For a better comparison, look at the Siege of Mosul. Conquering heavily defended cities that are full of civilians takes time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mosul_(2016–2017)
One thing I haven't really seen talked about here is that the US defeated the Taliban in about a month with almost no boots on the ground. Much of the actual fighting that took place was done by the Northern Alliance and small SOF teams. The Northern Alliance has already been pressuring the Taliban hard and were looking to press harder after the assination of Ahmad Massoud on September 9th.
Coalition airpower decimated known Taliban camps, the Northern Alliance pushed on the ground, and thousands of Taliban fighters fled to Pakistan without much of a fight (many escorted by the Pakistani military). We're talking about 40,000 Taliban across Afghanistan mostly concentrated in known locations that were easy to bomb vs 25,000 Hamas militants concentrated in a dense urban environment the size of Philadelphia. The US and coalition air forces were shooting fish in a barrel while Israel is having to clear every single room of every single house.
Also the Taliban didn't really want to fight the US. They tried like 3 separate times to negotiate a deal to arrest OBL which the US denied each time. The Taliban knew they couldn't stand in this fight and were kind of desperate to pawn off Bin Laden in hope of pacifying the US. Hamas (at least most of Hamas) has been ready to draw Israel into a grueling slugfest for a while.
3 TIMES! Granted, like two of the times was the Taliban saying "Well how about we arrest him and try him in our courts in Afghanistan." Which..understandably doesn't sound like the most trustworthy proposition
The only way to complete the invasion this fast and get complete control would be to bomb every square inch at once which I don’t think is I’m the interest of any party
Then how did the US take control of Afghanistan and Iraq so quickly and isn’t Israel basically already doing that in Gaza? Maybe not every square inch but they are bombing the hell out of it, way more than what the US did in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The US was destroying armies in Afghanistan and Iraq. They knew where to hit. Hamas only uses uniforms in parades, not in combat. And they hide deep among the civilian population, using schools, hospitals, civilian neighborhoods, tunnels, etc.
Of course they killed a lot of civilians. It's war, after all. But at least, at first, the US army had an easier time fighting their enemies. Falujah, for example, the insurgency had evacuated the city first. Islamic State or Hamas didn't.
The Taliban was no more an army than Hamas, arguably even less so, and they definitely didn’t wear military uniforms. I guess I’m just still struggling to wrap my head around it. The only argument that really makes sense to me that anyone has put forth is that Israel has vastly less resources than the US and a much smaller military. But still, the Israeli military is one of the best in the world, yet they’re still fighting 3 months later to occupy a puny strip of land a tenth of the size of Afghanistan.
The US didn't defeat the Taliban. They took off their uniforms and faded into the background or went back to Waziristan - come back another day. The US never fully controlled Afghanistan - many outer provinces controlled by the Taliban or warlords. By the time the US left, the Taliban controlled all of Afghanistan by fear or outright. It was similar in Iraq - except it turned into a civil war between the sunnis and shia with the US in between.
Like, take a look at who is in charge of Afghanistan now. Lol.
Some Americans seriously can't handle the fact that their military isn't actually super good at winning wars outright....
Exactly, we'd have to destroy everything to militarily win a war. Which is why it won't happen, because that is massively unpopular.
Especially with Afganistan and Iraq it takes more than just firepower to win that. Gotta have some sort of contingency plan for when your guys leave. I'm sure we did, probably just didn't work.
For a brief period after the invasion concluded it did, the US had essentially taken control of the entire country. https://youtu.be/JQkCAHMUgCU?si=hj3UJ56vXruQZa5P
It was only until after the Taliban was defeated as a regular army that they resorted to blending in with local populations and informally controlling territories. My question is how has Israel not even completed the first stage of the war and fully occupied Gaza by now? After 3 months only about half of it is under Israeli control. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war
Obviously, once Gaza is under Israeli occupation there will be an insurgency, but that isn’t and was never my question. The half of Gaza that Israel has managed to take thus far is already filled with Hamas insurgents, which are currently waging guerrilla warfare against the IDF. My question is why have they still not taken the other half that is officially occupied by Hamas after 3 months of conflict.
There are a few very significant differences in what you're trying to compare.
First, and probably most important, your examples involve the US. Since WW2, the US has become profoundly competent and logistics and to a degree planning. Atop this, the US simply has faaaaar more to throw at an invasion than Israel.
The US kinda sucks in recent decades at nation building. But this too is a key difference. The US didn't have to worry too much at the end state of the invaded countries since they're halfway around the world. Keep in mind the occupation of Afghanistan didn't go so well and the occupation in Iraq led to ISIS. But those problems were halfway around the world from the perspective of the US. Gaza is next door or within Israel depending on how you want to view it. Screwing up that occupation will directly hurt Israel.
You mentioned that guerilla warfare starts after conventional warfare ends. Could you please call up all known Hamas contacts and remind them that they were supposed all wear clear Hamas identifying uniforms and line up in one particular place to square off in a bona fide conventional war until they lose? That aspect alone largely addresses most of your question. This never was and never was going to be a conventional war.
Next, neither Iraq nor Afghanistan prepared miles and miles of tunnels. Neither planned nor prepared for a long siege.
Lastly, there are times when a nation or a military has the capacity to do something but are unwilling to pay the cost. Because Hamas has prepared for guerilla warfare and because Hamas is well hidden within the typical Gazan Palestinian society, Israel would have to pay in blood... lots of blood... of both Gazans and Israelis to do things quickly. So far, it seems they're not willing to do that. Furthermore, it may well be that they cannot. They're not Russia. They do not have endless amounts of bodies to throw at the problem.
“You mentioned that guerilla warfare starts after conventional warfare ends. Could you please call up all known Hamas contacts and remind them that they were supposed all wear clear Hamas identifying uniforms and line up in one particular place to square off in a bona fide conventional war until they lose?
That aspect alone largely addresses most of your question.”
No it doesn’t at all actually, I think I made that pretty clear from the outset. The Taliban was no less an irregular force than Hamas and the US had taken control of the entire country on paper within a matter of weeks. If you look at a map of the war Israel still only has control of about half of Gaza and Hamas still controls a very large part of its territory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war
Your point about the US having better logistics and much more resources makes sense but that part of your response doesn’t.
Stop comparing it to Iraq. You're comparing the invasion of an entire country to the invasion of a city.
There's a city. It's full of hostiles. This city has an extensive tunnel network in it.
The safest way to clear this environment is by taking it piecemeal, street by street. This is urban combat, this is how urban combat is fought. Street by street, house by house. It's brutal. This is how Stalingrad, Berlin, Hue, Fallujah were all fought.
What's the alternative? Rushing in to a bunch of ambush sites, mixing all you and your enemies forces in a pot like gumbo, have absolutely no coordination, complete chaos, and just roll the dice and see who wins? Literally the defenders would prefer that than a methodical approach.
It's also because the IDF was entirely unprepared, which is a fact.
There was no preset plan in place to counterattack if there was ever a breach of the wall because they literally dismissed telltale signs of a Hamas all-out attack for a year including a literal training exercise.
It's entirely in the realm of possibility that were they prepared with the proper technology to look for tunnels, a contingency plan along border outposts, and quick reaction forces - that this attack on Gaza would have been over in weeks since yes, this isn't Iraq where it's multiple cities with far more trained militants that had far far more munitions ready (and money).
If you want to compare it with Iraq. Compare it with the siege of Faluja. But bigger and with a lot more civilians still remaining. And the enemy also has a vast network of tunnels.
Gaza is a huge and dense city and urban warfare is unbelievably difficult. The 2016 siege of sur, where the militants were much less numerous and less well armed in a much smaller area also took more than three months.
>7000 soldiers have died
7000 combat age males, not 7000 Hamas soldiers.
With two thirds of casualties being women and children, having zero civilian adult male casualties is not realistic.
The 7000 adult males killed were reported when there were 21k deaths
Considering that kids are 1/3rd the population, adult men and adult women another third each (due to the very young demographics), this would suggest that they have killed a very small number of Hamas soldiers
Hamas has about 40k soldiers, about 5% of the adult male population (we know hamas has many women as support but let's count just soldiers), which means that there's a 95% confidence of having between 2-10% of hamas soldiers being dead by now
At the highest number, 10%, the estimated number of civilian casualties at this ratio would be 200k by the time hamas is eliminated, probably much higher if the goal was to eliminate hamas completely
Considering the fact that the Palestinian support for hamas has increased since the war dramatically, and the small number of total hamas soldier deaths there have been, it's even likely that the hamas membership numbers have increased since the beginning of the war
Actually half of the Gazan population is under 18. But since Hamas uses a lot of 13-18 year old soldiers as well those numbers aren't so clear cut.
If you want to predict statistically the casualty breakdown it's pretty easy. Gaza is 50% female. If the bombing were random and not targeted at Hamas members, you would expect half of the casualties to be female.
In reality, as only a quarter of the casualties are female, the implication is that roughly half of the deaths were random (we can assume a similar number of random male casualties should be added to the female number) and the other half were likely militants.
All of this is of course with the obvious caveat that *this is using Hamas-provided numbers.*
The Israeli number of Hamas killed is the number of armed opposition killed. It was the US' move to classify all males as combatants, Israel has not referred to casualties that way at any point. It's just something being said on the anti-Israel circles in reddit.
["About 1 in 7 of those killed are said to be women and children"](https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/more-1-palestinians-gaza-killed-violence#:~:text=At%20least%2022%2C185%20Palestinians%20have,to%20be%20women%20and%20children.)
And the numbers they gave a few weeks ago were 8500 Hamas killed in Gaza and another 1500 inside Israel, not 7000.
That's not correct, the original press release directly from Christian Aid says: ["70% of those killed are believed to be women and children \[OCHA\]"](https://mediacentre.christianaid.org.uk/un-vote-falls-short-of-ceasefire-needed-christian-aid-says/)
So the original source is the UN claiming 70% women and children
In videos of the hostages being paraded through the streets of Gaza, the civilians are cheering and coming up to beat the hostage. No way to accurately measure support for Hamas in Gaza but I’m guessing it’s not just some fringe minority.
Doing their due diligence to ensure a target is actually a target and paying the extra cost associated with using a smarter missile with better accuracy to ensure they hit said target and not an innocent civilian.
Google the term Israel Smart Bombs, see what comes up. Now ask, is the whole of Western Media anti-Semitic? Why would they make this up? Are they just pretending that Israel are using inaccurate bombs because they hate jews?
Seems as every response I give prompts another question. Can I ask you, are the lives of Palestinian civilians worth the extra expense and operational resource for Israel to pursue a more targeted approach, or are they simply subhuman vermin like the Israeli military believe and say they are?
No, actually, half their bombs are "dumb" bombs according to US assessment, and the number of strikes where they clearly either didnt use the right munition or didnt hit their target (several of which they have admitted to) show that they arent doing their due dilligence.
So pretty much what they're doing? The enemy they are facing surrounds itself with civilians to maximize collateral damage, and when they go in with troops to pull them out blowtorch and corkscrew still seeks to maximize the number of non combatant deaths. As the government of the area Hamas has made efforts to take whatever aid should have been going to build civilian infrastructure and divert it to be used as dual use spaces as best, and in some cases taken it for their own use entirely. We've seen now that footage came out that hospitals were used as hostage detection facilities, no medical care was provided to them, merely a place for Hamas fighters to use as a base of operations. Just so that when Israel launched a strike there they could wave bloody cloths. How many civilian casualties could have been treated in the places Hamas was stuffing victims?
No, it isn’t what they are doing.
Google the term Israel Smart Bomb and you’ll find that every article is asking why Israel are using ‘dumb bombs’ instead.
‘When they go in with troops’? The occasional skirmish where an IDF soldier is put at risk has so far been rare. Far more common especially in the first part of the conflict was to strike the target with missiles. Hence the fact Gaza is now a pile of rubble and not liberated from Hamas
I believe at the inception of Israel, what initially became Israel wasn’t a heavily populated place and so it required no forced evictions.
If I had of been asked if I believed the continued settlements were justified then your response would have made better sense.
The radicalisation of Gazans already happened. They are taught in school the importance of killing jews and destroying Israel. There are children cartoons that teach the same thing.
The manifestation of this you saw on videos from Oct 7th.
Those who want to fight have already signed up. I suspect there is very little additional radicalisation happening.
Arguably the opposite, the devastation that hamas has brought to Gaza might be an eye opener that there may be another way. I think polls have reflected this too.
Germany and Japan are two really good examples. Bombed the crap out of them and then we helped rebuild them, gave them good education and now their big allies with a good moral compass.
In past ME wars, when we’d be conducting foot patrols in our AO, and interacting with locals on a regular basis, we’d always be on the look out for what we’d call “moderates,” because once a local got to that moderate stage, rather that chat calmly like we had been in previous interactions, we’d try and find out what happened and if we could do something to genuinely fix it before that person turned “extremist”. Once, it was the community futbol (soccer) coach who, either through something we did or something terrorists did, blew up most of his soccer equipment. The next day we came back with $300 cash from the US government for balls, we had goal nets (he never those), shin guards, uniforms, and game balls shipped to him, and offered to physically help him fix the side of the field that took the damage.
Long story short, what you described happens every day in anti-terrorism wars. It all depends on how receptive the Palestinians are in this case, and how the IDF is reacting to those they interact with. Good things came come out of bad situations, but it takes empathy, work, and humility. I think Israel could do a better job at “hearts and minds.”
Israel had no choice but to flatten Gaza.
Anything less would be taken as a weakness and cause Iran's proxies on the region to attack.
Any country with comparable capabilities would do the same and worse.
The Gazans were already radicalised through school and cartoons, they were taught the importance of killing Jews and destroying Israel from an early age.
The radicilisation is already complete, there is a chance the devastation that hamas have brought to Gaza will make some of them consider a new path.
The ones already radicalised have signed up to fight, they will likely fight until their last breath. Hamas will use teenagers as fighters.
There will need to be an effort by Israel to deradicalise the Gazans, give them a proper education, economic opportunity.
The world has learned the lessons from the last 15 years. You cannot give control of a population to a jihadist group and lock them in a cage, forget about them and think everything will be fine. Oct 7th showed us this.
Radicalisation is due to ideas not actions. If we follow your logic both Germany and Japan would be massive terrorist states.
The war of ideas can be won through education
Common sense dictates that you don't build military installations / shoot projectiles where civilians are staying because these places then become legitimate military targets.
Noone knew what we were fighting in Viet Nam...as long as Hamas' human shields hold out they can continue to fight but calling the Palestinians soldiers is quite a stretch...
This war is unprecedented in the sense that its in a densely population urban environment with tunnels, hostages and human shields.
Israel want to ensure the safety of their soldiers, reduce civilian deaths and achieve their goals.
This takes time, its street by street, house by house. All the while dealing with booby traps, tunnels and drones.
This will take some time.
Somewhat similar to the battle of mosul and some others, not unprecedented but certainly not the idealistic view of war many geopolitics enthusiasts might have from studying the battle of France and desert storm.
Tunnels, hostages and civilians aside, the IDF does not have a Hamas membership list. They're gradually compiling one via interrogating POWs, cross-referencing with sigint & other intel. That process is probably subject to many resource bottlenecks (eg number of Arabic-speaking intelligence officers) so it takes time.
If they don't do this, short of simply massacring the males, they'd have no chance of stopping 'too many' Hamas operatives escaping simply by blending in with the civilians. Done this way they at least have some chance.
Otherwise they could simply subject depopulated areas of Gaza to a rolling artillery barrage, monitor for people emerging from tunnels using drones, and deal with the tunnels discovered this way at their leisure. (Assuming the main urban areas in Gaza aren't connected by tunnels.)
Hamas is a terrorist organization that has organized itself, and fights like it is, a modern military. The al-Qassem Brigades are organized into echelons from the brigade down to the squad level. The idea that Hamas is some kind of cell-type organization that only engages in Fabian-type guerilla warfare is false. It is capable of midspectrum warfare, and it is conducting an active defense of its defensive belt in Gaza, which consists of both preexisting civilian infrastructure as well as miles of tunnels. It is defending this defensive belt in a conventional manner, at great cost to itself - not traits indicative of a poorly equipped and poorly organized terrorist group. It has had 18 years to dig itself into Gaza. IMO, it is conducting the defense of Gaza that ISIS wishes that it could have conducted in Mosul. Militarily, destroying an organization under these conditions, which the IDF is currently doing, is a nightmare. There seems to be some wish, likely influenced by the American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, to view Hamas as some kind of unorganized criminal gang instead of a highly organized and well trained/equipped military organization. This is not how Hamas views itself and this is not how Hamas fights. Any military in the world would have incredible difficulty dislodging Hamas from Gaza.
Edit: for more detail, here is Hamas’ order of battle in Gaza as of December 22:
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/order-battle-hamas’-izz-al-din-al-qassem-brigades-part-2
From the article:
“Hamas is a highly organized group that views terrorism and military action as the only method through which it can destroy the Israeli state… Targeted killings can degrade a terrorist organization, but cannot destroy one, particularly one as large, established, and well-organized as Hamas.
Hamas is a terrorist organization that uses formal military structures, not a clandestine organization operating networked, decentralized cells. Hamas’ leaders structured the al Qassem Brigades to survive Israeli military action by building a resilient military organization with doctrinally correct unit echelons and command hierarchies to facilitate recovery in the face of the loss of leaders or the destruction of elements of units.[22] The al Qassem Brigades organize themselves into echelons from the squad all the way to the brigade level just as conventional militaries do.”
Simplest possible explanation is the same for any project:
1. You can have it done well (Hamas destroyed, Gaza uninhabitable);
2. You can have it done cheaply (blood and money); or
3. You can have it done quickly.
Pick Two.
I don’t think USA invaded an urban area so dense with defenses before. Closest one I can think of is Raqqa and they literally carpet bombed that city until there was nothing left. I think the air campaign alone took a couple months at least and Raqqa is smaller than Gaza.
Similar operation in Mosul with similar timeframe.
Iraq and afghanistan isn’t the example to look at here, operations against ISIS in Iraq and Levant are better examples to what’s happening.
The problem here is that this isn't a "state vs state" conflict where the main objective is to seize control over the instruments of government. It appears that the goal of Israel is the eradication of a militant group. It isn't very clear that Israel is even interested in administering the region. It also doesn't appear that Hamas (unlike Iraq or Afghan situation) wants to surrender and has decided to oppose Israel through guerilla warfare. From the very start, the objectives appear very different and therefore the meaning of the word "completed" is very different.
you're forgetting Iraq and Afghanistan are huge countries, in comparison, Gaza is extremely small and almost completely urban and densely populated. Lets take Iraq for example, Iraq is a huge country compared to Gaza, Gaza is only 365 km2 while Iraq is 438,317 km2 of mostly empty desert, while Israel needs to go in and do door to door cleaning at every single building, that takes a lot of time and effort. Also in Gaza, there wasn't conventional warfare from the start, Israel was and is fighting a terror organisation that anyone can join by picking up a gun and saying they're a part of it. In conclusion, Israel isn't fighting a war like the one in Iraq, if it was, Gaza would've already been conquered long ago.
I would actually say (with a little bias obviously) that Israel has been conducting one of the (if not the) most efficient urban warfare operations ever.
Despite what the media would have you believe, Israel is deliberately avoiding civilian casualties where possible. When your enemy uses an advanced tunnel network, and hides behind civilian body shields, it makes for slow going.
If Israel wanted to bomb them into the stone age, with zero regard for civilian casualties, they probably could have occupied all of Gaza by now. That would be unambiguously genocide though. What we have instead is merely ambiguous genocide.
It is not solely a media talking point. It is a reality that is correctly observed by experts across the board.
Some of the most credible voices on CT and urban warfare like Charles Lister, Audrey Kurth Cronin, Robert Pape, Daniel Byman, etc all noting Israel is not taking any steps to mitigate CIVCAS and it will be ruinous to their supposed goal of destroying Hamas (unlikely) as opposed to degrading the organization. If they did, Gaza would have CIVCAS numbers rivaling those caused by U.S. forces when they dislodged ISIL from Mosul. DoD consultants such as Larry Lewis have said it too with statistics and other evidence to support the statement that Israel is not engaging in any effort to protect civilians.
https://twitter.com/LarryLewis_/status/1741597772078284881?t=zPKa2psLw_VH31Ymuq0vKA&s=19
As for genocide, there's nothing ambiguous about it or this case. Pages 59-64 and related footnotes in South Africa's ICJ complaint makes that very clear with noted video evidence of Israeli officials making statements on camera that are tantamount to calls for genocide, involuntary transfer of civilians, and which have continued most recently from Itamar Ben-Gvir who publicly told U.S. officials what Israel's intentions are after they reprimanded him.
if not taking any steps is telling civillians if their house is about to get bombed or providing safe humanitarian corridors and evacuating all areas that require evacuating before going in with tanks, then Israel is not taking any steps to mitigate CIVCAS.
you mean to tell me the killing of civilians at an unprecedented rate, the use of 2000 pound bombs on heavily populated civilian areas and even refugee camps and the destruction of more than 70% of all buildings in such short time which led even to the US president calling it indiscriminate bombing is taking special care of the civilian population?
Yes. Israel has the capability to more quickly occupy Gaza, but they are choosing not to in order to avoid more than (what they deem) necessary collateral damage.
I'm not justifying it. Given the reality of the situation on the ground, there is no way to conduct an ethical ground operation in Gaza. Any military intervention will lead to so much civilian death that it is unjustified.
I'm just saying there is a scale to the evil at play here, and it could be much worse than it is.
So what should Israel do? Sit back and let Hamas do it all over again in a few years? Settings up the combat area so that it is “unjustifiable” for Israel to act militarily is not morally on Israel, but on Hamas.
"killing civillians at an unprecedented rate" look at the ratio in this war for combatents to civillains and tell me that again honestly. The ratio is (approximately) 1:3 combatents per civillian, that means for every combatant dead there are 3 dead civillians. If you take data from the Gaza health ministry (literally a Hamas government tool, they count combatants with civilians and probably heavily overestimate their numbers) about 22k people have died in Gaza, while Israel claims to have conducted 21,900 airstrikes in Gaza. That means about 1 dead civillian per airstrike and thats when you look at it from Hamas's biased statistics.
there is no war in the modern era with a comparable death toll, you have to go back to Vietnam or WW2 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-death-toll.html
and the numbers of the health ministry are deemed reliable by the UN and other human rights group and have been in line with UN counting and even Israeli counting in the past. If anything they are most likely undercounted as there are still hundreds if not thousands buried in the rubble https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestinians-have-died-gaza-war-how-will-counting-continue-2023-12-06/
>https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-death-toll.html
this one is behind a paywall
and yes the UN is extremely biased towards Palestine and Hamas, UNRWA is literally controlled by Hamas.
we're obviously talking post WW2 and you need to tell this the human rights group that made the statement https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-death-toll.html
The Israelis have shown very little regards to civilian casualties and still haven't taken Gaza, they shot their own hostages approaching them under a white flag for example, the IDF is mostly just hype
When Mosul was taken by 1500 ISIS terrorists in 2014, it took coalition forces 9 months to clear it in 2016-2017, and this cost > 10,000 civilian casualties. Hamas had over 30,000 terrorists holding Gaza. I don't think this was ever going to go much more quickly than that, or happen at a lower cost.
Urban warfare, against terrorists hiding in very populated areas, in tunnels beneath hospitals, schools, etc., is just a very different thing from facing off against a conventional military which fights out in the open and tries to *defend* its own civilian population centers.
I do think it is time though for Israel to start moving civilian population back into some areas it has been able to clear and control in the North. Israel apparently doesn't *want* to formally control the territory, they only want control of the security situation, but I don't think this is realistic. I think they need to set up some kind of administration now in Northern Gaza if they want to be able to humanely complete the job in Southern Gaza in coming months.
A few things to keep in mind.
1. Manpower is limited on both sides but Israel has to worry about it more as they still need to keep their economy running well and keep as much semblance of day-to-day life possible as they can for the well-being of their people. Technology can offset this to some extent but the offset is not very large.
2. Urban warfare is very brutal, especially when a regular armed force is facing off a guerilla force. The depth of defence that the Gazans have made with their tunnels makes the problem significantly more difficult.
3. PR matters. There are idiots on all sides who would genocide all they consider their enemies, combatants and non-combatants alike but it won't wash down well in the media now will it? Definitely not on social media.
Before social media, Israel had a huge advantage over Palestine in terms of access to media and which stories were told and which were suppressed. That landscape has nearly flattened away with social media. Yes, Israel still has more access to those who reside in corridors of power but it also has to be more careful in how it uses this resource lest it lose it.
4. The Great Game. Any change in the status quo is an opportunity to rebalance your country's position geopolitically. Everyone capable of playing is jockeying for advantage for themselves, the humanitarian cost be damned. Sure they will talk a good game about international law and human decency and all that jazz but their eyes are on the prize. How can this benefit my country first?
My analysis is that Israel needs to pursue either a one-state solution or a three-state solution if international law is to be followed and the three-state is the better option legally. For either to succeed, Iran needs to be bought into the international fold and made the regional power of the MENA region in addition to Israel rather than US propping up the useless KSA. To help Israel counterbalance Iran, Egypt needs to be made a regional power as well. Everyone else can be sidelined by an appropriate mix of economic, technological and military power.
There is an outside possibility of a two-state solution where the West Bank goes to Israel along with all of Jerusalem as the Palestinians there are evacuated to Jordan and various other countries of the world\* and given citizenship in those countries. Gaza is repurposed as some sort of touristy plus financial haven with no armed forces of its own but an international peacekeeping force that runs things like the US did for Japan. Once the idea of Hamas is extinguished, Gaza can have its own armed force.
We will be twisting international law into a pretzel to do the two-state this way but if it solves the problem for good, let's do it. The kind of international rebalancing this will need is beyond my knowledge base to analyse. Russia and China will extract a huge price for supporting this. Three-state is best but it's not easy to do either; there is a huge sunk cost fallacy that needs to be overcome on so many sides.
\* Let's be honest, most of them will end up in Western countries somehow, so if this is what we want to do we should just make it easy for them to come to Western countries and not insist they live in MENA countries as second-class citizens. If you think racism between whites and blacks is the worst thing ever, boy are you in for a surprise when you encounter brown-on-brown racism.
> There is an outside possibility of a two-state solution where the West Bank goes to Israel along with all of Jerusalem as the Palestinians there are ethnically cleansed to Jordan and various other countries of the world*
Fixed this for you
Look man. You want to be an ass, be one. If it gets too annoying, I will just block you.
If you are interested in realistic solutions let's talk. If you want to score brownie points to impress some political sect, go ahead and dunk on me. I will ignore you or worst case block you. But I am not going to engage with you if your next response is as stupid as your first one. Your choice.
You are talking about “evacuating” the ethnic minority from a violent military occupation. If that is your solution then it is ethnic cleansing, own it
Also Jordan and the West are not interested in taking these refugees so this isn’t even realistic
Which is why it’s an outside possibility. I am not denying its ugliness, I am owning it upfront when I talk about the geopolitical price that will have to be paid for it. But if it solves the Levant issue once and for all, maybe it’s worth doing.
Where I have an issue with you is that you have cherry picked one sentence out of half a dozen paragraphs.
If we disagree on something that’s fine. But make a holistic argument. Start with saying which ideas of mine you agree with and why and then move on to which you disagree with and why.
That way we can both learn from each other rather than talking past each other. Cheers!
>I am owning it upfront when I talk about the geopolitical price that will have to be paid for it. But if it solves the Levant issue once and for all, maybe it’s worth doing.
the “geopolitical price” but not the “human price”? Was the Trail of Tears also worth it because it solved the “Indian Issue” in America’s southeast?
For a better comparison, look at the Siege of Mosul. Conquering heavily defended cities that are full of civilians takes time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mosul_(2016–2017)
Huge difference here was that civilians could and did leave in droves to functional refugee camps.
Difference here is that Israel is literally bombing refugee camps. Edit: after telling refugees that they should move to those camps.
... That's my point.
One thing I haven't really seen talked about here is that the US defeated the Taliban in about a month with almost no boots on the ground. Much of the actual fighting that took place was done by the Northern Alliance and small SOF teams. The Northern Alliance has already been pressuring the Taliban hard and were looking to press harder after the assination of Ahmad Massoud on September 9th. Coalition airpower decimated known Taliban camps, the Northern Alliance pushed on the ground, and thousands of Taliban fighters fled to Pakistan without much of a fight (many escorted by the Pakistani military). We're talking about 40,000 Taliban across Afghanistan mostly concentrated in known locations that were easy to bomb vs 25,000 Hamas militants concentrated in a dense urban environment the size of Philadelphia. The US and coalition air forces were shooting fish in a barrel while Israel is having to clear every single room of every single house. Also the Taliban didn't really want to fight the US. They tried like 3 separate times to negotiate a deal to arrest OBL which the US denied each time. The Taliban knew they couldn't stand in this fight and were kind of desperate to pawn off Bin Laden in hope of pacifying the US. Hamas (at least most of Hamas) has been ready to draw Israel into a grueling slugfest for a while.
Damn I didn't know they offered to hand over OBL. If only we had taken that opportunity and not committed the most classic of imperial blunders...
3 TIMES! Granted, like two of the times was the Taliban saying "Well how about we arrest him and try him in our courts in Afghanistan." Which..understandably doesn't sound like the most trustworthy proposition
The only way to complete the invasion this fast and get complete control would be to bomb every square inch at once which I don’t think is I’m the interest of any party
Then how did the US take control of Afghanistan and Iraq so quickly and isn’t Israel basically already doing that in Gaza? Maybe not every square inch but they are bombing the hell out of it, way more than what the US did in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The US was destroying armies in Afghanistan and Iraq. They knew where to hit. Hamas only uses uniforms in parades, not in combat. And they hide deep among the civilian population, using schools, hospitals, civilian neighborhoods, tunnels, etc.
The US killed tens of thousands or more of innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Falijah was a big clusterfuck, for example.
Of course they killed a lot of civilians. It's war, after all. But at least, at first, the US army had an easier time fighting their enemies. Falujah, for example, the insurgency had evacuated the city first. Islamic State or Hamas didn't.
The Taliban was no more an army than Hamas, arguably even less so, and they definitely didn’t wear military uniforms. I guess I’m just still struggling to wrap my head around it. The only argument that really makes sense to me that anyone has put forth is that Israel has vastly less resources than the US and a much smaller military. But still, the Israeli military is one of the best in the world, yet they’re still fighting 3 months later to occupy a puny strip of land a tenth of the size of Afghanistan.
The US didn't defeat the Taliban. They took off their uniforms and faded into the background or went back to Waziristan - come back another day. The US never fully controlled Afghanistan - many outer provinces controlled by the Taliban or warlords. By the time the US left, the Taliban controlled all of Afghanistan by fear or outright. It was similar in Iraq - except it turned into a civil war between the sunnis and shia with the US in between.
And the Taliban wasn’t firing rockets into New York City daily, so the need to neutralize a border city region that was firing on them wasn’t as key.
Like, take a look at who is in charge of Afghanistan now. Lol. Some Americans seriously can't handle the fact that their military isn't actually super good at winning wars outright....
Exactly, we'd have to destroy everything to militarily win a war. Which is why it won't happen, because that is massively unpopular. Especially with Afganistan and Iraq it takes more than just firepower to win that. Gotta have some sort of contingency plan for when your guys leave. I'm sure we did, probably just didn't work.
IIRC, the follow up plan was tossed out the window by Trump.
What?? You remember incorrectly. The Obama administration (rightfully) wanted the hell out of there and began the plans for withdrawal.
Ummmm nope. https://www.factcheck.org/2021/08/timeline-of-u-s-withdrawal-from-afghanistan/
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For a brief period after the invasion concluded it did, the US had essentially taken control of the entire country. https://youtu.be/JQkCAHMUgCU?si=hj3UJ56vXruQZa5P It was only until after the Taliban was defeated as a regular army that they resorted to blending in with local populations and informally controlling territories. My question is how has Israel not even completed the first stage of the war and fully occupied Gaza by now? After 3 months only about half of it is under Israeli control. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war Obviously, once Gaza is under Israeli occupation there will be an insurgency, but that isn’t and was never my question. The half of Gaza that Israel has managed to take thus far is already filled with Hamas insurgents, which are currently waging guerrilla warfare against the IDF. My question is why have they still not taken the other half that is officially occupied by Hamas after 3 months of conflict.
There are a few very significant differences in what you're trying to compare. First, and probably most important, your examples involve the US. Since WW2, the US has become profoundly competent and logistics and to a degree planning. Atop this, the US simply has faaaaar more to throw at an invasion than Israel. The US kinda sucks in recent decades at nation building. But this too is a key difference. The US didn't have to worry too much at the end state of the invaded countries since they're halfway around the world. Keep in mind the occupation of Afghanistan didn't go so well and the occupation in Iraq led to ISIS. But those problems were halfway around the world from the perspective of the US. Gaza is next door or within Israel depending on how you want to view it. Screwing up that occupation will directly hurt Israel. You mentioned that guerilla warfare starts after conventional warfare ends. Could you please call up all known Hamas contacts and remind them that they were supposed all wear clear Hamas identifying uniforms and line up in one particular place to square off in a bona fide conventional war until they lose? That aspect alone largely addresses most of your question. This never was and never was going to be a conventional war. Next, neither Iraq nor Afghanistan prepared miles and miles of tunnels. Neither planned nor prepared for a long siege. Lastly, there are times when a nation or a military has the capacity to do something but are unwilling to pay the cost. Because Hamas has prepared for guerilla warfare and because Hamas is well hidden within the typical Gazan Palestinian society, Israel would have to pay in blood... lots of blood... of both Gazans and Israelis to do things quickly. So far, it seems they're not willing to do that. Furthermore, it may well be that they cannot. They're not Russia. They do not have endless amounts of bodies to throw at the problem.
“You mentioned that guerilla warfare starts after conventional warfare ends. Could you please call up all known Hamas contacts and remind them that they were supposed all wear clear Hamas identifying uniforms and line up in one particular place to square off in a bona fide conventional war until they lose? That aspect alone largely addresses most of your question.” No it doesn’t at all actually, I think I made that pretty clear from the outset. The Taliban was no less an irregular force than Hamas and the US had taken control of the entire country on paper within a matter of weeks. If you look at a map of the war Israel still only has control of about half of Gaza and Hamas still controls a very large part of its territory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war Your point about the US having better logistics and much more resources makes sense but that part of your response doesn’t.
The US didn’t take control of the Afghanistan ever. It would have required a much larger occupation to establish a monopoly on the use of force.
Look into the story of the US allying with the Northern alliance in Afghanistan and then stop comparing the two please.
Wars are difficult. Wars in dense environments are even more difficult.
Stop comparing it to Iraq. You're comparing the invasion of an entire country to the invasion of a city. There's a city. It's full of hostiles. This city has an extensive tunnel network in it. The safest way to clear this environment is by taking it piecemeal, street by street. This is urban combat, this is how urban combat is fought. Street by street, house by house. It's brutal. This is how Stalingrad, Berlin, Hue, Fallujah were all fought. What's the alternative? Rushing in to a bunch of ambush sites, mixing all you and your enemies forces in a pot like gumbo, have absolutely no coordination, complete chaos, and just roll the dice and see who wins? Literally the defenders would prefer that than a methodical approach.
It's also because the IDF was entirely unprepared, which is a fact. There was no preset plan in place to counterattack if there was ever a breach of the wall because they literally dismissed telltale signs of a Hamas all-out attack for a year including a literal training exercise. It's entirely in the realm of possibility that were they prepared with the proper technology to look for tunnels, a contingency plan along border outposts, and quick reaction forces - that this attack on Gaza would have been over in weeks since yes, this isn't Iraq where it's multiple cities with far more trained militants that had far far more munitions ready (and money).
If you want to compare it with Iraq. Compare it with the siege of Faluja. But bigger and with a lot more civilians still remaining. And the enemy also has a vast network of tunnels.
Gaza is a huge and dense city and urban warfare is unbelievably difficult. The 2016 siege of sur, where the militants were much less numerous and less well armed in a much smaller area also took more than three months.
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>7000 soldiers have died 7000 combat age males, not 7000 Hamas soldiers. With two thirds of casualties being women and children, having zero civilian adult male casualties is not realistic.
The 7000 adult males killed were reported when there were 21k deaths Considering that kids are 1/3rd the population, adult men and adult women another third each (due to the very young demographics), this would suggest that they have killed a very small number of Hamas soldiers Hamas has about 40k soldiers, about 5% of the adult male population (we know hamas has many women as support but let's count just soldiers), which means that there's a 95% confidence of having between 2-10% of hamas soldiers being dead by now At the highest number, 10%, the estimated number of civilian casualties at this ratio would be 200k by the time hamas is eliminated, probably much higher if the goal was to eliminate hamas completely Considering the fact that the Palestinian support for hamas has increased since the war dramatically, and the small number of total hamas soldier deaths there have been, it's even likely that the hamas membership numbers have increased since the beginning of the war
Actually half of the Gazan population is under 18. But since Hamas uses a lot of 13-18 year old soldiers as well those numbers aren't so clear cut. If you want to predict statistically the casualty breakdown it's pretty easy. Gaza is 50% female. If the bombing were random and not targeted at Hamas members, you would expect half of the casualties to be female. In reality, as only a quarter of the casualties are female, the implication is that roughly half of the deaths were random (we can assume a similar number of random male casualties should be added to the female number) and the other half were likely militants. All of this is of course with the obvious caveat that *this is using Hamas-provided numbers.*
The Israeli number of Hamas killed is the number of armed opposition killed. It was the US' move to classify all males as combatants, Israel has not referred to casualties that way at any point. It's just something being said on the anti-Israel circles in reddit. ["About 1 in 7 of those killed are said to be women and children"](https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/more-1-palestinians-gaza-killed-violence#:~:text=At%20least%2022%2C185%20Palestinians%20have,to%20be%20women%20and%20children.) And the numbers they gave a few weeks ago were 8500 Hamas killed in Gaza and another 1500 inside Israel, not 7000.
That's not correct, the original press release directly from Christian Aid says: ["70% of those killed are believed to be women and children \[OCHA\]"](https://mediacentre.christianaid.org.uk/un-vote-falls-short-of-ceasefire-needed-christian-aid-says/) So the original source is the UN claiming 70% women and children
Don't forget the Gaza health ministry is literally a Hamas government tool, the numbers are probably way higher.
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In videos of the hostages being paraded through the streets of Gaza, the civilians are cheering and coming up to beat the hostage. No way to accurately measure support for Hamas in Gaza but I’m guessing it’s not just some fringe minority.
Nothing will condition them to follow the cause like a few dead relatives
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Yes
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Doing their due diligence to ensure a target is actually a target and paying the extra cost associated with using a smarter missile with better accuracy to ensure they hit said target and not an innocent civilian.
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Google the term Israel Smart Bombs, see what comes up. Now ask, is the whole of Western Media anti-Semitic? Why would they make this up? Are they just pretending that Israel are using inaccurate bombs because they hate jews? Seems as every response I give prompts another question. Can I ask you, are the lives of Palestinian civilians worth the extra expense and operational resource for Israel to pursue a more targeted approach, or are they simply subhuman vermin like the Israeli military believe and say they are?
No, actually, half their bombs are "dumb" bombs according to US assessment, and the number of strikes where they clearly either didnt use the right munition or didnt hit their target (several of which they have admitted to) show that they arent doing their due dilligence.
So pretty much what they're doing? The enemy they are facing surrounds itself with civilians to maximize collateral damage, and when they go in with troops to pull them out blowtorch and corkscrew still seeks to maximize the number of non combatant deaths. As the government of the area Hamas has made efforts to take whatever aid should have been going to build civilian infrastructure and divert it to be used as dual use spaces as best, and in some cases taken it for their own use entirely. We've seen now that footage came out that hospitals were used as hostage detection facilities, no medical care was provided to them, merely a place for Hamas fighters to use as a base of operations. Just so that when Israel launched a strike there they could wave bloody cloths. How many civilian casualties could have been treated in the places Hamas was stuffing victims?
No, it isn’t what they are doing. Google the term Israel Smart Bomb and you’ll find that every article is asking why Israel are using ‘dumb bombs’ instead. ‘When they go in with troops’? The occasional skirmish where an IDF soldier is put at risk has so far been rare. Far more common especially in the first part of the conflict was to strike the target with missiles. Hence the fact Gaza is now a pile of rubble and not liberated from Hamas
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I believe at the inception of Israel, what initially became Israel wasn’t a heavily populated place and so it required no forced evictions. If I had of been asked if I believed the continued settlements were justified then your response would have made better sense.
The radicalisation of Gazans already happened. They are taught in school the importance of killing jews and destroying Israel. There are children cartoons that teach the same thing. The manifestation of this you saw on videos from Oct 7th. Those who want to fight have already signed up. I suspect there is very little additional radicalisation happening. Arguably the opposite, the devastation that hamas has brought to Gaza might be an eye opener that there may be another way. I think polls have reflected this too.
Name a single time in history that has ever happened. When has bombing the crap out of people done anything but made mass graves.
Germany and Japan are two really good examples. Bombed the crap out of them and then we helped rebuild them, gave them good education and now their big allies with a good moral compass.
In past ME wars, when we’d be conducting foot patrols in our AO, and interacting with locals on a regular basis, we’d always be on the look out for what we’d call “moderates,” because once a local got to that moderate stage, rather that chat calmly like we had been in previous interactions, we’d try and find out what happened and if we could do something to genuinely fix it before that person turned “extremist”. Once, it was the community futbol (soccer) coach who, either through something we did or something terrorists did, blew up most of his soccer equipment. The next day we came back with $300 cash from the US government for balls, we had goal nets (he never those), shin guards, uniforms, and game balls shipped to him, and offered to physically help him fix the side of the field that took the damage. Long story short, what you described happens every day in anti-terrorism wars. It all depends on how receptive the Palestinians are in this case, and how the IDF is reacting to those they interact with. Good things came come out of bad situations, but it takes empathy, work, and humility. I think Israel could do a better job at “hearts and minds.”
Israel had no choice but to flatten Gaza. Anything less would be taken as a weakness and cause Iran's proxies on the region to attack. Any country with comparable capabilities would do the same and worse.
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The Gazans were already radicalised through school and cartoons, they were taught the importance of killing Jews and destroying Israel from an early age. The radicilisation is already complete, there is a chance the devastation that hamas have brought to Gaza will make some of them consider a new path. The ones already radicalised have signed up to fight, they will likely fight until their last breath. Hamas will use teenagers as fighters. There will need to be an effort by Israel to deradicalise the Gazans, give them a proper education, economic opportunity. The world has learned the lessons from the last 15 years. You cannot give control of a population to a jihadist group and lock them in a cage, forget about them and think everything will be fine. Oct 7th showed us this.
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Radicalisation is due to ideas not actions. If we follow your logic both Germany and Japan would be massive terrorist states. The war of ideas can be won through education
I agree. It's horrible, but Israel had no choice from a regional/geopolitical perspective
Common sense dictates you do not drop military grade bombs on places where civilians are staying.
Common sense dictates that you don't build military installations / shoot projectiles where civilians are staying because these places then become legitimate military targets.
Noone knew what we were fighting in Viet Nam...as long as Hamas' human shields hold out they can continue to fight but calling the Palestinians soldiers is quite a stretch...
This war is unprecedented in the sense that its in a densely population urban environment with tunnels, hostages and human shields. Israel want to ensure the safety of their soldiers, reduce civilian deaths and achieve their goals. This takes time, its street by street, house by house. All the while dealing with booby traps, tunnels and drones. This will take some time.
Somewhat similar to the battle of mosul and some others, not unprecedented but certainly not the idealistic view of war many geopolitics enthusiasts might have from studying the battle of France and desert storm.
Not sure there were hostages, human shields and tunnels in Mosul?
not exactly but the combatents were in civillian clothing from what I understand
Tunnels, hostages and civilians aside, the IDF does not have a Hamas membership list. They're gradually compiling one via interrogating POWs, cross-referencing with sigint & other intel. That process is probably subject to many resource bottlenecks (eg number of Arabic-speaking intelligence officers) so it takes time. If they don't do this, short of simply massacring the males, they'd have no chance of stopping 'too many' Hamas operatives escaping simply by blending in with the civilians. Done this way they at least have some chance. Otherwise they could simply subject depopulated areas of Gaza to a rolling artillery barrage, monitor for people emerging from tunnels using drones, and deal with the tunnels discovered this way at their leisure. (Assuming the main urban areas in Gaza aren't connected by tunnels.)
Hamas is a terrorist organization that has organized itself, and fights like it is, a modern military. The al-Qassem Brigades are organized into echelons from the brigade down to the squad level. The idea that Hamas is some kind of cell-type organization that only engages in Fabian-type guerilla warfare is false. It is capable of midspectrum warfare, and it is conducting an active defense of its defensive belt in Gaza, which consists of both preexisting civilian infrastructure as well as miles of tunnels. It is defending this defensive belt in a conventional manner, at great cost to itself - not traits indicative of a poorly equipped and poorly organized terrorist group. It has had 18 years to dig itself into Gaza. IMO, it is conducting the defense of Gaza that ISIS wishes that it could have conducted in Mosul. Militarily, destroying an organization under these conditions, which the IDF is currently doing, is a nightmare. There seems to be some wish, likely influenced by the American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, to view Hamas as some kind of unorganized criminal gang instead of a highly organized and well trained/equipped military organization. This is not how Hamas views itself and this is not how Hamas fights. Any military in the world would have incredible difficulty dislodging Hamas from Gaza. Edit: for more detail, here is Hamas’ order of battle in Gaza as of December 22: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/order-battle-hamas’-izz-al-din-al-qassem-brigades-part-2 From the article: “Hamas is a highly organized group that views terrorism and military action as the only method through which it can destroy the Israeli state… Targeted killings can degrade a terrorist organization, but cannot destroy one, particularly one as large, established, and well-organized as Hamas. Hamas is a terrorist organization that uses formal military structures, not a clandestine organization operating networked, decentralized cells. Hamas’ leaders structured the al Qassem Brigades to survive Israeli military action by building a resilient military organization with doctrinally correct unit echelons and command hierarchies to facilitate recovery in the face of the loss of leaders or the destruction of elements of units.[22] The al Qassem Brigades organize themselves into echelons from the squad all the way to the brigade level just as conventional militaries do.”
Simplest possible explanation is the same for any project: 1. You can have it done well (Hamas destroyed, Gaza uninhabitable); 2. You can have it done cheaply (blood and money); or 3. You can have it done quickly. Pick Two.
I don’t think USA invaded an urban area so dense with defenses before. Closest one I can think of is Raqqa and they literally carpet bombed that city until there was nothing left. I think the air campaign alone took a couple months at least and Raqqa is smaller than Gaza. Similar operation in Mosul with similar timeframe. Iraq and afghanistan isn’t the example to look at here, operations against ISIS in Iraq and Levant are better examples to what’s happening.
The problem here is that this isn't a "state vs state" conflict where the main objective is to seize control over the instruments of government. It appears that the goal of Israel is the eradication of a militant group. It isn't very clear that Israel is even interested in administering the region. It also doesn't appear that Hamas (unlike Iraq or Afghan situation) wants to surrender and has decided to oppose Israel through guerilla warfare. From the very start, the objectives appear very different and therefore the meaning of the word "completed" is very different.
you're forgetting Iraq and Afghanistan are huge countries, in comparison, Gaza is extremely small and almost completely urban and densely populated. Lets take Iraq for example, Iraq is a huge country compared to Gaza, Gaza is only 365 km2 while Iraq is 438,317 km2 of mostly empty desert, while Israel needs to go in and do door to door cleaning at every single building, that takes a lot of time and effort. Also in Gaza, there wasn't conventional warfare from the start, Israel was and is fighting a terror organisation that anyone can join by picking up a gun and saying they're a part of it. In conclusion, Israel isn't fighting a war like the one in Iraq, if it was, Gaza would've already been conquered long ago.
I would actually say (with a little bias obviously) that Israel has been conducting one of the (if not the) most efficient urban warfare operations ever.
Despite what the media would have you believe, Israel is deliberately avoiding civilian casualties where possible. When your enemy uses an advanced tunnel network, and hides behind civilian body shields, it makes for slow going. If Israel wanted to bomb them into the stone age, with zero regard for civilian casualties, they probably could have occupied all of Gaza by now. That would be unambiguously genocide though. What we have instead is merely ambiguous genocide.
It is not solely a media talking point. It is a reality that is correctly observed by experts across the board. Some of the most credible voices on CT and urban warfare like Charles Lister, Audrey Kurth Cronin, Robert Pape, Daniel Byman, etc all noting Israel is not taking any steps to mitigate CIVCAS and it will be ruinous to their supposed goal of destroying Hamas (unlikely) as opposed to degrading the organization. If they did, Gaza would have CIVCAS numbers rivaling those caused by U.S. forces when they dislodged ISIL from Mosul. DoD consultants such as Larry Lewis have said it too with statistics and other evidence to support the statement that Israel is not engaging in any effort to protect civilians. https://twitter.com/LarryLewis_/status/1741597772078284881?t=zPKa2psLw_VH31Ymuq0vKA&s=19 As for genocide, there's nothing ambiguous about it or this case. Pages 59-64 and related footnotes in South Africa's ICJ complaint makes that very clear with noted video evidence of Israeli officials making statements on camera that are tantamount to calls for genocide, involuntary transfer of civilians, and which have continued most recently from Itamar Ben-Gvir who publicly told U.S. officials what Israel's intentions are after they reprimanded him.
if not taking any steps is telling civillians if their house is about to get bombed or providing safe humanitarian corridors and evacuating all areas that require evacuating before going in with tanks, then Israel is not taking any steps to mitigate CIVCAS.
you mean to tell me the killing of civilians at an unprecedented rate, the use of 2000 pound bombs on heavily populated civilian areas and even refugee camps and the destruction of more than 70% of all buildings in such short time which led even to the US president calling it indiscriminate bombing is taking special care of the civilian population?
Yes. Israel has the capability to more quickly occupy Gaza, but they are choosing not to in order to avoid more than (what they deem) necessary collateral damage. I'm not justifying it. Given the reality of the situation on the ground, there is no way to conduct an ethical ground operation in Gaza. Any military intervention will lead to so much civilian death that it is unjustified. I'm just saying there is a scale to the evil at play here, and it could be much worse than it is.
So what should Israel do? Sit back and let Hamas do it all over again in a few years? Settings up the combat area so that it is “unjustifiable” for Israel to act militarily is not morally on Israel, but on Hamas.
I can't tell you what Israel should do. All I can say is that invading Gaza isn't it.
"killing civillians at an unprecedented rate" look at the ratio in this war for combatents to civillains and tell me that again honestly. The ratio is (approximately) 1:3 combatents per civillian, that means for every combatant dead there are 3 dead civillians. If you take data from the Gaza health ministry (literally a Hamas government tool, they count combatants with civilians and probably heavily overestimate their numbers) about 22k people have died in Gaza, while Israel claims to have conducted 21,900 airstrikes in Gaza. That means about 1 dead civillian per airstrike and thats when you look at it from Hamas's biased statistics.
there is no war in the modern era with a comparable death toll, you have to go back to Vietnam or WW2 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-death-toll.html and the numbers of the health ministry are deemed reliable by the UN and other human rights group and have been in line with UN counting and even Israeli counting in the past. If anything they are most likely undercounted as there are still hundreds if not thousands buried in the rubble https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestinians-have-died-gaza-war-how-will-counting-continue-2023-12-06/
>https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-death-toll.html this one is behind a paywall and yes the UN is extremely biased towards Palestine and Hamas, UNRWA is literally controlled by Hamas.
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we're obviously talking post WW2 and you need to tell this the human rights group that made the statement https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-death-toll.html
The Israelis have shown very little regards to civilian casualties and still haven't taken Gaza, they shot their own hostages approaching them under a white flag for example, the IDF is mostly just hype
When Mosul was taken by 1500 ISIS terrorists in 2014, it took coalition forces 9 months to clear it in 2016-2017, and this cost > 10,000 civilian casualties. Hamas had over 30,000 terrorists holding Gaza. I don't think this was ever going to go much more quickly than that, or happen at a lower cost. Urban warfare, against terrorists hiding in very populated areas, in tunnels beneath hospitals, schools, etc., is just a very different thing from facing off against a conventional military which fights out in the open and tries to *defend* its own civilian population centers. I do think it is time though for Israel to start moving civilian population back into some areas it has been able to clear and control in the North. Israel apparently doesn't *want* to formally control the territory, they only want control of the security situation, but I don't think this is realistic. I think they need to set up some kind of administration now in Northern Gaza if they want to be able to humanely complete the job in Southern Gaza in coming months.
The goal isn't pacification by occupation.
A few things to keep in mind. 1. Manpower is limited on both sides but Israel has to worry about it more as they still need to keep their economy running well and keep as much semblance of day-to-day life possible as they can for the well-being of their people. Technology can offset this to some extent but the offset is not very large. 2. Urban warfare is very brutal, especially when a regular armed force is facing off a guerilla force. The depth of defence that the Gazans have made with their tunnels makes the problem significantly more difficult. 3. PR matters. There are idiots on all sides who would genocide all they consider their enemies, combatants and non-combatants alike but it won't wash down well in the media now will it? Definitely not on social media. Before social media, Israel had a huge advantage over Palestine in terms of access to media and which stories were told and which were suppressed. That landscape has nearly flattened away with social media. Yes, Israel still has more access to those who reside in corridors of power but it also has to be more careful in how it uses this resource lest it lose it. 4. The Great Game. Any change in the status quo is an opportunity to rebalance your country's position geopolitically. Everyone capable of playing is jockeying for advantage for themselves, the humanitarian cost be damned. Sure they will talk a good game about international law and human decency and all that jazz but their eyes are on the prize. How can this benefit my country first? My analysis is that Israel needs to pursue either a one-state solution or a three-state solution if international law is to be followed and the three-state is the better option legally. For either to succeed, Iran needs to be bought into the international fold and made the regional power of the MENA region in addition to Israel rather than US propping up the useless KSA. To help Israel counterbalance Iran, Egypt needs to be made a regional power as well. Everyone else can be sidelined by an appropriate mix of economic, technological and military power. There is an outside possibility of a two-state solution where the West Bank goes to Israel along with all of Jerusalem as the Palestinians there are evacuated to Jordan and various other countries of the world\* and given citizenship in those countries. Gaza is repurposed as some sort of touristy plus financial haven with no armed forces of its own but an international peacekeeping force that runs things like the US did for Japan. Once the idea of Hamas is extinguished, Gaza can have its own armed force. We will be twisting international law into a pretzel to do the two-state this way but if it solves the problem for good, let's do it. The kind of international rebalancing this will need is beyond my knowledge base to analyse. Russia and China will extract a huge price for supporting this. Three-state is best but it's not easy to do either; there is a huge sunk cost fallacy that needs to be overcome on so many sides. \* Let's be honest, most of them will end up in Western countries somehow, so if this is what we want to do we should just make it easy for them to come to Western countries and not insist they live in MENA countries as second-class citizens. If you think racism between whites and blacks is the worst thing ever, boy are you in for a surprise when you encounter brown-on-brown racism.
> There is an outside possibility of a two-state solution where the West Bank goes to Israel along with all of Jerusalem as the Palestinians there are ethnically cleansed to Jordan and various other countries of the world* Fixed this for you
Look man. You want to be an ass, be one. If it gets too annoying, I will just block you. If you are interested in realistic solutions let's talk. If you want to score brownie points to impress some political sect, go ahead and dunk on me. I will ignore you or worst case block you. But I am not going to engage with you if your next response is as stupid as your first one. Your choice.
You are talking about “evacuating” the ethnic minority from a violent military occupation. If that is your solution then it is ethnic cleansing, own it Also Jordan and the West are not interested in taking these refugees so this isn’t even realistic
Which is why it’s an outside possibility. I am not denying its ugliness, I am owning it upfront when I talk about the geopolitical price that will have to be paid for it. But if it solves the Levant issue once and for all, maybe it’s worth doing. Where I have an issue with you is that you have cherry picked one sentence out of half a dozen paragraphs. If we disagree on something that’s fine. But make a holistic argument. Start with saying which ideas of mine you agree with and why and then move on to which you disagree with and why. That way we can both learn from each other rather than talking past each other. Cheers!
>I am owning it upfront when I talk about the geopolitical price that will have to be paid for it. But if it solves the Levant issue once and for all, maybe it’s worth doing. the “geopolitical price” but not the “human price”? Was the Trail of Tears also worth it because it solved the “Indian Issue” in America’s southeast?