If recent history is any indicator, UN isn't that structure; probably EU / G7 / BRICS & other such blocs are:
... we construct a new dataset covering all 43 very large mass atrocities perpetrated by governments or non-state actors since 1945 with at least 50,000 civilian fatalities.
This article introduces and summarizes these data, including an inductively generated typology of three major ending types: those in which (i) violence is carried out to its intended conclusion (37%); (ii) the perpetrator is driven out of power militarily (26%); or (iii) the perpetrator shifts to a different strategy no longer involving mass atrocities against civilians (37%).
We find that international actors play a range of important roles in endings, often involving encouragement and support for policy changes that reduce mass killings. Endings could be attributed principally to armed foreign interventions in only four cases, three of which involved regime change. Within the cases we study, no ending was attributable to a neutral peacekeeping mission.
And this veto nonsense needs to go away.
If the US can't do anything about it, what hope is there for the underfunded UN?
But the terrible tragedy is that this situation is not going to resolve until these countries actually prosecute their war criminals, who have been getting away with it in the current context for 20+ years. Which means the only ones with any power to do anything about the USA/Israels' war criminals, are the citizens of those countries themselves - which is why the situation is just so dire.
Until there is a real appetite for prosecuting ones own war criminals instead of bleating like sheep for the blood of perceived enemies of other states, there will not be the moral stance/altitude required for Americans to do anything effective about the war crimes of any other nation.
Until Americans prosecute their own war criminals they can do nothing effective about Israels', Russias', Ukraines' war criminals, either ...
The proposed reforms led by the likes of Brazil, Germany and India are not getting a lot of traction. Maybe if they included everyone else they'd have a better chance.
Because that which war criminals bring to their victims, they will also - ALWAYS - bring back to their own state.
Prosecute your war criminals. Now!
That said, I find this particularly of interest here given the growing attention to the use of algorithms and AI (including generative AI) for surveillance and targeting of palestinians.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Personally, I find the political machinations around this conflict particularly interesting.
But I never came to better conclusion about West Bank annexation that that it is pure imperialism. Basically what russians are trying in Ukraine. I'm still not quite sure what is the purpose, there is really not enough land or it's all just bs?
I wonder if this ends up Flagged.
Boycott. Divestment. Sanctions. Use any legal means to stop funding this genocide and make Israel's leadership accountable. We all love our comfy white collar jobs and would rather not rock the boat, but not doing the little we can do (e.g. stop using Israeli suppliers and services) makes us supporters.
> Israeli forces continued to use high-payload munitions and weapons with wide-area effects in densely populated residential areas despite mounting child casualties ... this indicates that such attacks, which killed children in such high numbers, were intentional ... [and therefore Israel was deliberately targeting children]
is a reach.
Israel's targeting of neonatal and maternity care centres during its war on Gaza directly endangered Palestinians' reproductive future and the survival of newborns – driving a rise in miscarriages, birth defects, and lasting vulnerabilities.
Israel's aid blockade in Gaza last year also took a severe toll on Palestinian children, causing starvation-related deaths and a rise in disease as immunisation rates fell.
Palestinian children have been arrested and subjected to torture in Israeli prisons and other severe forms of mistreatment, including sexual abuse.
Israeli forces have destroyed orphanages and education facilities in the occupied West Bank, which has affected Palestinian children's cognitive, social and emotional care and development.It's actually one of the places in the Middle East with a higher birth rate than Israel itself, and a very high population density.
If you are shooting into the crowd which includes children, you are shooting at children even when you are not pointing at them precisely.
The timing was good too. 7am morning time in the US eastern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNRWA_and_Israel#International...
Relevant paragraphs:
6. Thousands of Child Combatants are Part of the 70,000 Total
There is no doubt that Hamas and other militant groups use child combatants, in some cases children as young as 12. Demographic analysis of the fatality lists already pointed to this reality, with roughly 2,000 excess deaths among male teens. That inference is now confirmed by direct evidence.
Numerous martyr posters, funeral notices, and social media posts identify underage fighters killed in combat. Most recently, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) publicly acknowledged that 9% of its announced fighters killed were minors, based on its own fighter death lists cross-referenced with Hamas’ fatality list. This shows that combat participation by minors was neither rare nor incidental.
Just ask yourself this - why there were no bomb shelters in Gaza , but plenty of tunnels? clearly, there was no shortage of concrete. No one of the leaders of Gaza cared about civilian casualties, they even saw it as a desirable outcome.
I really don't want to descend into countless counterexamples, but that's how virtually every military or militia wages war, including the IDF. I assume your confusion on this issue may be due to a lack of familiarity with the subject.
Usually never ever has anything to do with malevolence (eg. in an attempt to use the counter strike as a propaganda story). More often, it's just a matter of convenience, logistics, and the realities of operating in populated areas.
If there's one thing that CIA manuals on training militias stressed on, or any military history book in that regard, it's that soldiers need to be fed and supported. Or they'll find ways to meet those needs without you.
May, 2024: At least 21 killed in Israeli attacks on tent camp near Gaza’s Rafah [4]
September, 2024: An Israeli strike on humanitarian tent camp for displaced Gazans killed at least 19 people [5]
December 2024: Seven attacks on tent encampments in the past two weeks kill 34 Palestinians including 10 children [2]
April 2025, Israeli strikes kill Palestinians in tented area for displaced in Gaza [3]
January, 2026: Israeli airstrikes targeted tents belonging to displaced people [1]
[1] https://www.reutersconnect.com/item/israeli-airstrikes-targe...
[2] https://www.un.org/unispal/document/ohchr-opt-press-release-...
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yrl891j23o
[4] https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/5/28/at-least-21-kil...
[5] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/an-israeli-strike-on-huma...
Interesting part about your commentary is, that you completely ignored the West bank I mentioned. Place when Israel forces killed hundreds of children with sole reason or colonisation of land belonging to someone else. Or at least I never found any other explanation for behavior at the West Bank.
Israelis have bomb shelters because have ample warning and an enemy that is barely able to hit anything.
This blaming the victims of your own bombings for not taking shelter- actually accusing them to be responsible for their own deaths and those of their relatives, parents, wives, children, is some of the most revolting and shameless Israeli propaganda.
Not sure it's the same thing. Russians want political and territorial control in Ukraine, not expelling Ukrainians to resettle the place with "ethnic Russians". Israel wants to conquer the whole of Palestine (West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem) to replace the native population with its own. There is no possible equal integration of Palestinians or their descendants into a Jewish state, not in a thousand years, and by design.
But I wouldn't be sure about your claim regarding Israel. Even now there are millions of Palestinians with Israel citizenship. I understand the deeply rooted animosity with hamas but I do not understand the whole point of this type of colonisation of west bank. I suppose it have something to do with their extreme religious part of goverment?
You've had a point. Maybe it's more like Native Americans and colonizer type of situation.
> Israeli forces continued to use high-payload munitions and weapons with wide-area effects in densely populated residential areas despite mounting child casualties, the commission said.
It paints Hamas's Ministry of Health as a propaganda machine incapable of an honest number (sure) while Israeli military estimates (the 25,000 combatant figure, al-Ahli) are accepted at face value -- seriously? The IDF has been proven to lie numerous times.
Also, the article still relies on the MoH's numbers when it's convenient to the point it's trying to make.
The Gaza Mortality Survey, published in The Lancet Global Health in early 2026, run by Michael Spagat who's a war-mortality specialist (Kosovo, Iraq), with a long record of debunking inflated war-death claims, estimated 75,200 violent deaths between Oct 7, 2023 and Jan 5, 2025, which is around 25,000 more than the official Gaza Ministry of Health figure for that period.
The Lancet survey found that women, children, and older people comprised 56.2% of violent deaths. An OHCHR analysis separately found that 70% of those killed in residential buildings were women and children.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...
Let's see, what else: A ratio of 1.5 civilians per combatant means roughly 40% of all deaths are fighters. If 56% of the dead are women, children, and elderly, then every adult male death would have to be a combatant to reach 40% — which is obviously false.
The Washington Institute concluded that the available data cannot yield a civilian-combatant ratio because the MoH doesn't classify combatant status. https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/gaza-fat...
The combatants numbers: The 25k combatants figure is an estimate from IDF statements while it dismisses the 8.9k figure (militants the IDF actually identified) as absurd. "Let's make up a number and call the only real documented count" -- and whether it itself is real or not is debatable.
Then lies about natural deaths: Yes, there were about 6.3k deaths in Gaza before the genocide started, however it cherry-picks this subtraction while ignoring the corresponding addition. the same surveys that quantify baseline deathhs also find thousands of excess non-violent deaths caused by genocide. The lancet survey has 8.5k excess deaths. The 3.3k confirmed deaths the article cites are below the 6k baseline. Natural deaths are undercounted. Not inflating it.
Hamas kiling Gazans: Sure, but thousands? It's overblowing numbers for the al-Ahli hospital case and then extrapolating a bunch of bs as a result.
There is a genocide going on. We've seen the footage. We have the testimony about the horrors from both IDF soldiers and Palestinians. Why are we disputing numbers like holocaust deniers?
A few rebutals: > Yes the author is pro-Israel. I would assume the author the Reuters article is anti-Israel. This doesn't automatically disqualify either account.
> The issue is with the MoH is the breakdown of the numbers, not the overall number. No contradiction.
> He provides an alternative to Lancet. His numbers do not follow Lancet, so mixing his calculations with Lancet's is disingenuous.
> Hamas said they had 40k trained fighters which was about 2% of the population. They also recruited heavily throughout the war. Israel has a standing army of 170,000. The area is an active war zone. These numbers are feasible.
> The 8900 is fighters identified by Israel by name. This is an extremely high standard you are applying to identify fighters overall. For example in Ukraine, this standard would identify most of the 200,00 Russians they have claimed to kill to be civilians.
> Your logic is inconsistent. According to you over a 2 year period Israel couldn't kill tens of thousands of fighters in a large active military all over Gaza but could kill tens of thousands of exposed and trapped civilians in the crossfire but Hamas couldn't have harmed a few thousand of those same civilians.
> No genocide.
> This is not disputing numbers. It's disputing the nature of the conflict.
And, of course, the problem is people don't agree. Turkey refuses to accept many of it's actions as genocidal (because that's how Turkey was created: when the last islamic state ("the Ottoman empire") got destroyed by Turks (who at that point were the ottoman army), they massacred a LOT of population groups, famously the Armenians but academics name more than a dozen separate genocides: Greeks, Kurds, Azeri, Jews, ...)
Oh and of course they kept doing it. Technically what Turkey did in Cyprus is also a genocide, and they have an active policy of replacing Kurd population groups but that's, if that's even possible, an even worse sore point.
The sad fact is that these genocides happened to gain territory. And, most of that territory, go look at Google Maps. This was mostly deep inland Turkey. And ... Turks obviously don't want it. There's no big cities there, and the more east you go, the less little towns, the less people, the less everything (except on the border). After the genocides what was a European landscape, a village every 5km or so is now empty. Hundreds of kilometers of nothing. Names on a map , with nothing or ruins below them. You don't really need a line to find the Armenian or Georgian border: where the farms begin, the rectangular fields, the villages, you've crossed the Turkish border. In other words: what repopulation the Turks did ... is a failure. And what little remains, mostly near the black sea, is losing young people at an astonishing rate. This is huge empty space, mostly ecologically destroyed land, not productive farmland. Not nature preserves. Nothing.
Also the reverse also doesn't apply. The UN may have trouble with Israeli actions, but where the UN took control to resolve the situation, where the UN took action, most famously southern Lebanon, it has not just failed but it systematically kept getting worse for 50+ years now. Whereas at least for Israel you can say: look at Tel Aviv. Look at Jerusalem. Look at Haifa. They really built something. Where the UN "helped" ... there's nothing.
Besides the obvious religious/ ideological motivation, there's also a simple matter of territory: Israel is a small country and the West Bank and Gaza have a lot of value, both for the country as a whole (more space for more people, more natural resources, nobody to share with) as well as commercial value- think developments, real estate, industrial and agricultural areas, seafront properties, etc. Very hard to keep your hands off this bounty, for decades, when the rest of the world basically allows you everything.
"The Court is composed of a panel of 15 judges elected by the UN General Assembly and Security Council for nine-year terms"
Literally, from the first few paragraphs of wikipedia. People don't read these days.
If the UN general assembly (mostly anti israel) selects the judges how is it "structurally independent of the UN"?
>Have you not seen the footage of bombs dropped with no warnings in the middle of the streets, on residential buildings, on schools, on hospitals
Literally the first paragraph of the article we're commenting.