Israel-Gaza war

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

The problem with Abu Ghraib was that people were being tortured for kicks, not that the prisoners had their shirts off.  Jesus Christ you absolute idiots.  In the most famous photo from Abu Ghraib the prisoner isn't even naked at all.

This take is hotter than the core of the sun. So the problem wasn't the torture, it was that the torturers were having too much fun?

Maybe the most egregious willful misinterpretation of a post I've ever seen in the history of Atlas and that's really, really saying something since we all know how much Atlasians love to pretend they think someone is saying something different from what they know that person actually said.

Yes obviously the torture of the detainees was absolutely deplorable and the main reason why Abu Ghraib was a catastrophic moral and public relations failure for the Bush Administration that continues to haunt America decades later.

I know you know that I believe this.  I know you don't actually believe that I would be ok with torture under any circumstances.  But you are pretending to believe otherwise so you can try and score some cheap drive-by shot on an online blog.  What are you doing with your life?  Do you actually think you're some big hero in this situation?

You aren't ok with torture under any circumstances but you were just defending the verified torture-users abducting civilians and stripping them under the premise that the journalists and UN aid workers were actually secret Hamas terrorists who totally deserve what they get and that we're suckers for not automatically trusting the torturers. You'll have to forgive me for making such a terrible mistake. Does that mean you denounce Israel's use of torture?

That said, let's not pretend that the impact of Abu Ghraib wasn't doubled by the fact that these were detainees who were being tortured just for fun, degraded and killed for the sadistic pleasure of their captors, that the pictures of Charles Graner, Lynndie English and Sabrina whatever-her-name-was smiling and giving the thumbs up next to tortured and degraded prisoners weren't just as damaging as the torture itself.  The implication was that American soldiers were sadistic freaks who tortured detainees not for information, not to prevent attacks and save lives as the administration claimed, but for fun, or just because they hated muslims.  And even today, 20 years later, with torture outlawed for 15 of those years, that is how many people in the middle east see us.

See, here's my problem with you (and half the Israel defenders ITT for that matter): when people talk about verified, objective war crimes committed by Israeli security services the topic somehow always shifts to the unproveable mental state of the perpetrators. There's no disputing that Israel has used torture for decades against prisoners, even against children, so instead the discussion shifts to whether the torturers had evil in their hearts and took joy in the act of torture as if that's the core of the issue.

It's not even like there isn't evidence of Israeli torturers taking joy in their work. There was video from about a month ago floating around where they laughed as they forced a naked prisoner to piss himself and plenty of other blatant examples of sadism. Israeli officials have openly referred to Palestinians as subhuman, that there are no civilians and have acted accordingly. We don't need pictures of the torturers grinning, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence is already damning.

Tell me when you guys stop doing the same to Ukraine.

I've always denounced Putin as a war criminal.

Yet strangely people who were so brave when it came to denouncing Russian war crimes are mysteriously absent when the Israelis commit the exact same crimes. Whether it's deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure, assassinating civilians, torturing prisoners or putting out genocidal rhetoric, so many of the people who were so quick to demand Putin be put in front of the ICC for genocide have nothing to say when the IDF kills 20x more kids in two months than the Russian Army killed in two years.

Russians who denounced Putin from the start are expected to bear the full cost of sanctions while the idea of imposing comparable sanctions on Israel is totally unthinkable. The comparison between Ukraine and Gaza only exposes that the standard of international law applied to most of the world is never applied consistently to American allies.

Here's a crazy idea: how about we all denounce torture, ethnic cleansing and other war crimes, and we do it consistently instead of only when the regime in question is anti-American

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

No, I don't think this is true. Most simply, the city can be leveled with conventional bombing and the tunnels flooded without any IDF casualties at all, or very few; breaking things is much easier than making them. Hamas has not demonstrated an ability to actually advance against an IDF which is actually there, and when a single rocket out of hundreds actually claims any lives in Israel this is accorded a victory.

The IDF has been preparing and openly discussing how difficult and grueling a ground campaign through Gaza will be but apparently they were just too dumb to realize that they just had to bomb everything and flood the tunnels.

https://twitter.com/i24NEWS_EN/status/1734677220692558117

"Bomb everything and flood the tunnels" was always the plan, it was always basically guaranteed to work, and it's the least surprising thing ever that it did. You could've forecasted the general progression of the war quite accurately by reading what I had to say and disregarding 70% of the clowns here.

This is purely performative unless you think the IDF's strategy to rescue the hostages is to drown them. As they've admitted elsewhere, they're testing the effectiveness of flooding against tunnels with no hostages (ie. empty tunnels).

Also, to even get to the point where they were in a position to flood tunnels the IDF has sustained thousands of casualties. For comparison, that means the price to (not actually) defeat Hamas is already higher than the price to beat all of the Arab states in 1967. The bombs and water have had less to do with any progress made than the IDF discovering the Putinesque strategy of covering up losses. If they're willing to continue taking such losses for weeks if not months then they may well triumph over the strongest gang in Israel's prison but that isn't a sign of any great strategy on their part. It would seem I was right to predict a "difficult and grueling campaign" and you weren't so right about "very few casualties"

While I'm on the topic, I'll point out that this is what Israeli General Yitzhak Brick, one of the few to predict the Oct 7 disaster, had to say about the state of the IDF:

“We are witnessing an army whose culture of lying and deception is getting stronger and broader, and in the last two years the IDF has reached new heights [of corruption] we have never known, where some commanders are thinking about their next job and how to create an image of a high quality unit even if this is not the truth.

The result is very frustrating, severe and sad, the good ones leave the army. Some of those who remain in the IDF are the ones who follow suit, who are afraid to express their position and shy away, unfortunately this part is getting larger over time.

We have reached an unimaginable situation that reminds me of the conduct of the Arabs in past wars against us. The lies of the field ranks reporting to their superiors about success in the field while they failed in the battle against us, distorted the picture in the eyes of their commanders, and their decisions were made based on unreliable and distorted information, which worked perfectly in our favor. I did not believe that the Israeli army would reach the levels of lying as they were in the Arab armies which contributed greatly to their defeat against us. Have the tables turned?”

I recall the IDF claiming a little over a week ago that they'd have all of northern Gaza totally cleared within a week. A week later and they've made minimal progress in the north despite it being completely surrounded. In fact, Hamas was somehow able to launch rockets from northern Gaza in sufficient quantity to break through the Iron Dome and hit Tel Aviv. Is it a coincidence that the IDF suddenly decided to start kidnapping civilians for photo-ops just in time to cover up their failure?
And yes, it's since been confirmed that those were random civilians kidnapped by the IDF, not "mass surrendering Hamas fighters".

"Biden should potentially damn the world to save our enemies" is, shockingly, a political non-starter despite the screeching of the Judenhass mobs cosplaying 1933 Berlin in our cities. If Biden actually wants to boost his electoral prospects, he would send in the troops and start charging people with felony riot as a hate crime.

The country currently emulating 1938 Germany is the one shielded by Joe Biden

https://twitter.com/jeremyscahill/status/1734507744135127108

https://twitter.com/scotthortonshow/status/1734413286320304368

https://twitter.com/Yesh_Din/status/1734203968929083739

https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1733507003270803482

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

https://twitter.com/sosalam/status/1734913376755556550

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

snip

Appreciate the response, going through it section by section

IDF casualties (1-4, 9)

"Clash Report" isn't the actual source, that's just the twitter aggregator. The numbers originally came from Ynet, an Israeli news outlet, but the original article was pulled by the military censors

Fortunately an article that wasn't pulled by the censors came out at around the same time from Haaretz, and their estimates fall within the same range. The whole article is informative but some key points:

An examination conducted by Haaretz with the hospitals where the wounded soldiers have been and are treated shows a considerable and unexplained gap between the data reported by the military and that from the hospitals. The hospitals' data shows that the number of wounded soldiers to be twice as high as the army's numbers.
For example, Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon alone reports treating 1,949 soldiers hurt in the war since October 7 (out of 3,117 injured people treated there during the war), whereas the army reports a total of 1,593 wounded soldiers.

The gaps between the army's data and the hospitals' data also comes into sharp relief in light of Health Ministry statistics maintained on its website. This website displays general casualty data – civilians and soldiers alike. According to the Health Ministry's data, 10,548 soldiers and civilians who were wounded in the war have been admitted between October 7 and December 10.

Another obscure figure, not reported to the public, has to do with wounded security establishment personnel who do not belong to the military, and were wounded in the course of wartime duty. These personnel includes special reconnaissance fighters and members of SWAT units, the police, Border Police, Shin Bet and emergency and rescue units like Magen David Adom.

It's undeniable that the IDF is hiding casualties, the only question is how many and whether they're also hiding deaths.

Palestinian civilian casualties & Israeli military doctrine (5-6) & General Brick

Initially I would have agreed with you that the priority was protecting soldiers at any cost but there's mounting evidence that there's more to it than that.

So the Yitzhak Brick quote came from this article, specifically the summary at the very end. To be clear about the context, he was saying this over a year prior to the attacks and has since gained notoriety and fame in Israel for the accuracy of his predictions.

Gen Brick's proposed strategy was basically the exact plan you'd follow if your top priority was the lives of your citizens and soldiers above all else:

1. Negotiate an immediate "everyone for everyone" exchange right from the start. You can kidnap or assassinate ex-detainees later but this removes a huge political issue from the Israeli perspective
2. Move in and establish fortifications surrounding cities and towns, evacuate the civilians out and put them under siege. No need to engage in urban combat and take casualties or to storm prepared positions, just wait for Hamas to run out of supplies.

Yet instead the IDF is pushing into urban combat and evidently taking some pretty severe losses, which doesn't exactly match with the "every soldier's life matters" justification even if they might occasionally use that rhetoric as a shield. So what's the real explanation?

Well, the first is that the doctrine being imposed here is the Dahiya Doctrine, which justifies intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure and homes with the goal of provoking the civilians to rise up against the government. As "Mass assassination factory" puts it:

Compared to previous Israeli assaults on Gaza, the current war — which Israel has named “Operation Iron Swords,” and which began in the wake of the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on October 7 — has seen the army significantly expand its bombing of targets that are not distinctly military in nature. These include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks, which sources say the army defines as “power targets” (“matarot otzem”).

The bombing of power targets, according to intelligence sources who had first-hand experience with its application in Gaza in the past, is mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: to “create a shock” that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas,” as one source put it.

Several of the sources, who spoke to +972 and Local Call on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed.

Of course anyone familiar with the history of strategic bombing would know that this "strategy" has literally never worked once in history. If anything blowing up civilian infrastructure pushes them to support their regime to get revenge on the attackers. But whether it works or not isn't the point; the IDF hasn't won a ground war in decades and the excuse they've come up with is that it's because they just cared too much about collateral damage. The alternative would be to admit that the IDF just isn't very good at fighting. But blowing up apartment buildings and sewage plants is easy and comprehensive military reform is hard.

The other goal here is to satisfy the bloodlust of the Israeli public through the constant production of atrocity footage regardless of military value. I know this sounds like some crazy idea but once again, Haaretz has confirmed that the IDF is literally running a gore porn Telegram:

An October 11 post read: "Burning their mother ... You won't believe the video we got! You can hear the crunch of their bones. We'll upload it right away, get ready." Images of Palestinian captives and the bodies of terrorists were captioned "Exterminating the roaches ... exterminating the Hamas rats. ... Share this beauty." The following text accompanies a video of an Israeli soldier allegedly dipping machine gun bullets in pork fat: "What a man!!!!! Lubricates bullets with lard. You won't get your virgins." And: "Garbage juice!!!! Another dead terrorist!! You have to watch it with the sound, you'll die laughing."

The channel administrators didn't stop at images from Gaza. On October 11, hundreds of Israelis, including members of the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team's violently racist fan club La Familia, rioted at the Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv, following a rumor that Hamas terrorists who had invaded Israel were being treated there. People roamed the hospital, cursing out and spitting on medical professionals. Within an hour, a video of the riot was uploaded to 72 Virgins with the title, "My brothers, the heroesssss, La Familia fans, love you!!!!!!! What heroes, came to screw the Arabs."

The IDF was utterly humiliated on October 7th and up to this point they haven't achieved any major objectives: they haven't rescued the hostages (except dead ones), they haven't stopped Hamas from firing rockets or ambushing their forces and the top leaders of Hamas in Gaza seem to be fine despite the intense bombing campaign and ground invasion. So instead they've had to resort to PR stunts to raise the public's confidence, ranging from blowing up the Gazan parliament building and surrounding Sinwar's house to faking "mass surrenders". The clear priority isn't to protect the lives of soldiers and hostages but to project an image of victory regardless of the reality on the ground. The IDF is willing to do basically anything to project that image, even if it requires extreme collateral damage or explicit war crimes.

7.) I am not convinced about your line of "covering up Putinesque losses", since I suspect that many Israeli's are likely aware of the significant uptick on casualties (mostly WIA thus far), and are willing to accept that as a price.

Maybe, but the IDF clearly doesn't agree if they're hiding casualties instead of announcing them openly as they come out. Also if they're hiding the number of wounded then it's hardly out of the question that they're also hiding the number of fatalities.

8.) What might be a bit more damning is how many of these IDF casualties which have occurred within Gaza are from "friendly fire" incidents.

Weirdly enough this is one area where I don't think IDF incompetence is the cause.

On the one hand, Hamas used IDF uniforms on Oct 7 to launch surprise attacks and it stands to reason that they'll do the same thing on the defensive. Add in a few Hebrew speaking commandos and you have a recipe for some serious Operation Greif-style chaos in an already confusing urban combat environment. Additionally, Hamas seems to be replicating the tactics pioneered by Hezbollah in 2006: sudden, extremely close range urban ambushes where the IDF has to choose between hitting their own troops with their fire support or abandoning it entirely. As one Israeli commander put it,

“They emerged from tunnels, surrounding us, launching rocket-propelled grenades at us, and attempting to approach our armoured personnel carriers to set explosives,” said the battalion’s commander, Lt Col Tomer Greenberg, speaking to Israeli media after the engagement.

In that sort of situation it's very difficult to avoid friendly fire. There's also a less generous explanation: the Hannibal Directive, which authorizes the IDF to use deadly force against their own captives to prevent them from being used as bargaining chips. While the directive has been officially revoked there are growing indications that it has been applied more than once over the course of this war even if not by name. In the PR centric war being fought, it's hard to imagine an event more calamitous to the IDF's "image of victory" than a soldier sent to Gaza getting captured, and before any significant hostage rescue at that. In such a situation they'd rather obliterate the entire area with as much firepower as possible rather than allowing Hamas to drag fresh hostages into a tunnel to be put on camera.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

IDF killed three of their own hostages after they ran out for help and were mistaken as a threat. Casualty of just going around and shooting civilians as has been reported by Arab media outlets.

Or someone genuinely mistook them for a threat Palestinian civilians.

ftfy



Incompetent, murderous, cowardly, bloodthirsty savages. Yet Genocide Joe continues to send them weapons to pursue their campaign of ethnic cleansing despite the fact that he could end it tomorrow if he wasn't a worthless senile puppet.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

Pope denounces terrorist attacks on Catholics

https://twitter.com/CatholicSat/status/1736360497887187318

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Without changes of leadership on both sides, I think this conflict ultimately ends, sadly, with a mass expulsion of Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank.

Tbh this learned helplessness is a bit tiresome. The outside world *does* have the power to prevent Israel carrying out such a monstrous and utterly evil act, and should exercise it if necessary.

And yes, that may involve helping to force Netanyahu from power.

So we're for global military deployment in the Middle East and we're for regime change.

I remember a certain conflict, say 15 to 20 years ago. I'm sure everyone is arguing the exact same then as they are now and no one is being a hypocrite.

Except regime change in Iraq required a ground invasion and occupation, whereas "regime change" in Israel would simply require that the US not send them billions of dollars and provide them unlimited logistical support.

Israel would last somewhere between a week and a month without American backing. They'd run out of munitions and their planes would be grounded for lack of spare parts.  Then they'd go bankrupt from the economic pressure, and that's without South Africa style sanctions.

https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1735402780536475865

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

The latest reasonable and not at all genocidal statement from an Israeli official: lets turn Gaza into Auschwitz

https://twitter.com/Megatron_ron/status/1736454261276393886

So us overthrowing foreign governments is fine in your eyes, as long as not one soldier's foot hits the ground? Just clarifying for future and past reference.

In an ideal world I'd prefer America follow the Washington-Jefferson policy of non-intervention, which would mean zero money for Israel's war machine (or anyone else's, for that matter).

Short of that, if America is going to have an empire then it should at least exercise some control over the conduct of its vassals. Israel is currently bringing America an enormous amount of grief for minimal benefit besides lobbying money and subsidies to the Military Industrial Complex. Even putting aside morality, if your only goal is maintaining American hegemony then unconditionally supporting a campaign of vengeance against a civilian population is obviously only going to create problems. We're already starting to see this with the ongoing Red Sea crisis. Hell, even if your only priority is the benefit of Israel you would be doing them a favor by preventing them from totally destroying their reputation in a short sighted rage.

You've also not worked out the logistics of how that's going to occur when supporting Israel with aid enjoys massive majorities in both houses whether you like it or not. Be a realist, this is the world you live in. A clear majority of the two political parties that have power in American government at the very least quietly support what Israel is doing in Gaza.

Okay, the Israel Lobby owns Congress. We all know that, but so what?

Nixon told Golda Meir to not attack Cairo and she fell in line.
Reagan told Menachem Begin to stop his indiscriminate bombing of Lebanon and he fell in line.
HW Bush told Yitzhak Shamir to not retaliate when Saddam hit Israel with Scud missiles to avoid screwing up his anti-Saddam Arab coalition and he fell in line.

Ultimate authority here lies with the President and if he said Netanyahu can't continue his campaign with American support then that would be the end of that. That's how it works when normal countries are completely dependent on American support: they fold the instant that support is seriously threatened. Strange that even Republicans like Reagan and HW understood this but Biden apparently doesn't.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

Unfortunately pppolitics declined to do so, which would seem to indicate that pppolitics does in fact support Hamas' action in which they deliberately murdered civilians.

This does not necessarily mean that pppolitics "is wanting to mass murder Jews," in your words, because supporting mass murder does not necessarily mean that pppolitics would directly commit in murder him/herself. In other words, pppolitics appears to be a supporter of terrorism, but being a supporter is not necessarily the same thing as being an actual terrorist, though it certainly isn't good.

However, it does appear to imply that, as Chancellor Tanterterg said, pppolitics is "only in this to cheerlead the mass murder of (((Jews)))."

If any of this is wrong, I would encourage pppolitics to correct the record.

I can't speak for anyone else but my position is simple: Hamas are terrorists and the IDF are far worse than terrorists. They're currently engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against an imprisoned and dispossessed indigenous population and have committed countless atrocities that make October 7th look like a professional military operation with minimal collateral damage. If the international community and Israel's American handlers refuse to act then the only alternative to prevent the extermination of the Gazans is for the IDF to receive a military humiliation at the hands of Hamas and the dozen other local militias. That isn't "support for terrorism" any more than supporting the Soviets over the Nazis makes you a "supporter of Stalinism".

https://twitter.com/lo_lifer/status/1739060665111794050

https://twitter.com/emrane/status/1738924584366129181

https://twitter.com/VarrockianG/status/1739354408033337428

https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1739496938213441958

https://twitter.com/Timesofgaza/status/1738877182766633259

https://twitter.com/SanaSaeed/status/1739409445082587294

Calling people who have a problem with Israel's actions "self hating Jews" or "anti-semites" only serves to destroy the meaning of these terms. Every time you call a regular Jewish person who has a problem with ethnic cleansing an "anti-semite" you move the average person's perception of "anti-semite" from Hitler to people with a functioning moral compass. Israelis have a long history of using the entire diaspora as a human shield against criticism but they're going to bring enormous problems to us all if they're allowed to pretend that their fascist colonial state and all Jewish people are inseparable.

Hamas is not winning the war, and any claims to the contrary are silly.

That doesn't mean Israel can't also lose in the longer run.

I would have said the same a month ago but increasingly it does look like the IDF is unironically losing in Gaza somehow.

The Golani Brigade, generally agreed to be the best stormtroopers in the entire IDF, was forced to retreat from Gaza entirely after sustaining catastrophic casualties.  Israeli forces are still taking daily casualties from sectors they've claimed to have "secured" weeks ago like Jabalia, Shujaiya, Beit Hanoun and even the town of Juhor ad-Dik right next to the border fence. So either they were lying from the start about the extent of their gains to create an illusion of victory or they're actually getting pushed back forcibly by Hamas. Even the Israeli media, which to this point has been about as critical of the IDF as the German media was of the Wehrmacht in Stalingrad, has started to raise doubts as the timeline for "victory" projected by Israeli commanders has stretched out from "weeks" to "months if not years". It increasingly seems like Hamas followed the strategy of Sun Tzu in creating an appearance of weakness to lure Israeli forces deep into urban areas where they could be more easily ambushed and destroyed in detail.

Anyway, Hamas (and all the other resistance groups like the PFLP, DFLP, PIJ, etc) is a guerrilla force and guerrillas win when they aren't destroyed. Every indication seems to be that Hamas is nowhere near their breaking point and if they aren't destroyed then they're going to be the preeminent political force of the Palestinians as soon as the fighting winds down thanks to Israel's savage campaign of vengeance against a civilian population. The IDF lost on the defense, they lost the PR war and they're on track to lose on the offense too. Game, set, match.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

Israel's government is indiscriminately killing Palestinians.

If you want to have a real fact-based discussion about what actual indiscriminate killing of civilians looks like, then you should look to some historical examples of civilian casualties in war for comparison. Knowledge of history can help you to better contextualize and understand the true nature of what is actually occurring in Gaza today (hint - it's not what you suggest).

I will look at 4 examples:

1) The 2nd Battle of Fallujah (7 November – 23 December 2004; 1 month, 2 weeks and 2 days)
2) The Battle of Huế (31 January – 2 March 1968; 1 month and 2 days)
3) The Battle of Berlin (16 April – 2 May 1945; 2 weeks and 2 days)
4) The Battle of Nanking (1937) AKA the Rape of Nanking

Two counterpoints:

1. Palestinian deaths were around 20k several weeks ago. At this point we're approaching 40k, and that's not counting casualties that were buried under rubble, crushed by IDF bulldozers, or abducted from Israeli occupied territory, summarily executed and then tossed in an unmarked mass grave. Comparing Gaza to Fallujah at this point is a weak comparison because the battle is nowhere near finished and the bodies have yet to be counted. The Israelis haven't even seriously started in Rafah or other major towns in the south and fighting is still intense and ongoing almost everywhere else. I'd be shocked if the final Gazan civilian death toll doesn't exceed 100k at a minimum, and that's if the Isrealis agree to a total ceasefire and unrestricted access to humanitarian aid within a month. By the time the casualties reach a level you'd consider "genocidal" it will be far too late to do anything about it. Considering the atrocities already committed it's hard to imagine that the Israelis would be any more restrained against the overwhelming majority of Gazans currently living under areas of Hamas control than they'd been against the small minority they've managed to capture so far

https://twitter.com/hzomlot/status/1738550422829170830

https://twitter.com/kisusuli/status/1739622177094127846

https://twitter.com/jaffoneh/status/1739425222913360293

https://twitter.com/RamAbdu/status/1739389532829589583

https://twitter.com/davenewworld_2/status/1737971522378084517

2. Israel, unlike past genocide perpetrators like Nazi Germany, is incapable of maintaining its military capabilities alone. The extreme dependency of the IDF (and the Israeli economy more broadly) on foreign aid means that they can't just drop a bunker buster on every hospital and call it a day; they have to maintain at least a thin pretense of plausible deniability to continue their campaign. So instead they've copied the Nazi strategy used against the Slavs and other so-called "Untermensch" during Generalplan Ost: intentional deprivation of food and water plus targeting of medical facilities with the goal of promoting the spread of famine and pestilence. Generalplan Ost led to the deaths of a "mere" 15 million people, or just over 5% of the Soviet population, less than that if you consider that GPOst included non-Soviet populations like the Poles. The Turks did something similar during the Armenian Genocide, though unlike the Nazis they weren't restrained by the strength of the Red Army or time and thus were able to use these methods (plus the Death March) to greater effect. Starvation is historically the most reliable method to kill a huge number of people but it takes some time to take effect. It took years for the Nigerians to starve out the Biafrans. If the Israeli campaign and blockade is allowed to continue we will see deaths from disease and malnutrition rapidly shoot up in the coming months in a way that will dwarf any modern battle, perhaps even surpassing the bloody battles of the Second World War.

This isn't some fringe conspiracy theory, Israeli military and political leadership have explicitly stated their desire to use disease and starvation as a weapon against the civilian population of Gaza. Part of why it's so easy to call this a genocide is because typically the perpetrators of genocide in the past weren't nearly as open about their intent:

https://twitter.com/WarMonitors/status/1734554772793868384

Netanyahu has long since surpassed the bloodthirsty rhetoric of Milošević. If he (and the rest of the Israeli government and general staff, since this talk isn't restricted to just Netanyahu) was put in front of an international tribunal it would be the easiest conviction in the world.

But putting aside the question of genocide and looking at it from a purely military perspective there's one battle that most exemplifies the IDF "strategy" here: the 1st Battle of Grozny fought on New Years Eve, 1995. The similarities are striking:

* Opening with the use of overwhelming, indiscriminate firepower against mostly civilian targets ("Shock and Awe") for minimal military benefit
* Sending tanks into deep urban combat with minimal support
* Inability of the attacking force to hold positions against guerrillas using tunnels to quickly retake "secured" positions
* Leadership more concerned with projecting an image of victory to the domestic population and politicians than actually achieving military objectives
* A final civilian casualty rate of around 6%
* A Pyrrhic nominal military victory followed by decisive strategic and political defeat

1st Grozny may not have been genocidal but just about everyone agreed that it was the prime example of a military campaign which indiscriminately killed civilians, a veritable model of "Russian brutality" that every urban battle in Ukraine has since been compared to. And even then you didn't have Yeltsin talking about turning Chechnya into a parking lot or comparing Chechens to ancient tribes that were exterminated down to the last child. At best the Israelis are committing crimes comparable to if not surpassing Grozny as the result of shortsighted bloodthirst and their rhetoric is simply bluster instead of evidence of a conscious attempt to exterminate the Gazans. At worst they're intentionally making Gaza unlivable with the goal of ethnically cleansing the entire strip and are only being held back by their inability to actually conquer the territory where most of the Gazans are, much like how the Nazis were never able to fully implement Generalplan Ost thanks to their defeat at the hands of the Red Army. If the Israeli campaign is allowed to continue for months at this pace then the civilian deathtoll might actually exceed both.

Also this is a side point largely irrelevant to my overall argument but I feel like it's worth disputing,

Yes, Hamas sought to kill (or kidnap and use as hostages) every Israeli that they could manage to kill (or kidnap and use as hostages). When they went into Kibbutzes and when they paraglided into the desert rave, they made their best effort to ensure that there were no survivors. That is what it means to indiscriminately kill - you kill everyone that you can, not caring who is who at all, and you seek to leave no survivors. In other words, the idea is to "shoot anything that moves."

Did they, though? The official Israeli Oct 7 death count is ~400 "legitimate military targets" (IDF, police, etc) and ~700 civilians. When you consider that

* Israeli military positions are located in civilian kibbutzim
* One of the first locations where Hamas forces made contact with Israelis was at a rave with thousands of civilians present and few to no soldiers (reports vary)
* Armed but non-uniformed reservists attacked Al-Qassam fighters, often from civilian homes and civilian vehicles
* Israeli forces have been documented on video engaging in combat while using civilian vehicles with civilians still inside as cover
* Many of the casualties ascribed to Hamas, including one of the literal posterchildren of "Hamas brutality", have since been revealed to have actually died from the IDF indiscriminately firing into cars and houses with Hellfire Missiles and tank shells

https://twitter.com/davidsheen/status/1740073099163574569

it doesn't seem like Hamas was just shooting anything that moved. There were certainly atrocities and acts of terror but if the primary goal was to kill as many Israelis as possible then the civilian death toll would have been in the thousands instead of the hundreds. Plus if they had prioritized civilian targets instead of military bases then IDF casualties would be fewer too.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

To Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P! - First of all, thank you for making an actual good faith substantive response. Though I will disagree with some of what you say, you are discussing in a reasoned manner with reference to facts and the like, and this is exactly how reasonable people can eventually get closer to the truth.

I hope pppolitics will take your post as an example to learn from and perhaps improve the substance of his or her arguments in the future.

Likewise. Go easy on pppolitics, his heart is in the right place and these are trying times. It takes enough effort for me to keep a level head about this stuff

I am sure you are correct that civilian casualties will increase the longer things go, and whatever is the true number of civilian casualties now will be higher than it is now (whether that means it is higher than the Hamas' claimed number, is another question). Regardless, there is no way to know for sure other than to wait and see.

However, this fact is precisely the reason why I discussed the amount of time that the Battles of Fallujah, Hue, Berlin, and Nanjing lasted. Other things being equal, the longer a battle lasts in an urban area, the higher casualties will be, so if you want to have some sort of objective evaluation of whether civilian casualties are higher or lower than what would be "normal" for a military operation in an urban area, you must take into account the length of time it lasted. Hypothetically, if 1% of the civilian population is killed in 1 month of fighting, you would expect that if fighting goes on another month, probably around another 1% will be killed. Of course, this is not exactly linear and there will always be some variation, but more or less that is the sort of thing you would expect.

My overall point was that we can't make a definitive comparison of casualties until the battle is over, and the battle isn't over. The numbers from the Gazan Health Ministry (what you call "Hamas' numbers") are almost certainly undercounting because they've historically used the hospitals to keep track and the Israelis have consciously made things extremely difficult for the hospitals with targeted strikes, the abduction of key personnel, the assassination of journalists and their families, double tap attacks on ambulances, etc. The death count could be over 100k and we'd have no way of knowing until well after the battle was finished.

So, for example, what if the Germans had not (mostly) mass surrendered after Hitler shot himself in the Battle of Berlin, and instead had continued to fight and the battle lasted for twice as long? If so, rather than ~6.25% of the civilian population being killed, we would probably expect around 12.5% to have been killed. Or maybe 10%. or 14%. But the point is, something higher in general rough proportion to the length of time. And of course, when civilian casualties become high enough, eventually in the extreme case civilian casualties go down because you run out of civilians - this is all inexact and not linear and depends on what exactly people do. This should all be very obvious.

The important point though, is to ask yourself the question - if the Battle for Berlin had lasted twice as long, and as a result twice as many civilians had been killed, would we say that the Soviet behavior was somehow "worse"? No, not really. Similarly, if the battle in Gaza lasts longer because Hamas decides to keep fighting rather than surrender, Israel is not really worse than if hypothetically fighting were to stop now, even though civilian casualties would be lower if it stops now...

So the same 6% figure you reference was over 5 weeks of fighting.

Now consider that the Israeli ground invasion has been going on for a bit more than 2 months (began ~Oct 27) and in addition, before then, extensive bombing was occurring.

So even if we do not count the bombing period prior to the ground invasion, "Battle of Gaza" has lasted, so far, 8/5ths as long as the 1st Battle of Grozny.

A few key differences:

1. The Russian army intentionally moved as quickly as possible in both Grozny and Berlin, whereas the Israelis have intentionally moved slowly both to reduce their own casualties and to allow their "hunger plan" to kick in. Intentionaly stretching out the length of a campaign in a way that consciously increases the proportion of civilian casualties reflects on the attackers rather than the defenders. For example, the Nigerian government consciously blockaded and starved the Biafran population to death in numbers that wouldn't have been possible through regular combat. The Nigerian army didn't use this strategy because it was somehow more humanitarian but because they were militarily incapable of decisively triumphing over the Biafrans in direct combat. If anything the use of starvation as a weapon of war to drag things out is worse than moving quickly, not better. The Siege of Leningrad is another example where your prioritization of time over the total number of casualties would falsely portray the Germans as more merciful than they were, particularly if you only counted the first few months when starvation had only begun to set in.

2. It isn't a battle, it's a campaign. The Gaza Strip isn't one big city, it's several towns and cities separated by farmland and the fight for each of these towns and cities is separate. Unfortunately we don't know how many casualties there are in each individual area but it would be more representative to look at the figures for the places that are actually currently engaged in combat (eg. Gaza City, Beit Hanoun) rather than counting the whole strip as a single battle when large parts have yet to be engaged.

If what you say is/were accurate, it will be reflected in the civilian death counts. However, I don't think it is. For one thing there clearly does not appear to be mass starvation occurring in Gaza or anything of the sort. We know what that looks like, and if it were happening you would be posting lots of pictures like this - https ://negativecolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/image051a.jpg

I am deliberately not embedding or linking that picture, it is a picture of starving Somalian children in 1992. Readers can view or not at your discretion. But the point is, if this were happening you would be posting lots and lots of this.

https://twitter.com/GregCasar/status/1738321676499063077

So actually, international observers rate the current level of "acute food insecurity" in Gaza higher than any previously recorded famine, including Somalia. And this isn't some unintended consequence of the fighting, starving out the Gazans and spreading disease is the consciously stated goal of Israeli leadership

https://twitter.com/RedKlutz/status/1726452866498609164

Secondly regarding the Soviet civilian casualties your numbers are wrong and misleading. You say "15 million people, or just over 5% of the Soviet population." Although I am sure I could find higher (or lower) estimates, what I will bother to dispute is not the 15 million, but your claim that this is 5% of the Soviet population. The Soviet population in 1941 was ~ 196,716,000 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Soviet_Union).

15,000,000/196,716,000 = 7.6%, which is already 50% higher than your 5% figure.

However, from here:

https://conference.iza.org/conference_files/transatlantic_2016/peter_k200.pdf

Almost 85 million people or 44.5 percent of pre‐war population of USSR lived in the territories that were occupied during WWII (Goskomstat, 2015).

It only really makes sense to calculate the death rate for the portion of the Soviet population which was actually under German occupation in the denominator, not the total population. So:

(15,000,000/196,716,000)/0.445 = ~17.1%


As a percentage of the population under occupation, going with your own 15 million figure, about ~17.1% of the civilian population died. So you are understating by at least 3x or so just how bad the German conduct in the Soviet Union was.

I will grant that my rough estimation should have been "5-10%", not "just over 5%". Though the 15 million included ~4 million Polish Jews who I wouldn't necessarily count for various reasons (not Soviets, not victims of the "Hunger Plan" but direct extermination)

Otherwise, part of my point is that most of the Gazan population also isn't under Israeli ground occupation either, they've largely evacuated to sections still under Hamas control. The apples to apples comparison is to look at the entire population, not just the part that was occupied. Unless you have numbers that only look at the casualty rate for Palestinians under Israeli control, which to my knowledge don't actually exist at this point.

But I'll keep that 17% as reference for later. Also

In addition, you could make a fairly reasonable argument to count some of the many millions of military deaths in the Red Army as being civilian or "semi-civilian"/"quasi-civilian" in the sense that many of the millions who died in the Red Army were forcibly mobilized civilians (and partisans etc which were combatants but also sort of civilians). Whereas with Hamas, as far as I am aware there is not mass mobilization of civilians into fighters per se, so pretty much everyone who is fighting for Hamas is someone who wants to be fighting.

I would say that POWs intentionally starved to death count but combat fatalities don't. But even if we count every Soviet death in WW2 regardless of cause the percentage would only be as high as ~15% (again, I'll get back to this).

So as far as the numbers go, you are dramatically understating the German occupation of the Soviet Union. Also there is nothing in the IDF even remotely comparable to Einsatzgruppen, Babi Yar, etc. If you think there is, you should say - specifically - what you think it is.

There are no specific Einsatzgruppen units but judging by their execution of 3 naked, white flag waving, Hebrew speaking hostages (plus testimony from ex-IDF whistleblowers) they're basically shooting anything that moves in "hot combat zones" regardless of whether they're civilians or if they're surrendering. That may have been the standard at Stalingrad but it's well out of the ROE of basically any modern army, even the Russian army. There have also been multiple reports from international agencies of the summary execution of prisoners and civilians in occupied areas though obviously the IDF isn't letting anyone in to verify. There's also plenty of testimony that they've intentionally starved and tortured prisoners before forcing them on death marches, a classic method of death by attrition used against Soviet prisoners.

Anyway, if I could be as specific as possible with the "apples to apples" comparison I'd ideally exclude

* Deaths by death camp (while this may be a Genocide it certainly isn't a Holocaust)
* Deaths of soldiers in combat
* Deaths of non-Soviet citizens
* Deaths caused directly by Soviet authorities (GULAG prisoners, NKVD victims, etc)

while including

* Deaths by starvation and deprivation, including POWs and sieges like Leningrad
* Deaths by indiscriminate "anti-partisan operations"

and putting a question mark over "deaths by Einsatzgruppen/mass execution", we'll see how many atrocities are uncovered in the coming months and years.

Obviously there are other categories I'm missing and I don't have the time to break it down so I'll have to settle for the less precise measures already given.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Grozny_(1994%E2%80%931995)#Casualties

From here (I know that linking to wikipedia will upset politics, but I shall do so anyway):

As of the civilian casualties, Sergei Kovalev, the Russian Duma's commissioner for human rights, and Russian President Boris Yeltsin's aide on human rights, who had been in Grozny during part of the fighting, estimated 27,000 people, many of them ethnic Russians, died in five weeks of fighting, about 6% of the population.[30][31] According to the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University:

sources estimate that a large percentage of civilian fatalities [during the First Chechen War] occurred during the invasion of Grozny between December 1994 and March 1995. From the beginning of the invasion to the middle of February, fatality estimates range from 25,000 to 30,000 civilian deaths. This range indicates that the majority of the civilian fatalities in the entire war occurred during a mere four-month window. Of the estimated 25,000 killed in the invasion of Grozny, it is estimated that 18,000 were killed by mid-January. According to General Dudayev, the first president of the Chechen Republic, 85 percent of civilians killed in the invasion (approximately 25,500) were ethnic Russians due to the fact that the Chechens were the first to evacuate the capital; this estimate is close to the figure put forward by Russian human rights campaigner Sergei Kovalyov, who estimated the number of ethnic Russian deaths at 24,000.[32]

So the same 6% figure you reference was over 5 weeks of fighting.

Now consider that the Israeli ground invasion has been going on for a bit more than 2 months (began ~Oct 27) and in addition, before then, extensive bombing was occurring.

So even if we do not count the bombing period prior to the ground invasion, "Battle of Gaza" has lasted, so far, 8/5ths as long as the 1st Battle of Grozny.

Using the Hamas estimates of 20k+ deaths and generously rounding that up to 30k, I previously calculated that this was ~1.3% of the population of Gaza.

Right, this is Grozny but slower. Naturally, since the Russian Army was much larger than the IDF and the Chechens had far fewer fighters and preparations than Hamas. I disagree that killing more people at a slower pace (at least initially) is somehow more moral than killing the same number quickly. Particularly when you're intentionally using starvation and disease as a weapon, one aspect that distinguishes this campaign from Grozny.

Another thing: the rate of deaths is not going to be uniform because

* the rate will increase as the IDF pushes further into the strip and a greater proportion of the civilian population falls into combat zones
* the proportion of deaths reported by the Gazan Health Ministry will fall as hospitals become battlegrounds or inoperative
* deaths by starvation always start slow and then rise rapidly. At Leningrad many people died after the end of the siege thanks to malnutrition

Going back to the previously referenced point on starvation, an estimated 380,000 Gazans are currently facing IPC Stage 5 Catastrophic food insecurity ie. they're starving to death. If the Israeli campaign continues at the current pace for months without any ceasefire or "humanitarian pause" to allow sufficient food to enter then it's safe to say that all of these people (if not more) will ultimately die of starvation. That would constitute around 16.5% of the Gazan population, which would put the death toll above the "total Soviet death" proportion of ~15% and just under the "occupied Soviet death proportion" of 17%. So it really isn't such a crazy comparison for the higher end of casualties by the end of the conflict even if it's inherently imperfect. At the low end Grozny's 6% would translate to around 120,000 deaths, a number I'd expect to be close to the final tally if the Israelis give up and agree to a ceasefire within the next month.

So there's my range of likely fatalities, we'll only know whose estimate is correct once the fighting is long finished and international observers have had a chance to go through the area.

OK, fair enough point. I have not tried to research the details and I do not know for 100% sure all the details of what happened and how exactly Hamas acted beyond what I saw from the real time news coverage. I am not going to spend time trying to research it further now to determine to what extent "shoot anything that moves" is an accurate description (clearly it is not 100% accurate, because if it were, there would be no hostages).

My general impression though is that Hamas was trying their best to kill or capture anyone they could manage to, but that is just a general impression. But it is possible there could be things I don't know from the real time news reports and perhaps there were cases where Hamas willingly refrained from killing civilians or something despite having the ability to do so. Maybe in a year or 2 or 5 when it is well documented history I will read a book on it, and can re-evaluate then.

Agreed. We'll only know for sure long after the fact.

Last point - I do agree with you that there is a lot to criticize in Israeli rhetoric from various different people and groups. There are a substantial number of Israelis who would frankly probably like to nuke Gaza, and have said so. Of course, the same is true of substantial parts of the US population (and even politicians etc) wanting to nuke the middle east after 9/11. I agree that it is well and good to be critical of that.

However, I would consider that separately from the actual conduct of the IDF. Simply because some (or quite a substantial number) Israelis do support genocide or ethnic cleansing does not mean that the IDF is actually committing genocide or ethnic cleansing any more than the fact that many Americans after 9/11 at least rhetorically supported nuking Mecca mean that the US military actually did nuke Mecca.

Sure, but there's a gigantic difference between random Israelis and the very top levels of military and political leadership up to and including the top generals, the President and the Prime Minister. It's one thing if Random Texan or even Random Texan Congressman talks about nuking Mecca, it's entirely different if the President or members of the Joint Chiefs talk that way. Even worse would be if that wasn't just "empty threats" and the President and Joint Chiefs talked about starving Iraq to death to punish the civilian population and then proceed to do exactly that. The real factor distinguishing genocide from mass slaughter is intent and the Israeli leadership have used more genocidal rhetoric demonstrating intent than all but the most blatant genocidaires of the past century.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

The JSIL terrorists were literally hoist by their own petard

https://twitter.com/Sprinter99800/status/1749808457686147200

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

Israel fought multiple wars before American aid and won them fairly easily. Today its economy relative to that of its opponents is much larger.

Yeah, back in 1967. Lately the record hasn't been so great; a pyrrhic victory in Lebanon 1982, a clear defeat followed by a full retreat from South Lebanon against Hezbollah in 2000 and then another defeat to Hezbollah in 2006. Israel's economy has grown but the quality of its military has degraded.

No; recent history disproves you. There was no intifada from 1967-1988, and there hasn't been an insurgency in the West Bank from 2005 to the present. Palestinian rebellions have been easy to suppress (check out how one such suppression is going right now). Religion is no substitute for courage.

When the militarily inept PLO was in charge there was no intifada. Then the Israelis had the brilliant idea to invade Lebanon to destroy the PLO and they basically succeeded. The vacuum was filled by Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, organizations specialized in violence and fighting the IDF. This led to two intifadas, each more deadly for Israelis than the last. The suppression of the current one increasingly resembles the campaigns in South Lebanon that failed to defeat Hezbollah and even Gadi Eisenkot is calling for a ceasefire on unfavourable terms.

The real lesson here isn't "Palestinian rebellions are easy to suppress" but that Israel's shortsighted use of indiscriminate violence has created its very worst enemies where previously none existed, kind of like how anti-bacterial soap creates superbugs. The Lebanese Shia of southern Lebanon had no grudge against the Israelis but the indignities of Israeli occupation created Hezbollah, the most successful enemy they've ever faced. They're well on track to do the exact same thing in Palestine with Hamas, who went from having a single rusty gun to inflicting more casualties on Israel than they suffered during the entire Six Day War.

If Israel made basic concessions to the PA, cracked down on settlers and made it clear that collaboration was profitable then Hamas would rapidly lose cache among Palestinians. It's not like they're popular for their wise and efficient governance of Gaza. Instead Israel repeatedly humiliates the PA, lets the settlers do whatever they want, regularly sends troops into zones supposedly governed by the PA and just generally makes them look useless and pathetic.

The only reason these organizations have any power and influence is precisely because Israel always chooses violence. It's weird that you keep bringing up the aftermath of WW2 because there's one thing that happened after WW2 that never happened after any of the intifadas: Germany and Japan were flooded with money, living standards drastically increased and soon after they were given full (well, as full as anyone else in the Warsaw Pact in the case of the DDR) self government. They weren't just stomped into the dirt over and over again.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

You guys need to decide.  Either (A) Hamas is the duly-elected authentic representative government of Gaza and can, as a state actor, declare war on the State of Israel on behalf of the Palestinians of Gaza, or (B) Hamas is a group of terrorist thugs who hold the weak, pitiable, helpless Palestinians of Gaza captive against their will, and thus the Palestinians are not responsible in any way whatsoever for the actions of their elected government.

I'd distinguish between state and government. Hamas governs Gaza in the sense that they appoint the officials who perform local government functions but they aren't a state because they don't have a monopoly on violence: they don't control the air, they don't control the sea, they don't control the borders and their 'control' of the ground is contingent on the tacit agreement of a dozen other armed militias.

The only state in Gaza is the State of Israel, which claims the unrestricted right to raid, kidnap, rob from, dispossess, torture or kill any Palestinian regardless of what Hamas or the PA have to say. Strange that you hold Palestinians responsible for every crime committed by the group that narrowly won an election during the Bush era but you don't hold that same standard for Israelis or Americans who actually get to vote in regular elections. If Palestinians deserve to be bombed and starved to death for the crimes of Hamas then what should happen to Americans for the crimes of Bush or Israelis for the crimes of Netanyahu?

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

If Palestinians deserve to be bombed and starved to death for the crimes of Hamas then what should happen to Americans for the crimes of Bush or Israelis for the crimes of Netanyahu?

It seems Hamas are already applying that logic - and it's not working out for them because Israel can kill far more effectively than they can.

Hamas was under no delusion that they could match the firepower of the IDF. Their short run objectives were to kidnap a bunch of soldiers to later exchange for high value prisoners, to provoke a disproportionate backlash that would destroy Israel's diplomatic position and to come out of said backlash still in control of Gaza. As things stand even the Israeli hardliners are beginning to recognize that resettlement is unrealistic and that the best they can get is a (still illegal under international law) "buffer zone" within Gaza. While they won't admit it publicly, even they can see that Hamas will still control Gaza when the fighting stops, and that's all they need to do after Netanyahu's bluster.

If Palestinians deserve to be bombed and starved to death for the crimes of Hamas then what should happen to Americans for the crimes of Bush or Israelis for the crimes of Netanyahu?

It seems Hamas are already applying that logic - and it's not working out for them because Israel can kill far more effectively than they can.

After George W. Bush declared war on Iraq on behalf of America, I think if Saddam Hussein had had the capability to strike military targets on American soil he would have been perfectly entitled to do so.  Like if he had bombed JBLM I wouldn't be crying about how those poor soldiers and the civilian contractors who work on base, and the civilians who work at the Taco Bell off-post who got blown up as collateral damage, none of them deserve this because they didn't vote for Bush.

Look Mac, you know as well as I do that nobody here is complaining that Israel is hitting legitimate military targets. The analogy isn't "Saddam hitting military bases", it's

* Saddam hitting civilian infrastructure, including sewage and electricity
* Saddam blowing up entire apartment blocks because an off duty reservist lives there
* Saddam blowing up entire apartment blocks because they're "power targets" and could demoralize Americans into surrendering
* Saddam blowing up banks and businesses because they once dealt with the US Federal Government
* Saddam imposing a total blockade on America, preventing the entry of food, water and fuel
* Saddam forcibly abducting American civilians to be tortured at mass detention facilities
* Saddam systematically targeting for assassination university professors, doctors, surgeons, journalists and other "high value" civilians
* Saddam's soldiers plundering American homes, posting it to TikTok and proudly announcing that there are no uninvolved civilians in America

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

Undercover Israeli troops dressed as medical staff kill three militants in West Bank hospital raid, officials say

Israeli special forces, dressed as civilians and medical staff, infiltrated the Ibn Sina hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin on Tuesday and killed three Palestinian men, according to Israeli and Palestinian officials.

Hamas said the men were Jenin Brigades fighters, an umbrella group of armed Palestinian factions in the West Bank city. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they were terrorists linked to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and an Israeli government minister praised the operation.

The disguised special forces “infiltrated the hospital individually, headed to the third floor, and assassinated the young men,” Palestinian state news agency WAFA reported, citing sources from inside the hospital.

The IDF said it targeted Hamas fighter Mohammed Jalamneh who “had recently been involved in promoting significant terrorist activity and was hiding in the Ibn Sina Hospital in Jenin.”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/30/middleeast/israel-undercover-raid-jenin-west-bank-hamas-intl/index.html

The Islamist left is complaining about this. When Israel was bombing Gaza, they cried that Israel should only be using targeted assassinations so there wouldn’t be civilian casualties. But now targeted assassinations are a war crime too.

https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1752326543001424125?s=46&t=o2RmfeV6yY...

Targeted assassinations? Not (necessarily) a war crime.

But attacking hospitals is a war crime, killing wounded combatants in the hospital is a war crime (supposedly one of the "terrorists" was literally in a coma) and armed soldiers disguising themselves as doctors and patients is perfidy which is - you guessed it - a war crime.

Israel is literally on war crime spree. Speaking of, the mother of one of the hostages killed during the Gaza campaign has accused the IDF of yet another war crime: using chemical weapons to kill the hostages

https://twitter.com/incontextmedia/status/1748149011251331146

Strange how the American media refuses to even touch stories like this when even the Israeli media has started to give them air.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

No, it is not when those hospitals are used for military purposes; I have already provided the citation and can go hunt it down again if you like. If this war were being carried out in a just and reasonable way, then on the first day all 192 countries on Earth would've collaborated to level every hospital in Gaza (which I believe I was calling for in the first week; I can go find the quote if you like).

Weird deflection because the hospital wasn't being used for military purposes, it was being used as a hospital. Again, one of the "terrorists" was there because he was in a literal coma.

You have the moral code of Atilla the Hun and I don't particularly care whether or not Atilla the Hun thinks the IDF is committing war crimes. The relevant standard is the one laid out by the Geneva Convention and by that standard the IDF has crossed the line a thousand times over. Hell, even by the standards of Just War laid out by Aquinas in the Middle Ages the IDF's conduct would be found severely wanting.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

No, it is not when those hospitals are used for military purposes; I have already provided the citation and can go hunt it down again if you like. If this war were being carried out in a just and reasonable way, then on the first day all 192 countries on Earth would've collaborated to level every hospital in Gaza (which I believe I was calling for in the first week; I can go find the quote if you like).

Weird deflection because the hospital wasn't being used for military purposes, it was being used as a hospital. Again, one of the "terrorists" was there because he was in a literal coma.

You have the moral code of Atilla the Hun and I don't particularly care whether or not Atilla the Hun thinks the IDF is committing war crimes. The relevant standard is the one laid out by the Geneva Convention and by that standard the IDF has crossed the line a thousand times over.

By the standard of the Geneva Conventions Israel has been absurdly careful. As I have mentioned before the Geneva Conventions not merely permit but basically flat-out endorse the destruction of hospitals used for military purposes by an enemy; I have never once advocated for Israel to take an action forbidden by them, because so long as you have intelligence that they are used for military purposes -- this was published by the absurdly pro-Palestinian press in 2014 and has been known for much longer -- then of course you are permitted to destroy them. The scandal here, as I've said before, is that other countries did not join Israel in destroying Gaza, when it is so clearly in the entire world's interests for that to happen.

I remain the only poster in this thread citing actual passages of the actual Geneva Conventions, and the reason for that is that merely skimming them reveals that they are not intended to punish far more intense offensives than the one Israel has actually conducted.

My brother in Christ treating the wounded is not a 'military purpose' sufficient to justify an attack on a hospital. The slain "terrorists" were not plotting terrorism in a hidden safehouse, they were asleep (or in a coma) in their hospital beds after having been wounded. That is, hors de combat, the textbook example of an illegitimate target even if the attackers weren't committing perfidy in the process. The facts of the situation have nothing to do with the pretend scenario you've created in your addled mind to justify your bloodthirsty mentality.

The cited xitter thread uses a Potemkin Village of "humanitarian measures" to fool simpletons. Yeah, they warn people to evacuate areas they plan to attack, then they gun down those very same people waving white flags during the evacuation and bomb them once they arrive at the "safe zone". They use their vaunted "precision munitions" to assassinate journalists and professors. They openly brag about their intent to collectively punish the Gazan population by destroying their essential infrastructure and then starving them to death until they're ethnically cleansed. The only way one could find this convincing is if they've already drank the Kool Aid or they're suffering from severe brain trauma.

Are you going to try to justify the IDF gassing the hostages too or would that be a bridge too far?

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

@Vosem

How do you feel about President Biden's recent executive order to sanction Israeli settlers?

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/01/biden-executive-order-israel-palestine-00139023#:~:text=President%20Joe%20Biden%20is%20expected,official%20and%20a%20congressional%20aide.

And how do you feel about the state department considering to recognize a Palestinian state and linking Palestinian statehood to any Israel-Saudi deal

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/31/palestine-statehood-biden-israel-gaza-war

You're never gonna convince him to agree with even the most minor anti-Israel policy. He'll write an essay-long soliloquy where he'll play PC and waddle, but in the end it always ends with the maximalist pro-Israel position (destruction of "Palestinian liberationism" aka destruction of any sort of "Palestine"). Even ignoring Gaza, he supports the ongoing policies in the West Bank of Palestinians receiving no equal rights. It's almost impossible to change someone with these type of views.

I like that you admit that you won't convince me of things, but the conversation here should continue anyway, until I convince you to destroy the Palestinian liberationism within you. Total destruction means infrastructure too, but it also means destroying those ideas in every human heart, mind, and soul.

That is an impossible idea unless your goal is the death of every Palestinian on the planet. Then again, you support that.

...why? Every other nationalist movement has accepted that conquest is wrong. Nobody thinks that convincing Russians to leave Ukraine can only be done by killing every Russian. Similarly Nazism died without killing every German. What, in your estimation, makes the Palestinians so uniquely evil that they cannot be convinced to abandon Palestinian liberationism?

Except the Zionists in 1948 and then again in 1967 when they claimed the unique (at least since WW2) right to seize, occupy and colonize territory taken by conquest. If stopping Hamas from winning would justify killing 2.3 million Palestinians then would stopping Zionist militias in 1948 or the IDF in 1967 from seizing territory justify killing every single Israeli Jew too?

What terrible precedent would be set by a Hamas victory that hasn't already been set by a full century of victories for other irregular guerrillas like the IRA or the Viet Cong?

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

But the Zionists did not appear as a conquering army; they immigrated, mostly in cooperation with government policy. (This is why I compare the response of the Palestinians at that time to the Know-Nothings). They declared independence and received international recognition much as other colonies did; everywhere else colonial-era borders have been respected, which means the British Mandate.

They used terrorism to force the British out, committed atrocities against communities that they had previously promised peaceful coexistence, then forcibly deported enough Palestinians to secure a demographic majority in a new state that included territory promised to the Palestinians in 1948. Then they did the same thing after 1967, seizing territory and building colonies in what little remained of what was supposed to be Palestine. For all intents and purposes done exactly this:

I think the currently existing Palestinian political parties have the destruction of Israel as a terminal goal rather than the establishment of an independent Palestine alongside Israel, and I think this is comparably evil to the Nazis conquering Czechia because they felt Germany was incomplete without it.

but in reverse. The Israelis conquered all of Palestine because the hardliners thought it would be incomplete otherwise. So they've already won, why is that acceptable when the reverse isn't?

I think the problem with Hamas in particular is that their strategy for gaining international sympathy is driving up casualty counts using human shields, so if it were successful they would incentivize every other group which is defending or attacking a city to try to maximize casualties. (This happened to some degree in the early stages of the War in Donbass, in 2014-15). It would mean every other war on Earth becoming much more lethal

Israel accuses any time Hamas operates from within a civilian population as "using human shields" which would apply to literally every guerrilla force that has ever existed. Literally every guerrilla force ever goads the occupying force into slaughtering uninvolved civilians because it creates a new pool of recruits and wins international sympathy, it isn't a strategy unique to Hamas.

One could also point out that the Israelis have literally admitted to sniping civilians waving white flags (including Israeli hostages!!!) and to intentionally destroying civilian infrastructure to increase the spread of disease and famine. Do you think allowing that might make every other war on Earth much more lethal? Have you considered that starving literally every single Gazan man, woman and child might be a worse precedent to set than the precedent that sometimes guerilla warfare works?

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

But the Zionists did not appear as a conquering army; they immigrated, mostly in cooperation with government policy. (This is why I compare the response of the Palestinians at that time to the Know-Nothings). They declared independence and received international recognition much as other colonies did; everywhere else colonial-era borders have been respected, which means the British Mandate.

They used terrorism to force the British out, committed atrocities against communities that they had previously promised peaceful coexistence, then forcibly deported enough Palestinians to secure a demographic majority in a new state that included territory promised to the Palestinians in 1948. Then they did the same thing after 1967, seizing territory and building colonies in what little remained of what was supposed to be Palestine. For all intents and purposes done exactly this:

I think the currently existing Palestinian political parties have the destruction of Israel as a terminal goal rather than the establishment of an independent Palestine alongside Israel, and I think this is comparably evil to the Nazis conquering Czechia because they felt Germany was incomplete without it.

but in reverse. The Israelis conquered all of Palestine because the hardliners thought it would be incomplete otherwise. So they've already won, why is that acceptable when the reverse isn't?

Because immigrating, declaring independence, and then enforcing control of the accepted borders is not conquest. It was not Zionist armies that attacked Palestine in 1948, but armies from Syria, Transjordan, and Egypt. My point is not that all Zionists were good people; it is that Zionism is a relatively normal anti-colonial movement, with the main unusual thing about it being its unusually substantial level of non-indigenous buy-in, and Palestinian liberationism is strange and aberrant.

1. Yes it is.
2. They were not "accepted borders": once again, they seized territory beyond their "accepted borders" in 1948 and then again in 1967
3. The Zionist forces started their campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1947, the "armies" (really only the army of Transjordan was a real "army" and their hearts were hardly in it) of the Arab states only attacked after the Palestinians had already been crushed

I think the problem with Hamas in particular is that their strategy for gaining international sympathy is driving up casualty counts using human shields, so if it were successful they would incentivize every other group which is defending or attacking a city to try to maximize casualties. (This happened to some degree in the early stages of the War in Donbass, in 2014-15). It would mean every other war on Earth becoming much more lethal

Israel accuses any time Hamas operates from within a civilian population as "using human shields" which would apply to literally every guerrilla force that has ever existed. Literally every guerrilla force ever goads the occupying force into slaughtering uninvolved civilians because it creates a new pool of recruits and wins international sympathy, it isn't a strategy unique to Hamas.

This was legitimately an unheard-of tactic before the 1980s and remains a moderately unusual one today. No, guerrilla forces do not normally goad occupiers into slaughtering uninvolved civilians, because this would normally be an excellent way to lose the sympathy of those uninvolved civilians. This is only a plausible course of action when credulous basically modern Western media exist; this is why it is crucially important to dramatically lose sympathy for forces which behave like this, and to gain sympathy for the "occupiers".  [/quote]

It's incredible to me that you write out long screeds while remaining utterly ignorant of history.

No, goading occupiers into slaughtering uninvolved civilians wins the support of those uninvolved, as they typically want revenge against those who wronged them. I can understand why this would be a difficult concept for someone who thinks bombing civilians turns them against their own government but normal people hold the most anger against those who drop the bomb or pull the trigger, not their enemies. Winning international sympathy is just icing on the cake.

Every Maoist insurgency ever going back to Mao himself intentionally provoked brutality from the local authorities for political benefit, it's called "heightening the contradictions". Even the Spaniards fighting Napoleon used guerrilla tactics and hid among the civilian population over 200 years ago. If you want to stop this dangerous precedent from somehow making war more lethal than you'll have to invent a time machine.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

1. No it's not. Immigration is not conquest. Argentina was not conquered by the Italians, nor Massachusetts by the Irish, nor (for some spicier examples) Natal or Plymouth by the English, or Fiji by the Indo-Fijians.

CONQUEST: Conquest is the act of military subjugation of an enemy by force of arms.

Israel was founded by militarily subjugating the Palestinians, dispossessing them of their land and forcing them into Bantustans. That they immigrated first doesn't make it not conquest, but okay, if we call Hamas "prospective immigrants to Israel" does that make Oct 7 "not conquest" too?

Invest in a dictionary before wasting my time.
 

2. No? The 1949-1967 boundaries of Israel included no territories outside the former British Mandate of Palestine, which they were the legal successors of. The post-1967 boundaries did (and some, in the Golan, were annexed outright rather than merely occupied), on the grounds that territory can be legally annexed from a country which invaded you first (the same grounds that permitted the Soviet Union to annex -- and then trade away -- East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia).
This is strained in some ways (it is a precedent that applies almost exclusively to the USSR and Israel, though one could also add the case of the US conquest and partial annexation of the formerly-Japanese TTPI), but I don't think it's insane. I think Ukraine would be justified in pushing further than the former border in the current Russo-Ukrainian conflict, or that Britain could have attacked the Argentine mainland in response to the Falklands offensive if they had chosen to do so, or that Kuwait or Iran could have held on to Iraqi territory after they were attacked.

You are making sh**t up. The Soviets simply applied the traditional pre-WW2 right of conquest, there wasn't some special right granted to countries that get attacked. The reason Israel stands out is because it is literally the only country on Earth granted the right to continue to conquer since the aftermath of WW2, hence why you have to reach deep into your ass to even imagine hypotheticals in which countries hypothetically could have exercised such a right when in reality they did not.

Also it wouldn't even apply in 1967 because even the Israelis recognize that they started that war.

Er, yes, I have ancestors that fought in multiple guerrilla campaigns and they did not try to provoke their enemies into killing civilians, because that is how you lose support. They tried to disrupt communications and infrastructure and launch attacks on bases (and certainly civilians died as a result of attacks on communications and infrastructure), but they did not kill civilians to "heighten the contradictions". People don't like it when you kill them or their family members, and while "there is a war, we did what we had to do" is something they understand, your galaxy-brained take is totally alien and removed from the human experience. By no means do guerrilla forces always (or even usually) try to protect civilians, but they lose support when they use civilians for target practice or encourage others to do so.

The Viet Cong, the Algerians, the Nepalese and literally every Latin America rebel group ever intentionally created conditions where the occupiers would kill a ton of civilians, thereby creating new recruits for their forces. It's like guerrilla warfare 101. But I guess Vosem Khan knows more about guerrilla strategy than Ho Chi Minh and Mao.  You're either being dishonest or illiterate by equating "provoking the enemy to kill civilians" and "killing civilians yourself", by the way. The former wins recruits, the latter not so much. Incidentally you have yet establish a single thing Hamas has done that the Viet Cong didn't.

Ah, yes, this is why every Maoist insurgency has been so successful and beloved by the population, as opposed to Mao himself succeeding because he promised land reform and received support from the USSR at the critical moment early in the war*, and subsequent Maoist insurgencies succeeding or failing mostly through pure terror. (But, crucially, in spite of an effort towards this in the 1970s Maoists have never been portrayed as the more moral side in Western media, deserving sympathy for fighting in a way that tended to increase civilian casualties.)

No, I don't think Spanish guerrillas in the Napoleonic Wars, or French ones in the Franco-Prussian War, deliberately tried to kill civilians to gain support either among foreigners or among those civilians. Certainly armies have used scorched-earth tactics to prevent advancing armies from making use of land, which consigned the people living there to death -- this is common in Russian history -- but this wasn't done to make the people who live there like you; their opinions were just considered irrelevant.

So to be clear, you're conceding that the actions of Hamas aren't remotely unprecedented, just that the proliferation of media today makes Hamas doing what literally every guerrilla group ever has done slightly more effective than in the past at convincing foreigners to cut their support to Israel.

Of course, this strategy wouldn't work if the Israelis didn't fall right into the trap of responding with excessive and pointless brutality but that would imply that the precedent being set here will actually reduce civilian casualties since future invading armies will be incentivized to not just bomb anything that moves

Anyway, no, all of this is nonsense, causing people to die does not make them like you and should not make foreigners like you. Where it is done in war despite being unnecessary it is a grave crime. Hamas should unconditionally surrender and agree to follow the orders and directives of the Israeli occupiers, and the future Palestinian education system should teach that it's good that things happened that way.

From the perspective of Hamas, why should they? They're well on track to achieving their goals, the Israelis are starting to fold on the terms of hostage release, over 80% of their tunnels are intact and they're able to keep fighting even in areas the IDF has declared "secured". The Israelis don't have a plan besides killing Gazan civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure, acts that only make Hamas stronger.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

Right, but it wasn't. It was founded by people who immigrated under a British Mandate, then defended that Mandate against a 1936-1939 uprising, came to dominate its government, and then declared independence. The Mandate became Israel through a regular process of decolonization, rather than having been conquered by some Jewish army. (I guess one could say that the British conquest in 1917 was to some extent motivated by political Zionists in the British government, and Zionists fought alongside that conquest, but then so did the Arabs.)

This is the equivalent of saying the Somalis conquered Cedar-Riverside, Minneapolis, because they immigrated and then took political control. No, that isn't conquest.

If the Somalis declared Minneapolis to be "New Somalia", forcibly deported or slaughtered non-Somalis in their claimed territory, turned those who remained into second class citizens of the newly formed country then that would absolutely qualify as conquest.

Again, no. The important threshold here is not the Second World War but the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which has been widely interpreted (as in the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials) as preventing launching an offensive war. Annexing territories in response to a war in which you were attacked is permitted (as demonstrated by numerous examples in the aftermath of the Second World War); the prohibition on conquest hasn't really been amended since Kellogg-Briand.

The Soviet Union is a good example here because it carried out both illegal conquests -- those of the Baltic states, which were never recognized by countries which were not its satellites -- and legal ones from the territories of the former Axis powers (East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, Karelia, South Sakhalin), some of which were traded to Poland for other territory. These laws have not changed -- they are rarely applied because offensive wars for conquest, like the ones launched by Egypt/Transjordan/Syria in 1948, have become very rare.

Once again: the fact that the only example you have is the Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of WW2 illustrates how you literally have zero examples of the principle you claims exists being applied in the post-UN era. Not "very rare", literally completely nonexistent in the modern era. The Soviets didn't get away with land annexation because they were law abiding but because they were winners, the same reason they kept hold of Karelia and eastern Poland despite that territory having been seized in a war of aggression prior to WW2. They didn't even try to make an argument like the one you're making because they didn't need to.

I mean, no, legally the war launched by Syria when they attacked Israel in 1948 has never ended, and has only had periods of ceasefire. Syria held (and pretended to annex, contrary to international law) territories within the former Mandate during the period 1949-1967.

Are you just going to use the most absurd logical stretches imaginable to work backwards to find a way to justify anything Israel does?

A state of war technically existed between Israel and Syria. A state of war technically also exists between Japan and Russia too but you'd have to be on crack to think that Russia is therefore legally in the clear to start carpet bombing Tokyo and depopulating Hokkaido in a "defensive annexation".

No, I don't have to know more about strategy than Ho Chi Minh or Mao to have lived with people who did guerrilla warfare. Provoking the enemy into killing civilians does not win you support if people see you as responsible for those deaths. This is incidentally why the movements you cite, which were mostly supplied by foreign powers, tended to either lose their wars or establish intensely authoritarian regimes if they won -- support among the people was actually lacking. Fighting a 'people's war' for an extended period of time is a good way to turn much of the people against you. (Much of the rhetoric against the war in Gaza, like insisting on talking about children who become casualties rather than political justifications, is also descended from the shameful legacy of the anti-Vietnam movement.)

I completely agree with the bolded section and never claimed otherwise, guerrillas are not guaranteed victory and plenty of guerrilla forces have lost due to blowing their support on the ground one war or another. But it's a two way street: if people think the guerrillas are responsible for their suffering then they turn on the guerrillas, if they think those fighting the guerrillas are responsible then they'll be even more motivated to support them. But convincing anyone of the former requires more than just pure violence and escalation, it takes a "hearts and minds" campaign that the Israelis have demonstrated zero ability or motivation to wage.

I don't know where your theory that I'm pro-Vietcong comes from. I think the Vietcong deserved the same fate that Hamas deserves (either death or forced conscription into enemy ranks -- incidentally a common tactic in inter-guerrilla fighting). I don't think they had the same reputation for deliberately fighting in a way that tended to increase casualty counts even if their interactions with civilians tended to put those civilians in harm's way; the deaths of allied civilians were not the point.

My point isn't that you're pro-Vietcong, my point is that the precedent that guerrilla warfare works was set decades ago and that Hamas prevailing wouldn't change anything on that front. There's no evidence that they're any more prone to "fighting in a way prone to increase casualty counts" than any other such group over the past several decades.

I don't think they're unprecedented (I think I have already said that they originated in Sri Lanka), but I think they're distinctively modern, belonging to the 1980s and later, because earlier guerrillas did not have raising civilian casualty counts as a goal. I think it's good that the LTTE was crushed, with their territories coming under the rule of their enemies, and I think Hamas should have the same fate.

So if it isn't unprecedented then how is it setting a precedent so bad that literally exterminating millions of Palestinians would be justified to stop it?

This strategy wouldn't work if not for the cooperation of Western media, insisting on not ascribing blame for all casualties to Hamas. Thankfully, with the bankruptcy of news outlets, even the hypothetical effectiveness of such a strategy is limited, and we won't see arguments advanced like the ones against this conflict (or like the ones against the Vietnam War).

What? The Israelis aren't negotiating because of the "Western Media" but because their military strategy has failed to destroy Hamas or to rescue any hostages.

Well, of 30,000 militants, 10,000 are dead and 10,000 are captured.

I've seen Israelis claim 10,000 dead but I've never seen even the most hardcore Zionist outlets claim to have captured 10,000 Qassam fighters. Do you have a source on that?

Even the death count is pretty dubious because it looks suspiciously like the Obama era strategy of counting every dead "fighting age male" as an insurgent. If that's the standard then the count is 10,000 down, ~990,000 to go.

All of their international allies have abandoned them.

The US literally just launched a wave of attacks across the Middle East because the allies of Hamas that supposedly abandoned them have killed American troops, attacked American bases and shut down Red Sea transit to America and its allies. Gallant has been threatening to invade Lebanon for weeks because Hezbollah has depopulated northern Israel and forced hundreds of thousands of Israelis to become internal refugees. You have a funny definition of "abandoned"

If they continue fighting, then the IDF will continue destroying Gazan infrastructure until they do surrender, as most of the world continues happily arming them. The only problem is that the rest of the world is too cowardly to join in the bombing of Gaza themselves.

Okay, so what? Hamas obviously doesn't care about Gazan infrastructure, the infrastructure they built underground has largely survived the bombing campaign intact:

As much as 80% of Hamas’s vast warren of tunnels under Gaza remains intact after weeks of Israeli efforts to destroy them, U.S. and Israeli officials said, hampering Israel’s central war aims...

Late last year, in an operation called “Sea of Atlantis,” Israel installed a series of pumps in northern Gaza, despite concerns about the potential impact of pumping seawater on the territory’s freshwater supply and above ground infrastructure. Israel’s bombing of the tunnels has inflicted widespread destruction to buildings on the surface.

Earlier this month, Israel installed at least one pump in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis to disrupt the tunnel network there, a U.S. official familiar with the effort said. The first pumps installed within Gaza used water from the Mediterranean Sea, while the latest pump draws water from Israel, the official said.

In some places, walls and other unexpected barriers and defenses slowed or stopped the water flow, U.S. officials said. Seawater has corroded some of the tunnels, but the overall effort wasn’t as effective as Israeli officials had hoped, U.S. officials said.

So much for the Vosem patented "flood the tunnels" strategy you assured would take all of Gaza in a month with a hundred casualties. Turns out the tunnels are equipped with a technology beyond the comprehension of Israel's top military thinkers: watertight doors.

But to take over the underground the IDF would first have to secure the surface and every indication is that they're utterly incapable of even managing that. After months of hard fought combat in northern Gaza the Israelis were forced to withdraw and Hamas pretty much instantly popped up to resume their control of these areas as soon as Israeli forces left. Gaza City doesn't even have any infrastructure left for the IAF to bomb yet the Hamas civil administration was able to reestablish itself in record time

What's the end goal here? Is Israel just going to spend tens if not hundreds of billions USD keeping its reservists raised and hundreds of thousands of internal refugees displaced indefinitely so that it can continue blowing up civilian infrastructure in Gaza in the hopes that Hamas will suddenly decide to give up for no reason? Eventually even the IDF will start running low on ammunition regardless of how much fiat their puppets in Congress send them, particularly if things heat up with Hezbollah. If your only strategy is to blow sh*t up and hope they surrender then the only question is whether Hamas wins now or later.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

There are thousands of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Many for bull charges and never get a trial. You really think the IDF is going to allow an Israeli civilan to get killed? When three teenagers were killed in 2014, there was a huge military operation to find them.

Meanwhile, there are hundreds of cases a year of Israeli settlers killing and attacking Palestinians. My grandfather's car was destroyed by Israeli settlers. And burning homes. Most go unpunished
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_settler_violence

The IDF is not infallible and cannot stave off all attacks on civilians when there's a terror quasi-state on the doorstep.

Israeli settler violence exists, yes. It is bad, yes. It is a thing which the Israeli state prosecutes and aims to prevent. One can argue that it's prosecuted too leniently. But it's not even remotely comparable in the scale of pure evil to pay-to-slay being fully endorsed by the Palestinian Authority.

The Israelis don't pay the families of prisoners in Palestinian jails because Israelis who commit crimes in the West Bank don't go to Palestinian jails, they get tried by their fellow Israelis and almost always get off with a slap on the wrist. There's no need for an explicit Israeli "pay to slay" policy because the settlers are paid in whatever they can loot from the pillaged homes and bodies of Palestinians and they hardly have to worry about repercussions since the PA can't arrest them and the IDF protects them from the Palestinians, not vice versa. Videos abound of the IDF literally standing guard as West Bank settlers destroy property and attack people. If said settlers were to be injured by Palestinians defending themselves from illegal attack then the IDF would intervene to arrest the Palestinians and would doubtless call them terrorists and have them locked away forever by the Israeli kangaroo military court. Then you would use said example as proof of how these terrible Palestinians just keep getting violent against innocent Israeli settlers

It's absolutely mindboggling to me that anyone can look at the situation in the West Bank and conclude that the Israelis are the victims. The mere fact that there are settlers at all is a blatant violation of international law, never mind that they're given state protection to forcibly remove people from their homes. And yeah, it isn't remotely comparable, go look up how many Palestinians are killed by Israelis compared with the reverse.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

90% of this thread is just abstract policy arguments about the conflict.  Only 10% of it, at this point, is about the actual events unfolding in the Israel-Gaza war.  

Fine, I'll just stick to arguing about the facts on the ground then.

The Israelis are very clearly negotiating in order to have better relations with the Biden administration and EU. (I guess, yes, because some in the current Cabinet have rescuing the hostages as a priority over destroying Hamas, but it was never terribly realistic that both of those goals could coexist, and the latter is very obviously more important.)

Even the death count is pretty dubious because it looks suspiciously like the Obama era strategy of counting every dead "fighting age male" as an insurgent. If that's the standard then the count is 10,000 down, ~990,000 to go.

Well...not to be cynical but it is obviously in the interests of Israel's current leadership for the war to continue as long as possible, both because international support only seems to be increasing over time (defunding UNRWA was a fringe idea in October), but also because they would be unlikely to win an election and public pressure for one would rise significantly.

All of their international allies have abandoned them.

The US literally just launched a wave of attacks across the Middle East because the allies of Hamas that supposedly abandoned them have killed American troops, attacked American bases and shut down Red Sea transit to America and its allies. Gallant has been threatening to invade Lebanon for weeks because Hezbollah has depopulated northern Israel and forced hundreds of thousands of Israelis to become internal refugees. You have a funny definition of "abandoned"

I mean, yes, every indicator we have is that Hamas expected there to be direct intervention from Hezbollah and Iran into a war, and that they expected that Israeli tactics would result in increased global sympathy for the Palestinians; but the reverse seems to have happened. Hezbollah's non-intervention in spite of heavy Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon (in spite of hundreds of militant deaths acknowledged by Hezbollah) kind of implies to me that they just literally don't have the strength for it, presumably because of their losses in 2006 and the scale of their intervention in Syria...

The strategy is to continue bombing until Hamas either doesn't exist or voluntarily surrenders and agrees to implement the orders of an Israeli occupation force. This seems to be going fine at the moment (kind of slow to be sure, but that slowness can be fully explained by a mixture of the secondary goal of recovering hostages, pressure from allies, the desire of the Israeli leadership for a campaign which is as slow as possible, and the likelihood that if the war is ongoing in 2025 the rules of engagement will change dramatically).

After pages of you making stuff up without any citation I need to ask: what are your sources?

Because I read the Israeli papers and I read Hamas's telegram reports and your conception of how the war is going is totally disconnected from what even the most optimistic Israelis are saying. In no particular order:

* Hezbollah isn't "not intervening", they've literally depopulated northern Israel with constant missile attacks. They obliterated the IAF's northern command at Meron and forced them to redeploy some of their best forces to the northern border. That's the IDF's official explanation: the alternative is that they were forced to withdraw most of their regulars and nearly all of their reservists from Gaza by intense pressure from Hamas. Gallant has been threatening to invade Lebanon for weeks. If anything they're probably doing more than Hamas expected considering they were only given 12 hours advance warning of the initial attack.

* Israel isn't negotiating to have better relations with Biden, they're negotiating because of internal pressure regarding the hostages. There aren't roads being blocked by angry protesters in Tel Aviv because they want Biden to like them but because they want the hostages released by any means necessary. Also, if you think this war is somehow making Israel more popular internationally then why would agreeing to a ceasefire improve their relations with anyone?

* Also, it isn't making them more popular internationally:

Net favorability—the percentage of people viewing Israel positively after subtracting the percentage viewing it negatively—dropped globally by an average of 18.5 percentage points between September and December, decreasing in 42 out of the 43 countries polled.

China, South Africa, Brazil, and several other countries in Latin America all went from viewing Israel positively to negatively. And many rich countries that already had net negative views of Israel—including Japan, South Korea, and the U.K.—saw steep declines. Net favorability in Japan went from -39.9 to -62.0; in South Korea from-5.5 to -47.8; and in the U.K. from -17.1 to -29.8.

* An extended war is in the interests of the current Israeli leadership but not Israel itself. Obviously Netanyahu will be out the second the war ends as will hardliners like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir but even Gantz has no motivation to rock the boat when he's almost guaranteed to be PM as long as he just waits patiently and doesn't do anything controversial. But the current status quo is a disaster for Israel; they can't afford to keep hundreds of thousands of internal refugees in hotels and hundreds of thousands of reservists raised indefinitely. There are only two ways this goes: an escalation in Lebanon or a ceasefire. Once again, this isn't just some crazy idea I'm just making up, this is what the Israelis themselves are saying.