Agreed. There's only one solution. The UN needs to disarm both sides, depose their governments and make the whole area a UN protectorate. Remove any illegal settlements. Try anyone on both sides involved in war crimes or human rights violations.

Israel and Palestine can not behave like grown ups? Take away their toys and put them in time out.

You're acting like we're just talking about "actions" that people are "doing."

What you're ignoring is the apartheid society created by Israel. They're directly responsible for the conditions that foster this type of response.

This isn't a "both sides are just as bad" thing. One of these groups has been horrifically oppressed and kept in the largest open-air prison on the planet for nearly 100 years. Any time Hamas has attacked Israeli soldiers (you know, because they're literally kicking them out of their family homes they've lived in for generations. Which is genocide btw), Israel has responded by slaughtering hundreds to thousands of Palestinian (not Hamas) civilians. It's completely disproportionate.

I'm not defending or justifying, just trying to explain.

The Israeli-German girl is apparently still alive and in criticial condition in the Indonesian hospital in Gaza. She wasn't murdered (though of course she could still succumb to whatever was done to her).

Two points:

• As her mother is calling for news about her I'll go with her belief of "not dead" until proven otherwise given how the poor girl has been turned into a - as you so well put - "figurehead" for propaganda. I confess I'm one of those weird people who prefers to believe that others are merelly "kidnapped" rather than dead.
• I'm glad you're beginning to start to get my point about the use of figureheads to make the smaller number of people murderer on one side seem more disgusting to a western audience than the much larger number of deaths on the other side. That's exactly how propaganda works: turn individual humans into symbols and parade their horrible fate as justification to kill lots of those "other" humans most of whom are blamed by association.

See, on the one hand you’re validly calling out sensationalism and propaganda, but on the other you’re kind of going further the other way. She wasn’t kidnapped, she was murdered and her corpse mutilated, paraded and spat on. And it isn’t her vs 100s of murdered Palestinians, she is but a figurehead representing hundreds dead in Israel.

You know, google for "Anush Apetyan" and consider that Israel is Azerbaijan's main military supplier after Russia, and almost an ally, and nothing from what Azerbaijani troops are doing (just the same Hamas stuff) seems to have any effect.

Also Israel is a genocide-denier state. Israelis on the Web like to behave all cynical and realpolitik-enjoying and "what are you going to do" on subjects similar to what Hamas has done in Sderot etc.

I'd say there is an element of crocodile tears in this.

Action should be taken to prevent anybody doing anything like this again, to Israelis or anybody else, but that doesn't mean Israel somehow got moral. Promoting that would be exploiting events for propaganda.

The only reason it's not productive, in your opinion, is because it makes the side you support look REALLY fucking bad.

"Why can't we all come together and forget the 6+ decades of horrific oppression and wildly disproportionate warfare, and all just get along?"

tallying up which side did what and who was worse really isn’t productive here

rephrased...."Let's not bicker and argue over who killed who". Serious conversation and that is what my mind locks on. Go figure.