrant crisis” is the result of policies that their governments forced on others. Violence that their elites made their fortunes off. What a monstrous, barbarous way of life we have.

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brontios-helm · 11 months

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Destiny 2: Digital Trace

#destiny 2 #the gulch #edz the gulch #destiny 2 the gulch #european dead zone #destiny 2 edz #exotic quest #vexcalibur #LOOK AT THEM #a friend #asher ;-;#lightfall #destiny 2 lightfall #season of defiance #bungie #destiny 2 pc

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matan4il · 3 months

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Proportionality in war does not mean what so many of you seem to think it means.

Proportionality in war doesn't mean that an army fighting another military force is standing with their hand on a stopper, counting the dead and waiting for the moment when the number on both sides is equal. Not a single war in history has been fought like that, and it is an insane double standard, that people talk about Israel as if this is how it's meant to fight. In WWII, there were way more German civilian fatalities than there were American or British ones, and NO ONE says the Americans and British carried out a genocide of the Germans, just because the impact on the civilian populations was dissimilar. No one looks at that war and says, "The allies should have totally stopped before defeating the Nazis, once the number of German civilians killed was bigger than their own."

(and all this holds true whether we're talking about a regular army fighting another, such as in most wars, or whether it's this case, where we see Israel facing in this war in Gaza a terrorist organization, that is made up of tens of thousands of armed fighters, with proper military training, backed by tens of thousands of rockets, using even more people as human shields, booby trapping entire residential areas, digging an entire underground network of tunnels and bunkers stretching for miles, dedicated solely to terrorism, and having collaborators from other terrorist organizations in that territory and outside it fighting with them, plus members of that terrorist organization attacking from outside the war zone)

Proportionality in war means that an army's impact must be proportionate to the size of the threat. Not to the number of casualties, to the size of the threat.

Just like when we talk about the allies' response to the Nazis in WWII, we do take into account more than just how many people actually died in the war the Germans started, we take into account what would have happened, had Nazi Germany been successful in conquering even more countries, or reaching even more Jews to exterminate, as the Nazis planned to (demonstrated by, among other examples, their special death squad geared to kill the Jews in Israel had they managed to occupy it, the pressure they placed on the Japanese to get rid of the Jews living in East Asia under Japanese rule, and the lists of Jews to be arrested first in places the Nazis were planning to occupy, but thankfully failed to, including the UK, the US and Canada).

Since Hamas is an extremist terrorist organization, that has repeatedly stated it targets all Israelis and Jews, and has acted accordingly, that means that when Israel is fighting to dismantle Hamas, the threat it's trying to remove is the one posed to:

9.8 million (as of Dec 2023) people threatened in Israel, Jewish and non-Jewish alike (as demonstrated in action on Oct 7, when Hamas murdered Israeli Muslim Arabs as well, for being affiliated with the Jewish state)

about 8.4 million Jews living outside of Israel and targeted by Hamas (as demonstrated in action when Hamas terrorists were arrested last month for intending to carry out terrorist attacks on Jewish targets in at least 3 European countries)

Every single Gazan who might be killed due to Hamas. As Hamas has gotten Gazan kids killed building its terror tunnels, killed Palestinian kids by recruiting teenagers as terrorists, killed Gazan civilians when using them as human shields, killed Palestinian women and Palestinian queers by allowing (even condoning) "honor killings," killed Gazan protestors, killed Gazans affiliated with opposing political parties, and as Hamas is seemingly hellbent on waging this war to the last Gazan, when they didn't have to start it by attacking Israel on Oct 7, and they could have saved so many of their people by surrendering and ending it, all 2.1 million Gazans can be seen as endangered by Hamas

In total, this would mean that there are currently 20.3 million people in the world directly threatened by the very existence of Hamas.

By fighting Hamas in Gaza, Israel is currently actively defending 20.3 million people!

(obviously, minus the 30,000 Hamas terrorists)

That's before we start counting Palestinians outside of Gaza (because yes, Hamas exists and operates in other areas as well, as I mentioned above, and if it's seen as victorious in Gaza, that will strengthen Hamas outside it, too), or what it would mean for the entire Middle East region, or even for the whole world, if the moderate countries in this area see that the extremist terrorist tactics of Hamas are successful at stopping a democratic state from protecting its people.

THAT is the size of the threat. And THAT is what Israel's war impact is in proportion to.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

#israel #antisemitism #israeli #israel news #israel under attack #israel under fire #israelunderattack #terrorism #anti terrorism #hamas #antisemitic #antisemites #jews #jew #judaism #jumblr #frumblr #jewish #resources

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thebusylilbee · 26 days

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"IDF says it ‘completely rejects’ charge that its soldiers deliberately fired on any of the thousands of civilians killed in Israeli offensive

Dr Fozia Alvi was making her rounds of the intensive care unit on her final day at the battered European public hospital in southern Gaza when she stopped next to two young arrivals with facial injuries and breathing tubes in their windpipes.

“I asked the nurse, what’s the history? She said that they were brought in a couple of hours ago. They had sniper shots to the brain. They were seven or eight years old,” she said.

The Canadian doctor’s heart sank. These were not the first children treated by Alvi who she was told were targeted by Israeli soldiers, and she knew the damage a single high-calibre bullet could do to a fragile young body.

“They were not able to talk, paraplegic. They were literally lying down as vegetables on those beds. They were not the only ones. I saw even small children with direct sniper shot wounds to the head as well as in the chest. They were not combatants, they were small children,” said Alvi.

Children account for more than one in three of the more than 32,000 people killed in Israel’s months-long assault on Gaza, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Tens of thousands more young people have suffered severe injuries, including amputations.

Nine doctors gave the Guardian accounts of working in Gaza hospitals this year, all but one of them foreign volunteers. Their common assessment was that most of the dead and wounded children they treated were hit by shrapnel or burned during Israel’s extensive bombardment of residential neighbourhoods, in some cases wiping out entire families. Others were killed or injured by collapsing buildings with still more missing under the rubble.

But doctors also reported treating a steady stream of children, elderly people and others who were clearly not combatants with single bullet wounds to the head or chest.

Some of the physicians said that the types and locations of the wounds, and accounts of Palestinians who brought children to the hospital, led them to believe the victims were directly targeted by Israeli troops.

Other doctors said they did not know the circumstances of the shootings but that they were deeply troubled by the number of children who were severely wounded or killed by single gunshots, sometimes by high-calibre bullets causing extensive damage to young bodies.

In mid-February, a group of UN experts accused the Israeli military of targeting Palestinian civilians who are evidently not combatants, including children, as they sought shelter.

“We are shocked by reports of the deliberate targeting and extrajudicial killing of Palestinian women and children in places where they sought refuge, or while fleeing. Some of them were reportedly holding white pieces of cloth when they were killed by the Israeli army or affiliated forces,” the group said.

The Guardian shared descriptions and images of gunshot wounds suffered by eight children with military experts and forensic pathologists. They said it was difficult to conclusively determine the circumstances of the shootings based on the descriptions and photos alone, although in some of the cases they were able to identify ammunition used by the Israeli military.

Eyewitness accounts and video recordings appear to back up claims that Israeli soldiers have fired on civilians, including children, outside of combat with Hamas or other armed groups. In some cases, witnesses describe coming under fire while waving white flags. Haaretz reported on Saturday that Israel routinely fires on civilians in areas its military has declared a “combat zone”.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) deploy snipers – or sharpshooters, as the military calls them – during combat operations, often as part of elite units. They are trained to “target and eliminate particularly difficult terrorist threats”, according to the military’s own definition.

Israeli and foreign human rights groups have documented a long history of snipers firing on unarmed Palestinians, including children, in Gaza and the West Bank.

Palestinians in Gaza also report a terrifying new development in the latest Gaza war – armed drones able to hover over streets and pick off individuals. Called quadcopters, some of these drones are used as remote-control snipers that Palestinians say have been used to shoot civilians.

The IDF said it “completely rejects” allegations that its snipers deliberately fire on civilians. It said it cannot address individual shootings “without coordinates of the incidents”.

“The IDF only targets terrorists and military targets. In stark contrast to Hamas’s deliberate attacks on Israeli civilians, including men, women and children, the IDF follows international law and takes feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm,” it said.

Doctors say otherwise.

Dr Vanita Gupta, an intensive care doctor at a New York City hospital, volunteered at Gaza’s European hospital in January. One morning, three badly wounded children arrived in quick succession. Their families told Gupta that the children had been together in the street when they came under fire and that there had been no other shooting in the area. She said no wounded adults were brought in to the hospital at the same time and from the same place.

“One child, I could see there was a shot to the head. They were doing CPR on this five- or six-year-old girl who obviously died,” said Gupta.

“There was another little girl about the same age. I saw a bullet entry wound on her head. Her father was there, crying and asking me, ‘Can you save her? She’s my only child.’”

Gupta said that a third young child also had a shot to the head and was sent for a CT scan.

“The neurosurgeon looked and said, ‘There’s no hope.’ You could see the bullet had gone through the head. I don’t know how old he was, but young,” she said.

Family members told Gupta that the Israeli army had withdrawn from the area about four kilometres from the hospital.

“They said people started returning to their homes because the army was gone. But the snipers stayed on. The families said they opened fire at the children,” she said.

Doctors who worked at the Nasser hospital in southern Gaza said what appeared to be targeted Israeli fire killed more than two dozen people, including children, as they entered or left the hospital in the first weeks of this year.

Among the casualties was 14-year-old Ruwa Qdeih. Doctors say she was shot dead outside the hospital in Khan Younis as she went to collect water. They said there was no fighting in the area at the time and that she was killed by a single shot and then men who went to recover her body were also shot at.

In Gaza City, three-year-old Emad Abu al-Qura was shot outside his home as he went to buy fruit with his cousin, Hadeel, a 20-year-old medical student, who was also killed. The family said they were targeted by an Israeli sniper.

A video of the pair lying together in the street shows Emad still alive after he is first hit and trying to lift his head. More shots hit the ground close by including one that strikes a plank next to Emad. The boy’s mother said he was then hit again and this time killed.

Hadeel’s father, Haroon, saw the shooting.

“The targeting of civilians is very clear. It is a deliberate direct targeting aimed at killing civilians without reason, without there being any events, without there being any resistance. They deliberately killed Hadeel and Emad,” he told Al Jazeera.

Other young victims include 14-year-old Nahedh Barbakh, who was hit by sniper fire alongside his 20-year-old brother, Ramez, as they followed Israeli military orders to evacuate an area west of Khan Younis in late January, according to the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. [...]

In October, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, described the IDF as “the most moral army in the world”. The Israeli military claims to be guided by a “purity of arms” doctrine that precludes soldiers from harming “uninvolved civilians”.

But Israeli and international human rights groups have long said that the military’s failure to enforce its own standards – and its willingness to cover up breaches – has contributed to a climate of impunity for soldiers who target civilians.

The groups say it is extremely difficult at this stage to quantify the scale of such shootings in Gaza, not least because their own staff are often displaced and under attack. But Miranda Cleland of Defense for Children International Palestine said that over the years there had been a “clear pattern of Israeli forces targeting Palestinian children with deadly force in situations where the children posed no threat to soldiers”.

“In the occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers routinely shoot children in the head, chest or abdomen, all areas from which a child will quickly bleed out if they aren’t killed instantly. Many of these children are shot by Israeli forces from great distances, sometimes upwards of 500ft, which is something only a trained military sniper would be capable of,” she said.

An Israeli group, Breaking the Silence, collected testimonies from IDF soldiers in earlier conflicts who said they shot Palestinian civilians merely because they were where they were not supposed to be even though it was evident they were not combatants.

IDF snipers boasted about shooting unarmed Palestinian protesters, including young people, in the knees during nearly two years of demonstrations at the Gaza border fence from the spring of 2018."

#this article is extremely long and complete I urge people who want references or seek knowledge of zionist crimes to read it #it seems that some western medias are finally ready to tell the actual truth without euphemism or racist double speak #bee tries to talk #palestine #free palestine #zionism #israel #genocide #war crimes #colonialism

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