Many countries are bombing Syria, including Syria itself, Jordan, Russia, and the US, largely because of the ongoing civil war and related ISIS attacks, though Jordan is mostly targeting drug smugglers aligned with the Syrian government. Focusing on Israel is just incredibly ignorant.
"Focusing on Israel" is pretty fair in this instance. Israel has been bombing many important archaeological sites recently (along with hospitals, refugee camps, humanitarian corridors, press offices, schools, etc).
I had the same question, especially that the researchers are from a western "enemy" country. It's impressive the length researchers go to, well, research.
Isreal is regularly bombing targets in Syria as well. But the targets seem to be mostly military installations, so the civilian life is not nearly as much disrupted as it is in Lebanon.
> Assad has killed about half a million Syrians already in the civil war.
How can that be true? Western academics protest when so many people are killed. The Gaza health ministry itself claims less that 1/10 of that number, and look at how many protests and riots are in the US right now. If Syria really had half a million dead you'd see the academics rioting about that.
People typically protest their own government to effect policy changes. In the case of Gaza, the US is sending billions of dollars to Israel on a regular basis. The Syrian government, meanwhile, has been sanctioned for more than a decade by these western countries.
The definition of terrorism generally excludes acts performed by a legitimate state. Whenever this causes problems, you have to declare the relevant state illegitimate (which, depending on the state, may be trivial or highly contested).
It's also been standard practice in war since pretty much forever. Not that that's a good thing—war is and always has been terrible—but Israel didn't invent the idea of targeting civilians, nor are there any countries in recent history who have suddenly become above that kind of warfare. There are some that like to talk the talk, but they either have managed to just avoid war (to be fair, good on them) or do the same thing.
It's not. Nowhere in my statement did I attempt to justify it. I explained the context so that people wouldn't walk away confused as to what that short sentence actually means.
Apparently that context being added irritates you. That is interesting in it's own right.
700k fatalities is a little high as consensus estimates go, but it’s not ridiculous, even low estimates are in the hundreds of thousands.
It’s been going on for more than 13 years and has way more factions than anything happening in Gaza right now, many/most great powers both regionally and globally have a hand in somehow, and the Western press doesn’t report on it nearly as much as on more recent conflicts.
If college campus protests were driven directly or substantially by human suffering you’d be hearing about Sudan every day.
Riots for what? Assad was blamed and bombed by the West already, what should have people rioted for?
Besides, the entire Syrian civil war was started and fueled with American money and weapons- which ended up in the hands of each and every rebel/ terror group, including ISIS. Then the West blamed Assad for fighting back instead of leaving the country in the hand of those terror groups. Had he done that, now Syria would be a wasteland roamed by warlords, Mad Max style.
But Syria is (incorrectly) stereotyped as "brown people killing brown people" which college students shrug at. While Israel is (incorrectly) stereotyped as "white people killing brown people" which is a big no no.
Incorrectly because if you look at pictures of Syrian dictator Assad, he would be considered white in the US. Certainly whiter than many Israelis of Yemenite ancestry.
According to the Lancet medical journal, the Gaza deaths are closer to 200k but other sources say it might even be higher. No one knows because most of the hospitals are not operational, the dead from collapsed buildings can't be retrieved.
For Syria, I've heard ranges of anywhere between 300k and 700k. The difference between Syria and Gaza is most of the dead in Gaza are woman and children and the Syrian civil war death toll is over a decade
Lancet's numbers are not based in facts. Here's the exact excerpt from them:
> Armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence. Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases. The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population's inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza Strip.
> In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.
Again, from their own words, these numbers are not based in any reality on the ground, they are just taking the current number of reported deaths and multiplying it by 5. It also includes theoretical deaths in the future.
I had to look that up. Apparently the Lancet just multiplied by five the numbers from the Gazan health ministry, on the basis "of four indirect deaths per one direct death". That inflation technique is not used in any conflict anywhere else in the world, and particularly not in the Syrian conflict we're discussing and comparing to. If you would like to use that number, then apply that inflation technique also to the Syrian conflict as well.
Syria has been bombed far more by the US and Turkey than Israel, and a significant area is currently being occupied by Turkey. Israel is barely a player in this conflict and is just striking the occasional tactical or strategic target (like random factions attacking Israel, IRGC or Hezbollah leadership).
But the answer is that there's really not much bombing at this point. A bigger problem for Syria is the multi-faction conflict on the ground, of which Hezbollah was one of the biggest factions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_civil_war#Belligerents
You might be confusing it with Lebanon, but Syria has been bombed by Israel and is pretty unstable in general so it's impressive they were able to do this research regardless. People shouldn't be downvoting you for asking a question.
Nah Israel is heavily assaulting Syria too, these days, at this moment, continuously. Special ops raids for targeted killing, blowing up some stuff or the other, bombing places. They don't even try to hide it, videos from chopper pilots, drones and helmet cams from soldiers are all over internet.
It may have some good reasons behind given war they wage on Lebanon, or just settling decades old political grudges, don't know.
> It may have some good reasons behind given war they wage on Lebanon
The day after Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, Lebanon (well, Hezbollah) stepped up their rocket attacks on Israel. Israel had to evacuate the entire north of the country, so that combined with the evacuated people from the Gaza area means something like 200,000 internally displaced Israelis right now. Hezbollah has killed dozens of citizen across the border, most prominently 12 children playing soccer a few months ago. They bombed two kindergartens in Israel this past week.
Honestly, I don't understand why the threshold for war seems to be ground invasion. If you're shooting missiles at another country, that's war too. Israel is at war with Syria, Iran, and Lebanon imo. Not to mention Hamas.
Also giving billions worth of weapon is seemingly totally fine but selling shells and sending troops to an allied country is "an escalation" when the opponent camp does it. The double standards and double speak is so tiring.
Also, Israel claims it must preemptively strike and do all sorts of things due to what its enemies may do to them, but given how much slaughter and actual genocide Israel sanctioned its allies to do in Lebanon in its history, they would be equally justified in reverse
