I don’t understand what mother would leave their baby behind while panicking. This is a horrible story that is perhaps more horrible that initially assumed.
@Sina no mother would, and under normal circumstances neither would medical staff. As the article states, staff were pleading for help.
These babies were in an Intensive Care unit. Most were premature babies who were supposed to be in incubators. They are vulnerable and need to be kept warm, may be tube fed or require oxygen. It's difficult for parents, who usually cannot be there all the time.
It is more likely that the mothers were unable to get to the ICU. We do not yet know how many died trying.
The mothers may not even have been alive and medical staff simply can’t evacuate premature babies and all the ICU equipment needed to keep them alive.
This story is absolutely going to be used as “look how inhuman and barbarous these Palestinians are, good thing we’re genociding them” and your comment is exactly what they’re looking for.
But the reality is that if you shoot and bomb civilians, then threaten to bomb the hospital they’re being treated at, this could happen anywhere in the world.
They weren’t leaving babies to die and rot 6 months ago because they weren’t being shelled and shot at and if they weren’t being shelled and shot at now, they wouldn’t have left those babies either.
This comes after an order to evacuate a city with >0.7 million inhabitants within 24h without preparation, with broken infrastructure and broken government, with a treat of invasion.
There’s no way this happen without panic, and without people being left behind.
I fear we’re going to hear more horrific stories as the dust settles.
There were many innocent civilians living in Nazi Germany, and a lot of them died in the interest of stopping them.
We try to minimize innocent deaths in war, but when the group you are fighting against uses hospitals as military locations and innocent people as human shields, it becomes difficult to do so
You are being drawn in by Israeli propaganda. Look at more balanced news sources, or just a wider range. The ‘human shield’ myth is particularly awful as it’s being used to defend murdering innocent people.
I’m not. I’m old, and have been following this conflict for decades. Hamas very often targets innocent Israelis in their attacks, and hides behind innocent Palestinians to make it difficult for Israel to target them. You can argue about whether it is justifiable or not that they do this, but there are many, many sources that they do.
I’m also old and have been following this conflict for decades but apparently more balanced sources.
Israel claimed that they were targeting Hamas at Al-Shifa but they positioned snipers who shot doctors and nurses through the windows. If you’re being forced to attack a hospital full of innocent civilians then you would be trying to avoid the innocent civilians, but that’s not what it’s about here.
Same as taking swathes of land since WW2, they are occupying massive areas that they were never given. They’re not ignorant, they know exactly what they’re doing.
There were also horrific war crimes in WW2, including the bombing of civilians. War crimes are war crimes no matter who commits them.
I don't think it's really an appropriate comparison to make, but since you are making it, approximately 0.4% to 0.6% of Germans were killed by bombing in WW2.
The death toll in Gaza is already at 0.75% of the population, and growing.
a lot of them died in the interest of stopping them.
You are conflating innocent people with armed forces in this sentence. My point was that it is not the same "them".
“You see, the birth canal is a tunnel and we all know Hamas is using tunnels to move around without observation. The babies just used tunnels, so they must be Hamas.”
Everyone always says the answer is that the “other side” stop being violent and be nice. It never happens. So my question to the liberals is, if being nice doesn’t work, what’s your answer to the situation? Have Israel disarm and let Hamas murder Israelis with impunity? Have Hamas disarm and have Israel settle palistine with impunity? It’s been 70 years of this. And by 70 I really mean about 7000.
Israel never stopped murdering Palestinians in the West Bank, and even shot a bunch of Palestinian civilians who tried to go North during the “cease-fire”.
The cease-fire was Hamas trying to give people as much time to evacuate as they could, because Israel was clear from the beginning that they intended to go back to murdering Palestinians afterwards. And of course Israel is now expanding “operations” in the South, since that’s where the majority of Palestinians are now.
Lol, they fired rockets at Israel at 05:42 (ceasefire was scheduled till 07:00) and yesterday 3 people were killed in a terrorist attack that they (proudly) took responsibility for.
Guess we’re due for another apology from the BBC…
Israel killed Palestinians in Gaza who were heading North during the “cease-fire”.
Israel killed Palestinians in the West Bank who they said were Hamas during the “cease-fire”.
Israel never even wanted the cease-fire except that it would lay bare Bibi’s complete lack of giving a shit about the hostages on Hamas’s side if he refused, and he couldn’t afford that either internationally or internally.
Still, this is exceptionally commendable. Most of the time, when other countries have claimed they ran only on renewables, they have neglected the fact that they are net exporters and were running combustion generation across some of their network. The total renewable generation was greater than the total demand, but some of their generation was combustion and the excess passed off to other countries, with a bit of number fiddling to say that they were 100% green. With this, Portugal didn’t run any combustible generation, and they still exported to other countries.
Norway ran on 100% renewables for like 80 years, but no one cares.
Only reason we’re not at 100% anymore is because politicians don’t find it a priority to be self-sufficient and it’s much better to sell Norwegian renewable electricity to Europe for a profit, then buy back dirty electricity and let the consumers in Norway pay a cable transit tax to the government.
See, now you get to sell the energy twice, and both times at a higher rate.
You can’t compare other countries with the likes of Norway or Iceland. For most countries, hydro isn’t enough to meet the needs. Not to mention the fact that it isn’t truly renewable. What happens when climate change makes water more scarce?
The true renewable production became possible only recently with the advances in PV, wind and battery tech.
Yeah I’d agree with you, I think the reason Norway isn’t 100% renewable has a little more to do with growing demand, as well as seasonal variation. Saying that, I’m sure this could have been addressed if the government had properly encouraged development of more clean generation.
Honestly, the entire world could have been in a much better situation if we had pushed for renewables a long time ago. The first identification of the global greenhouse effect was in 1892 - more than 130 years ago. There was plenty of time to come up with alternatives, considering how fast technology develops (how many knew mobile phones before 1995?).
We are in a serious mess not for the lack of understanding or resources. Some people wanted to be rich at the expense of the majority of ordinary people, all other species and the entire planetary biome. They made sure that no other technology would challenge the world’s dependence on oil. They chose profits over countless lives on the brink of a mass extinction event.
I understand why you feel the need to blame the government. But I can’t help but rant about the insatiable greed and the crime that resulted from it on a scale that the planet has never witnessed before (I don’t think any species, much less a few individuals, ever caused so much destruction before). And while those criminals (for lack of a better word suitable for their actions) live a life in luxury without consequences, the rest of us are being gaslighted by the same vermin for the damage they caused.
I’m sorry for the lengthy rant. Thank you for understanding!
Even now, going hard on renewables is the best strategy. The technology is cheap, proven and readily available. If we build an excess of renewables we can wean off of fossil fuels most quickly, even diverting resources to nuclear will only slow down this goal.
The government do have ultimate responsibility, even if they’re influenced by the greed of wealthy people and organisations.
Well, portuguese here, that record period can be mostly attributed to hydropower as we’ve seen unusually high levels of rainfall over that period that we haven’t seen in a while. And because we decided to try and ditch stuff like coal in a rush, there was an uncomfortable while where our grid very much depended on electricity imports, which don’t come from clean sources, we just outsourced the problem.
Renewable capacity is still growing however, but with climate change making droughts here more frequent, the main hydrofallback may not become as much of an option
That’s where energy storage comes in. Either more traditional elevated water storage, or new battery storage. Batteries is a massive growth sector at the moment, and governments are making it easier for batteries to get approval - to developers and land owners, it’s becoming more appealing than solar.
So these children are driven to work due to poverty right? So isn’t the answer to try to address that rather than to say “stop using cocoa harvested by child labor?” Like I’m totally pro-non-child-labor-cocoa, but wouldn’t the kids just get other jobs then?
their parents also work harvesting cocoa. The reason they are poor despite being working a lot is that they are not paid enough for their work… by Mars (or Nestle, Mondelez, etc)
That is why I’m buying chocolate made in Africa, rather than chocolate made from beans from Africa. That way the value is generated there and not here.
It’s not about child abuse, it’s about not making enough money so they need their children to help out. If they get a fair salary, they don’t need to exploit their kids for labor.
Yes, and this is a vestige of the destabilization of African nations by white colonial powers to have and sell enslaved people. What boggles my mind is that paying a living wage to workers would increase the price of Mars chocolate slightly if at all (corporate profits could eat the difference) but the people with the power to make those decisions are like “nope! We could get even more profits by paying less for raw materials!” so they seek and/or create even more disenfranchised workers. Doesn’t get more disenfranchised than a 5 year old that has to go to work to help the family make ends meet, but I’m sure the corporate overlords are cooking something up as we speak.
John Oliver did a great show on chocolate around Halloween time. It showed just how much child labor goes into producing chocolate for the world, when almost no one really spends any time thinking about where it comes from.
The CNN clip in that video, is even better: the reporter gives the guys a bar of chocolate, and they go all “ohh, it tastes so great!”. Then he asks them if they’ll give any to the children, to which the guy answer “they can have the wrappers”… at which point the reporter produces out a second bar saying “don’t worry, give them this”… still, I don’t recall the kids getting any.
I enjoyed the part with the other journalist where he was on the phone with someone who hung up when the reporter pointed out that kids could stop working if their parents made more money. Insane that he was defending that practice.
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