Excerpt:
The team’s interrogation lasted more than two hours, during which all our phones and laptops were examined, and many photos - including personal ones - were deleted. The officer threatened us with worse consequences if we approached the frontier from the Syrian side again, and said that they know everything about us and would track us down if any hidden or un-deleted photo was ever published.
I don’t deny the overall sentiment, but we should still try to stay fact-based. It’s not about benefit of any doubt, nobody deserves that in any military conflict. It’s about the evidence we’ve been presented. If there were some war crimes caught by the BBC reporter, he likely would have said so. I doubt Israeli threats would dissuade him from doing his job when he’s brave enough to go reporting there in the first place. The IDF would have a hard time reaching him if he were to move safely back to Britain.
Loyalty to logic and factuality is more important than which side we support in conflict. If we cannot maintain a loyalty to reality, we don’t deserve to overcome our opponents in the first place. We’ve become too much like them.
Running journalists out of town before they can find your war crimes sounds like the actions of someone who commits warcrimes.
None of this is exactly a stretch given the sheer scale of war crimes and cover ups we already know about from that army.
I mean, technically, illegal occupation is in and of itself a warcrime, so there’s that?
So, bombing hospitals and innocent civilians trying to get food aren’t war crimes?
No, those are absolutely war crimes. I am not saying the IDF does not commit war crimes. I am saying this BBC reporter would have told us if he witnessed any, and as such, this specific case probably has a different motive of the many possibilities.
Don’t mistake my attempts at objectivity for support for the IDF. I just don’t automatically assume the worst possibilities.
It could still be to cover up war crimes that the BBC team hadn’t got quite close enough to discover yet, but the IDF were concerned that they might have if not scared away. It could just be for opsec, but them having been competent at stopping the BBC seeing whatever it was they were hiding isn’t proof that the thing being hidden was benign.
Intimidation is probably part of it, for sure. The only thing that fully explains the deletion of the photos is opsec, though. Frankly, we should assume the IDF absolutely is maintaining opsec, and will absolutely forbid any footage of their forward operating positions from going public as much as they possibly can. That should be a standard procedure for any military engaged in combat, and any exceptions to it should be surprising.
I believe whether this was to cover up something or not, Israel is using intimation tactics to keep eyes and cameras away from them. We have a saying in Arabic that goes “hit the one with the leash to scare the loose” basically you attack non-threatening individuals to scare away actual threats.
You guys are also forgetting that the Golan Heights since 1981 and recently southern Syria are illegally occupied by Israel and heavily militarized. Which has caused the locals to move away that of itself may be argued to be a crime. So if you wanna maintain opsec go ahead but not when the operation is about stealing land and harassing locals.
Yeah, that I agree with. The behavior beyond the deletion of the photos alone was very egregious. Blatant intimidation.
“… without any assumptions, regardless of how plausible, bordering on certainty, that the assumption is” I suppose.
I never said I wasn’t making any assumptions. That an army would follow sound opsec principles while they are in a state of conflict is an assumption after all.
This does fully explain the deletion, though, while anything else has to twist around to explain why a journalist isn’t reporting on potential war crimes while still reporting on other bad behavior.
edit: If you can’t see how obvious this is, I’m afraid you’ve probably been indoctrinated with a severe bias. I’m the only one here saying Israel absolutely commits war crimes, this just isn’t a good example of another one. Details are important and all that.
They did this insane power move because they can, because their government is run by a maniacle, greedy, evil, megalomaniac.
They are empowered by getting away with war crimes, if no ones seems to care about that who will care if they enter Syria and harras and delete some people’s photos.
If their focus was opsec they wouldn’t delete personal photos.
Why are you suckling this grotesque teet?
Because it doesn’t make sense. Your leader being a megalomaniac does not mean every soldier is, that’s not how life works. You cannot paint any whole group of people based on the actions of some of them.
Personal photos can contain identifying landmarks in them, and are thus still subject to opsec. If I take a selfie in a certain spot with a tree in the background, it can be determined where I was based off that tree. It’s no different from how the backgrounds of photos posted to the internet can get the subjects doxxed regardless of them not intentionally giving out their info. This is prevented by blurring out all backgrounds when posting photos near a military position. Or can just delete the photos.
As I said earlier, I’m loyal to trying to be objective. Not to identifying what I think are bad guys and automatically heaping every bad thing I can think of on them. I don’t do that with Russia, China, the US or Israel. I don’t do it to anybody. I try to figure out the truth, instead of just thinking “those are bad guys, bad guys do bad guy things”.
It also helps that I’ve heard of non-Israeli cases of people not being allowed to take footage of or photograph around military positions, so that part of it is actually normal.