There's no topic ban. The invasion of Gaza and its impacts are an important, highly newsworthy topic and it would be ludicrous to ban it. So it's not on sight the moment it comes up or what have you. However, these discussions pretty rapidly turn into disasters and whatever value a discussion on the news about this critical, extremely serious situation approaches zero. People are being killed by the truckload and SVers turn it into stupid bullshit instead. I wish it wasn't so but that's how it is.
It's not a mystery why this happens. On one side you have people who can't really approach this kind of topic without it just being emotive venting and on the other you have people who are, frankly, just way too blasé about population centres getting bombed. The latter side is unresponsive to counterarguments and generally conceives of everyone on the former side as standing in for some guy they saw elsewhere. That's why you get this absurd situation where thousands of tons of aerial bombs are dropped on residential neighbourhoods and some guys are talking about the secret meanings of 'from the river to the sea' or whatever. The former side is just not equipped to deal with this and engages in petty heckling instead.
There's only so much that can be done in terms of keeping threads in shape. Moreover it's a complicated topic area for line moderators which puts a bottleneck on how much volume and how much speed can be handled. For basically all of 2024 to this point the N&P report queue has generally been about 90% IvP reports (that has recently changed somewhat due to the US election approaching, though some of those are still IvP reports).
Some of the lines can be very fine and our tools are supposed to be used relatively precisely, but the things we have most flexibility in is making directions to a given thread, or closing it. So if necessary, that's what we'll do.
