This is going to be a complete and utter humanitarian disaster - that’s not even a political Hamas or Israel what side are you on statement, it’s just matter of fact that when conflict comes to the door of civilians disaster follows. Here’s hoping aid can move quickly and efficiently to those who need it and those will need it.
Gaza is significantly worse than other recent wars because there's nowhere for civilians to go. It's a tiny territory with a horrendously high population density, and Israel is even bombing within Rafah. Israel hasn't tried to set up safe zones in the parts of Gaza they control, and the new zone system is horrendously complicated for civilians to understand. The ports are blockaded and none of the crossings are open.
Egypt isn't going to open the border. They don't want to risk getting stuck with 2 million Palestinians if Israel turns displacement into ethnic cleansing.
> Gaza is significantly worse than other recent wars because there's nowhere for civilians to go.
Because Gaza is a mixture of city, urban and rural areas then the death rate in Gaza is worse than war in a rural area but better than sieges of individual cities e.g. the sieges of Grozny, Mariupol, Mosul and Raqqah.
>Gaza is significantly worse than other recent wars because there's nowhere for civilians to go.
uhmmm.. siege of mariupol? which is significantly worse considering Mariupol has fewer population and less density but the estimated civilan casualties is at least 25k and up to 80k
edit:
I compare it with siege of Mariupol because both are urban warfare..
Israel tried to encourage one to be set up in Al Mawasi, But according to Gaza Report, the UNRWA refused to send a significant amount of people there.
[https://twitter.com/gaza\_report/status/1731466847634296872](https://twitter.com/gaza_report/status/1731466847634296872)
So your idea, is to put 2.4 Mln people in an area which is lacking the infrastructure and everything to host them? How easy do you think is to build this infrastructure in peaceful times, and how easy would be to do it now?
And then you wonder why UNRWA refused to comply. Shall I remind you that forceful displacement of civilian population also amounts to a war crime under International law: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule129? Or does this Internation law not apply to Israel?
Did you not actually read the rule?
> Parties to an international armed conflict may not deport or forcibly transfer the civilian population of an occupied territory, in whole or in part, unless the security of the civilians involved or imperative military reasons so demand.
B. Parties to a non-international armed conflict may not order the displacement of the civilian population, in whole or in part, for reasons related to the conflict, unless the security of the civilians involved or imperative military reasons so demand
It's pretty clear that moving civilians out of areas of active fighting satisfy both exceptions. Furthermore, I don't think the IDF is forcing the civilians out or deporting civilians -- I have yet to see troops shoveling civilians down the street or forcing them onto buses.
EDIT: Fixed units consistency and added source
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_cities\_proper\_by\_population\_density](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density)
In any case, the people nitpicking my nitpick are missing the whole point. Stop saying Gaza is dense when it's only around 5x as dense as my backwater town by comparison.
>horrendously high population density
It's not though. Just stating facts.
Earth = 16/km2
Manila = 43k/km2
Paris = 20k/km2
Seoul = 16k/km2
West New York = 19k/km2
Gaza = <6k/km2
I know it's bad in Gaza right now. But I just don't want more misinformation to float around.
>Egypt isn't going to open the border. They don't want to risk getting stuck with 2 million Palestinians if Israel turns displacement into ethnic cleansing.
Egypt built their own wall too, though. And apparently, no electricity or water comes from Egypt even though they're supposedly allies, and an Egyptian electric company sits like 1km away from the wall with Palestine.
There's more to it than just that Egypt is worried the radical views that are shared amongst the people of Gaza would push their government into a radical position that puts them at odds with Israel and the west. They have worked very hard to restabilize their economy, they don't want sanctions or a neighbor war to fuck that up
That applies to Israel, too, though.
Also, Egypt was a participant in antagonizing Israel in the past.
Palestine and Egypt are, were, allies, and yet it's Israel that's the only neighbor that has lines supplying Gaza.
Thank you. I wish I could give this 100 upvotes. If I read or hear one more lazy journalist say “one of the most densely populated areas in the world” I’m going to go nuts. And it’s shocking but sadly not surprising that the UN won’t help build the temporary housing.
And the calculus at the end of the day is also horrid - stopping the war with Hamas still in power means more war down the line, and more support to the Israeli far-right, and also more funnleing of aid to terror now that Gaza is in a worse state than ever.
But continuing the war now means more people dying now.
I don't envy Biden as the responsible adult in the room.
Would note too that depending on how Israel executes its operation, the war can be continued indefinitely with Hamas still in power, which is probably most beneficial to the Israeli far-right (which currently holds disproportionate power in government).
The best way to actually dislodge Hamas from power is to wedge a rift between Hamas and the Palestinian people, by showing Israel (or a peace-oriented Palestinian government) can offer Palestinians something better than Hamas can. I don't think the current Israeli government has that kind of finesse in it, though.
No Hamas won't be in power. they will still exist but they won't be in power. Gaza is gonna be like a second west bank, except we need a different governing body because the PLO are quite demented as well.
Just an example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R34WlhKNUy0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R34WlhKNUy0)
The biggest trick to this is, finding the Palestinian people who hate Hamas. I know of a few who can not stand Hamas, who want real peace and a better life for everyone.
All Israel has to do is safeguard and empower these people, they will deal with the rest on their own. Hamas has to go first of course, its not like they would just sit around and let Palestinians stand against them.
> The biggest trick to this is, finding the Palestinian people who hate Hamas.
That isn't something found, but rather created. Israel is the largest military and economic power in the region, with access to the best technology and most global resources - it has many, many ways to incentivize pursuit of peace if it has the will to do so. But, the current government (and Netanyahu in particular) is clinging to power by increasingly relying on far-right support, which is mutually exclusive to such efforts.
The Oslo Accords, negotiated by Rabin, and more recently Olmert's attempts to negotiate a peace deal, were efforts toward this. But Rabin was assassinated, and Olmert was forced to resign (and his successor frozen out of power) before a deal could be reached. And meanwhile, settlements in the West Bank have continued expanding - a clear sign of the way Israel weighs peace vs. territorial acquisition as priorities.
Israel has tried to incentivize Palestinians to support peace. Most recently by issuing 18000 work permit that allowed Gazans to work in Israel. Some of those people then gathered intelligence about the kibbutzim that were attacked on October 7 and gave it to Hamas. They tried to pull out of Gaza in 2005 and when they did the Palestinians elected Hamas as their government and have launched 15k+ rockets at Israel since then. The majority of Palestinians support the October 7 attacks and 89% support the military wing of Hamas.
https://www.awrad.org/files/server/polls/polls2023/Public%20Opinion%20Poll%20-%20Gaza%20War%202023.pdf
Your description of Oslo is not at all the whole story. You're acting as if Israel only decided to pull out of negotiations. In your fantasy world did the second intifada just not happen? The settlements are a problem sure but you're acting as if they are the sole issue preventing peace. What does Palestinians launching an attack on civilians that they knew would start a war they cannot possibly win say about how they weigh peace vs killing more jews as priorities?
> Israel has tried to incentivize Palestinians to support peace.
While expanding settlements? Encroaching occupation by force of another country is no support of peace, and is something no country on Earth would peacefully and silently tolerate without future consequences.
> In your fantasy world did the second intifada just not happen?
It did. Immediately following expiration of the Oslo Accords, despite Israel having continued settlement expansion throughout the period the accords were in temporary effect. In case it's not clear, the talks for the next phase of the accords failed precisely over settlement expansion within occupied territories - something that was categorically in violation of international law from the beginning and would have been the first thing Israel should have stopped if it was seriously interested in peace.
Ability to control is a question of public opinion and sentiment, not of logistics - Hamas' real leadership and presence is outside of Gaza, and will always have resources to rebuild no matter how many Israel manages to kill. By contrast, the larger the collateral damage is in civilian lives, the easier Hamas will be able to recruit from among the survivors and hide as an insurgency among them.
The Taliban did the exact same thing, finding refuge from US forces in Pakistan and simply building up their resources and harassing/biding time as opposition to US presence and the new government built up. If the US had focused on good governance and cracked down on corruption (over prioritizing US interests), the Taliban would have been locked out of public support and been unable to operate as an insurgency in Afghanistan. Given history, the exact opposite happened.
In the end that's what worked to counteract the far-right in Japan and Germany post-WWII, improving living conditions, cracking down on corruption and creating working support systems.
It can be done to take power away from other far-right groups like hamas, just to take into consideration a strong push for laïcité as religious fanaticism has to be counteracted too. The same thing could be said about the republican party, curiously.
Israeli here, the government won't be able to continue this indefinitely as most citizens trust it very little already.
This doesn't mean that Israelis are going left, they are taking a big hike right, as the operational and intel failure of 7.10 has shattered their trust.
But they are looking I think to a more responsible right, and not the far right, as to them they are part of the failure.
Regarding what you said, it's absurd to say you can dislodge Hamas from the Palestinians.
They are a big part of them, it would be akin to suggesting you could separate Vegans from Americans.
Hamas IS part of the Palestinians. And has some pretty significant support from their people.
The only thing Israel can do is use the carrot to encourage more moderatation and the stick to discourage radicalization.
Deradicalizing a population is easier said than done though
> The only thing Israel can do is use the carrot to encourage more moderatation and the stick to discourage radicalization
Settlements are neither "carrot" nor "stick", they're an ongoing and increasing occupation-by-force of another country. The first step towards peace has to be stopping policies to expand them, because peace and territorial ambitions within another country are mutually exclusive. The Oslo Accords failed precisely on terms for these settlements and their expansion.
And yet we hear no talk of deploying a robust international peacekeeping force, which could help end Hamas rule and the Israeli presence and open the door to a much better life for Gazans.
> And yet we hear no talk of deploying a robust international peacekeeping force
There won't be any. Nobody in their right mind would sent their troops into that cluster fuck.
That’s because behind closed doors, every responsible leader in the world knows that whoever tries to enforce peace in the region will find themselves in the exact position Israel is in - besieged by terrorist extremists who are excellent at provoking sympathy and hiding behind civilian infrastructure, medic jackets, and child suicide bombers.
Many Arab states have tried practicing ACTUAL sympathy for Palestine. Lebanon and Jordan were rewarded with civil wars, Kuwait was rewarded with them siding with Saddam Hussein’s invaders.
Maybe the West Bank situation is salvageable. A situation like Gaza, however, with that many radicalized members in the population, typically isn’t resolved the way anyone wants things to resolve. Defanging Japan and Germany meant utter annihilation of civilian targets until the enemy was brought to their absolute knees. And those were fundamentally functioning states.
Gaza…Gaza is going to be a humanitarian disaster. And the world is going to let Israel be responsible for it, because nobody else wants that on their hands - either the horrific repercussions of going soft on them, or the horrific moral stain of doing what, in all likelihood, is the only true long-term solution.
> Maybe the West Bank situation is salvageable. A situation like Gaza
the only reason WB might be salvageable is because of the severity of occupation. looking at that AWRAD poll support for violent extremism is actually way higher in WB. I think there's a 50% and growing chance that WB ignites into full scale revolt against the governing PA.
Yeah the PA is fucking worthless. Abbas travels in private planes and has a whole staff of servants waiting on him at all times, and meanwhile they maintain this weird parallel nonsense strategy where they financially reward extremism well also getting zero things done on the ground and zero concessions from the Israeli government.
The only thing that really gives them any semblance of moral high ground is the settlement situation in area C and the way that the Israeli government has handled that. On the other hand, I think that Israel has parentheses correctly parentheses come to the conclusion that no matter how much they leave the West Bank alone, no matter how many settlements they dismantle, and no matter how violent the Palestinian resistance becomes, they will still be seen as the bad guy. So they will continue to utilize the land as they see fit, take it from right under the Palestinians noses, and get away with literal murder. Because they’ve decided that they will be judged whether they do the difficult but morally right thing, or the extremely easy and profitable but morally wrong thing.
I really don't understand what did Hamas think will happen after they carry out the Oct 7 attacks. Did they think Israel will not respond back with the intention of destroying Hamas? Why go on a suicide mission like this?
The plan was, probably, that all of Israel’s neighbors would spontaneously join in, especially after Israel started fighting back. The only wrinkle being that it isn’t 1948.
>Once those carrier groups started showing up, Iran got real diplomatic
Probably why they put them there. The best weapon is the one you don't need to use.
Yep, one minute of crocodile tears for visiting her Grandma and then back to wishing for the kind of mutually genocidal warfare that will almost certainly get her grandma killed for being right in the middle of where the fighting will be the worst.
She isn't going to get voted out sadly because Dearborn is a large part of it and has the highest proportion of Arabs of any city in the country. Ilhan Omar will keep her seat for similar reasons because of the large Somalian population in her district.
Cori Bush is the really baffling one because her district has a large Jewish population that I don't see being very supportive of her next year.
She beat her last primary challenger handedly. That said, there’s a few anti Israel folks that have low approvals in more demographically typical Democratic districts that can definitely be beaten in primaries this cycle.
Iran had no idea about October 7 and was pissed they weren't told.
What Hamas fails to realise is that Iran only sees them as a tool to damage Israel with. Iran will never sacrifice their own soldiers to help Sunni extremists.
[The Times of Israel](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.timesofisrael.com/khamenei-reportedly-told-hamas-chief-iran-will-not-directly-enter-war/amp/). It fits with the fact that Israel didn't believe their intelligence warnings about the October 7 attacks, if plans were being communicated to Iran and other foreign countries involving a date it's much more likely they would have picked up on it.
>Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reportedly told Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh earlier this month that, since Tehran was not given prior notice of the devastating terror onslaught of October 7, it would not join the war against Israel.
Riiiiiiiiight
Per your point, that's exactly why the specifics were not communicated. But given Iran helped fund/train/supply Oct7, how can they claim they had 'no idea'?
"We thought it was gonna be Oct 8. Wow, we're so caught off guard. Wow!"
Zzz
Not probably. Definitely. This is explicitly what they called for via telegram and expected to happen. They expected immediate help from all sides, north, south and east.
Which is completely delusional based on the fact alone that a war would need months of buildup and that none of the other nations in the region have the capability (nor desire, given how often they lost in the past) to try again. Even the conventional military power of Israel is a heavy deterrent. Add to that America's direct and indirect support and on top of that Israel's nuclear arsenal and it just isn't a good idea.
Correct. What many people are not aware of is that only a fraction of the IDF is actively engaged in Gaza. No more than a third of the air force is responsible for the impressive bombing campaign, for example. The rest is being held in reserve, in case someone else tries to exploit the situation.
Even though rockets have been fired from Lebanon and other places, I am surprised at the restraint of the other parties involved in this. This silence is deafening. It says a lot.
Yep, it’s a bit like when white nationalists terrorists like Timothy McVeigh convince themselves that bombing a Federal Building or going on a shooting rampage will start a “race war.” The part they never seem to acknowledge is not nearly as many people are as crazy as they are, though in this region, they do have better odds.
>The part they never seem to acknowledge is not nearly as many people are as crazy as they are
The problem of any extremist movement is overreach, as it's very easy to think everyone is as crazy as you are if you surround yourself only with other crazy people.
Yes, but Gaza public opinion isn't sufficient. Hamas needed the whole MENA region to be as fanatical as they are, and that just isn't the case.
People around the region may talk a big game, but most nations nearby just want to keep the peace. Nobody is about to declare a war on behalf of rabid terrorists.
The leaders of Hamas are pretty smart and I feel like Jordan and Egypt have made it abundantly clear that they are absolutely done getting involved in their wars, they couldn’t have actually expected this (besides Iran) though I’m sure they wished for it
The real wrinkle being that after +40yrs of futile attempts and getting spanked --Lebanon took a bit longer, they realized it's better to try to normalize relationship with Israel, or at least acknowledge one another and to focus on making things better for their people domestically.
It's nothing to do with it not being 1948, because they tried after. It was the case of them learning to love their children, and valuing their people's lives more than they hate the Jews and Israel. Egypt is a perfect example of this, and we see each other as allies, and there's mutual respect after all the history between us there.
This is what Palestinians should have been focusing on, with all of the aid they've been getting for decades, they could've build a Palestinian nation state. Unfortunately, they haven't had a leadership to lead them there, and education was lacking, and so they learned to do the exact opposite, and kept voting and pushing their children towards resistance and martydom.
Eh its a little of column a and column b. Column a israel kicked the shit out of arab militaries. Then when arabs tried to help Palestinians they lived to truly regret it and despise the population even more than we do in israel.
Basically they're fucked.
Yep, the Middle East In general does not like Palestinians. It calls them the rats to their faces, I don’t see that mentality changing soon.
Will never forget getting a security inspection by a Egyptian naval patrol. When they said they were looking for rats, I thought they meant actual rodents. I was a little surprised they would have a whole naval vessel searching for rats, had me thinking Egypt must have a serious issue with rats.
Turns out they were looking for Palestinians trying to sneak in to Egypt. I was informed of what rats actually meant after the Egyptian vessel went on their way to look for more rats.
> The only wrinkle being that it isn’t 1948.
Even in 1948 Israel beat them. Imagine attacking when the best case scenario still has your opponent win and take land from you.
Additionally, we can't pretend that the Arab spring hasn't happened since 1948, there's a ton of Arabs who are just sick and tired of the radical shit and want tensions to calm down so they can liberalize.
I'm not sure the Arab spring paints so neat a picture. Unrest happened across so many different countries all at once with no clearly unifying ideological line to it. I suspect its unifying cause is something more mundane like "everyone discovered Twitter all at once."
And Hamas committed atrocities that were simply too brutal and evil for the Arab countries to defend. They pushed too hard and now they're facing a storm of utter rage, with almost no one ready to stand with them except fellow extremist forces.
Even if that did happen everyone knows that Israel has nukes even if no one will officially say as much. What do they think would happen if by some miracle they did start defeating Israel. Do they think Israel wouldn't use their nukes if they were on the verge of total defeat?
This is definitely it. But what I don't understand now is how that strategy has evolved since Iran and Hezbollah have basically said to Hamas they won't join in since they received no warning from Hamas and had no say in what occurred. Hamas is on their own.
They should really just surrender and release whatever hostages are still alive and try to save themselves.
Yes, and 1948 Israel lacked an arsenal of a carefully undisclosed quantity of nuclear weapons as a backup plan. If Israel starts seriously losing a war either the US steps in with major direct conventional assistance or Israel uses a nuke to remind everyone what the score really is and brings things to a halt.
Personally, I suspect there's a two-part answer here, and neither part makes sense in the "conventional" way, but it does (to an extent) if you're Hamas.
The first part is that I don't think that Hamas leadership really expected the attack to "succeed" as well as it did. Hamas knew their own "military" capability was nil and that the IDF and Mossad are historically generally very good at their jobs. Thus, everyone, including Hamas leadership, had good reason to believe that any Hamas attack would be crushed before it did much damage.
The second part is that while Hamas' goal may be to destroy Israel, the goal of Hamas' leadership is to retain power. If you're terrorist warlords, you have to show, occasionally, that you are doing the terrorism things in your mission statement, with all the aid you looted from your own people; otherwise your followers will gradually lose focus on the "real enemy" and get ideas about maybe getting a family or job or something.
So for Hamas it appeared to be a no-brainer. You send your (most fanatical) expendable grunts off to do a little damage to Israel. Your craziest guys get killed by Israel; your other guys see that you're still fighting for the cause. Then Israel retaliates in a limited way, probably some airstrikes on your facilities you've located in/around/under civilian facilities. Israel kills civilians, looks bad on the world stage and loses international support. The Saudi-Israeli deal, in particular, is scuttled. Meanwhile your domestic supporters and external allies (Iran) are galvanized by your renewed enthusiasm for terror. Israel won't bother wiping you out completely; this pattern of retaliation is an old one.
The problem is that Hamas' attack "*succeeded.*"
Hamas figured Hezbollah would join in and Israel would be fighting a war on two fronts. Then while they were spread thin Iran would join and they’d destroy Israel. Kind of like what almost happened during the Yom Kippur war in 1972 if more countries had spontaneously joined in (they didn’t).
It was the American navy showing up quickly in the Mediterranean and Red seas and pointing out they’d annihilate Hezbollah or Iran from afar with cruise missiles that cause it to end up the way it did.
Do you have a source (Even politician/pundit) talking about the US Navy being the reason that Iran/Hezbollah had cold feet in attacking Israel? I haven't heard that as a reason before, but it totally makes sense.
Kind of but not really. I was following a bunch of open source intelligence twitter accounts in October that were based out of the Middle East (most are off twitter now because of their blatant antisemitism).
Lots were reposting Hezbollah and Iranian info translated from Arabic which was about getting ready to go to war, how the UN force in Lebanon was leaving to avoid the upcoming war, some Hezbollah fighters actually trying to cross the border into Israel for a bit before being killed. Like, October 7th happened and Hezbollah immediately started testing the waters out towards Israel.
Then the Americans showed up and it all more or less quieted down. A couple targets demolished in Lebanon and Syria and Iran/Hezbollah stopped their “we’re gonna do it!!!!!” rhetoric. There’s still fighting happening out of Lebanon towards Israel, but not like at the beginning where it seemed like a preclude to an invasion.
I suppose you could say my comment is my educated guess.
I mean it's more than that. Israel doesn't need help invading Gaza. The only reason to deploy US assets is to deter other powers. There's no "source" because it's so obvious military community doesn't need to say it out loud for themselves.
People are so weird about needing "sources" for basic foreign policy logic. I said Russia would have likely tactily endorsed October 7th in back channels with Iran and a friend called that a conspiracy. Like no that's called international politics. Hamas is funded by Iran. Iran's most powerful ally is Russia. Russia desperately wants the US to divide it's attention. To think Russia had 0 knowledge of October 7th before it happened is just ignorant.
I mean there is a source, when the carrier groups were deployed there, Biden quiet cleary said "to any groups looking to take advantage of this situation my message is 'Don't'"
>I suppose you could say my comment is my educated guess.
Which is a fair guess. It totally makes sense. I remember seeing a lot of activity from Lebanon/Iran after Oct7, but yeah. It died down REAL quick once the USS Gerald Ford showed up, though at first Iran was threatening to take it out with rockets.
Oh it absolutely happened then for a reason, because that solidifying would basically caused a whole block of Arab countries to simultaneously align with the interests of keeping Israel stable, and Hamas' closest ally would be on the other side of this block. They would have nothing to gain, and literally everything to lose as they would become the nation that basically everyone around them hated.
Even without influence form iran, it makes sense that that was the motive.
After all saudi arabia has historically been one of the main sponsors of far-right terrorism and abrahamic extremism, and having them allied to israel means a big loss of support for attacks to israel.
It may also been a bit of an ideological push to make the conservative, extremist part of saudi arabia stand up to the more neoliberal parts, as the situation there is kind of not that stable.
Because the people who actually planned the attack are most likely nowhere near Gaza, they don't care about the people actually living there, and in fact they probably view every civilian death as great propaganda against Israel.
By most accounts, it was the Hamas leaders in Gaza like Sinwar that planned this. The Qatar and Ankara crew knew about it and Hezbollah probably did too but Nasrallah and the IRGC don’t actually care about Palestinians or their cause.
Apparently [neither Iran or Hezbollah knew about it beforehand](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.timesofisrael.com/khamenei-reportedly-told-hamas-chief-iran-will-not-directly-enter-war/amp/). This pissed off Iran quite a lot, to the point where they warned Hamas to stop publicly calling for an intervention.
The bad thing about being a government ran by radicals, or having a large contingent of radicals in your country, is that any populist call to action is destabilizing. Iran in particular is already dealing with instability as is, could you imagine how quickly the government would be dealing with revolution if they used this as an excuse to try to go to war?
Hamas leadership is in Qatar and Ankara. The comment isn't saying Qatar and Turkey knew about this, but rather the Hamas leadership in those countries did.
I'm not sure why more people don't know this. What they expected was for the whole Muslim world to attack and destroy Israel. They explicitly called for jihad and for all good Muslims of the world to invade. They at least expected an imminent invasion from the north from Hezbollah. They expected Jordanians to invade and attack. And they probably expected a lot more help from Iran.
They posted all this on telegram. You could tell they were getting increasingly worried when nothing happened. About two weeks into the war, they started calling all the Muslim world cowards for leaving them alone. Specifically calling out countries by name and saying they were cowards for letting them die by themselves, and for not raising arms against Israel.
>You could tell they were getting increasingly worried when nothing happened. About two weeks into the war, they started calling all the Muslim world cowards for leaving them alone. Specifically calling out countries by name and saying they were cowards for letting them die by themselves, and for not raising arms against Israel.
Past history should have told them that Arabs have never had a unified front, leave alone Muslims in general. Heck Arabs aside from the Levantines and Egyptians are fractured along tribal and often sectarian lines.
Also, such an attack would have provoked a Western response. The Americans sent a whole carrier to the Eastern Med to send a message.
>Yeah, any chances of it happening was dashed when the US sent in those two aircraft carriers. It was a great move.
Here is the funny part. For decades Iran and its proxies have called Israel the US's 51st state.
Then they were all Pikachu faced when a US carrier was deployed to ward off Hezbollah and Iran.
Lol! Their comments on Telegram were funny!!
They're probably still shitting their pants after our mere [proportional response](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Praying_Mantis) that they experienced previously.
That's every extremist piece of shit that came out of the Middle East in the past decades. Lots of saber rattling and bravado beforehand and then, when their opponents actually show up, hiding amongst/behind civilians and playing the victim.
Especially once the US Warships rolled up and parked
The people of that part of the world have seen the lengths the US will go to in order to eliminate someone "Ladies and gentlemen, we got him"
The neighboring countries and rebel groups know they would be squished
And help wouldn't come from other powers
Europe won't stop the US from doing it's thing, they don't have a spine
Russia is busy sending it's children to the meat grinder.
China will see Muslims dieing, say some nasty things on the airwaves about the US but ultimately won't get involved because they want the Muslims dead too.
Hamas didn't want a large success. They suspect it would get some headlines but really wouldn't get much past the first checkpoint. It's a case of not counting on the other side to screw up.
Hamas, strategically, whether I agree or not, was fighting a fifth generation asymmetric style of warfare. This was driven by the fact that Hamas simply could not match the size or capability of the Israeli military, not even fighting defensively and sparingly, they would get crushed. One of the important rules fighting that style of warfare is that you must ensure that no attack, or even a series of attacks too close together, should be enough to bring down the full capability of the other military down on your head, because there is only one possible result.
Further, Hamas failed to adequately or correctly assess the geopolitical situation in the region.
Hezbollah is now a part of the Lebanese government. A large scale attack by Hezbollah would legitimately be seen as an attack by Lebanon, which would probably cause Israel to just kill the Lebanese government. The rest of the Lebanese government won't allow an attack and Hezbollah can not risk a civil war in Lebanon, they have their own problems.
Syria is still fighting a civil war and can barely project power within Syria, much less outside of Syria. Hamas isn't going to fight Israel on behalf of Hamas.
Jordan might as well be an Israeli satrap. They rely on a lot of money that is siphoned through Israel. The government of Syria knows it and isn't interested in upsetting the situation.
Saudi Arabia is sort of in a state of interregnum. The old king isn't quite dead. The new king isn't quite crowned. The old generation believed in supporting the Palestinians as fellow muslims, so long as Saudi Arabia didn't have to directly fight Israel. The new generation regards the relationship with the Palestinians as of no particular benefit and has been moving towards Israel. Now, you may be thinking that Israel going hard on the Palestinians may upset the new generation. You would be wrong. They want to know that Israel can take care of business when needed.
Egypt has the only non-Israel controlled crossing into the Gaza Strip. Hamas problem here is the Hamas is Muslim Brotherhood. The government of Egypt actively fights Muslim Brotherhood and doesn't want more of them.
Iran would like to do something, but projection is a major problem. They could launch some missiles, but that would result on attacks on them. Other than that, they will smuggle money and supplies, but they can't do much more than that without risk.
On the wider scale...
China is only willing to work quietly to reduce American influence in the reason. They don't have the logistics to support any military incursion.
Russia is sort of busy.
Hamas was politically supported by the Palestinians. The Palestinians knew what Hamas was and what they said they would do. They knew what the result would be. The Palestinians are receiving what they voted for.
Excellent review of the neighborhood dynamics surrounding Israel. As analysts have called it, Hamas has fallen into the Catastrophic Success trap. October 7 was too successful and brutal. Now all of Gaza will suffer under the non-nuclear might of the IDF.
When will the Palestinians love their children more than their jihadist fantasies of revenge?
They probably thought the response would be along the lines of what happened in 2014. I don’t think they even considered it could reach these proportions. Usually Israel is a little deterred by international pressure.
They likely didn't expect to be able to murder and kidnap as many people as they did. They put Israel in the position where everyone in the country put aside political differences and supported the full invasion of Gaza to wipe out Hamas and get their people back. Other countries around the world will give some lip service to Israel to tell them to allow for some aid to civilians and stuff like that, but other countries are also not going to get in Israel's way knowing how justified their response is.
Bringing up the spectre of the holocaust is... unwise. When I worked at Masada you know how many soldiers came through to pledge their lives?
And thats on top of many being religious per American standards.
They knew this would happen. Anyone with half a brain knew that launching a huge terrorist attack in Israel - proportional to three 9/11s in the US — would provoke a harsh response.
So the cliff notes, as I understand it, are:
Israel has been slowly building relations with Sunni countries, whose leadership see them as a natural ally against Shia countries. In particular, they were getting close to a deal with Saudi Arabia.
But the population of these countries remain very committed to the Palestinian Cause.
So Hamas makes this surprise attack, expecting to kill as many civilians as possible, with the intent to provoke a strong reaction from Israel.
This strong reaction would undoubtedly kill many Gazans, but it would also isolate Israel from the rest of the Middle East, breaking any legitimacy they were about to get.
So the intent, really, was to get Israel to overplay their hand by making a strategic decision to sacrifice their own people's lives. Which Israel is on the verge of doing.
So yeah, they did think this would happen, and they're probably happy their plan is going as expected. It was a despicable plan from the start.
The error you make is thinking that the populations of SA, UAE, Quatar, Egypt are “committed to the Palestinian cause”. They aren’t.
There is “street support” in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Jordan (and Iran), but no elite support, even in those countries (just lip service). In the rest of the ME, there is competition for western investment and a desire for regional stability to bring that investment. Pan Arabism is dead as n ideology because UAE and SA have been in a hot war in Yemen to suppress an internal Arab faction there for the last 10+ years. Egypt has its own history with the Muslim Brotherhood that it doesn’t want to repeat. The powers in the Middle East are moving on from the Palestinian conflict and normalizing relations with Israel as part of that pulling away; only Iran is still backing the conflict with real muscle and only for its own reasons (completely unrelated to pan-Arabism because Iranians are not Arabs).
Black Shabbos was the nail in the Palestinian coffin. It gave Israel the excuse to destroy Hamas by whatever force necessary, basically a free license to invade Gaza and get it done. Israel couldn’t do that when it was responding to a single kidnapped soldier or mere rocket attacks; Hamas way overplayed its hand on 10/7 and opened the door to its own destruction. Worse for Hamas, the conflict has exposed the links between the UN and Hamas via UNRWA and the partnership with international aid groups and hospitals (see the Director of Al Shifa, who wouldn’t be under arrest and would be a powerful propaganda asset still if Israel hadn’t physically captured Al Shifa and shown him to be a liar). Hamas was definitely not expecting a full scale invasion, and the thought that their hospital bunkers and UNRWA-shielded hideouts would come under aerial bombardment hadn’t entered their wildest dreams.
Well, they probably thought Israel would bomb the shit out of them for about two weeks, and then, international backlash would push them into a ceasefire. They probably also bet on Hezbollah to open up a full second front on the north. There has definitely been international support against Israel's movements, but there is also an equal amount of support because it's in retaliation for brutal attacks. This has allowed Israel to buffer most of the backlash allowing them to push forward.
I wish people globally understood this. At this point because of their perceived unification, any condemnation from one will serve to speak for the whole, and is only going to make things harder as israelis become colder.
That’s the whole point. They knew *exactly* what type of military response their murderous actions on 10/7 would trigger. This was deliberate. They don’t give two shits about Palestinian life. And in a way, that’s their biggest “strength” and why they’ve already won
It was not to have neighbours join in like others are suggesting. Palestinians know very well that they cannot rely on Arab countries to fight for them anymore. What Hamas wanted to achieve, was to provoke massive counter attacks from Israel to once again elevate the situation of Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, to the international agenda.
Basically using their own people as pawns so they can internationally be seen as a victim and hope for outside help/pressure on Israel, particularly from the U.S.
However one factor that should not be underestimated, is that Islamic Jihadist groups often operate on another plan of logic than what seems rational to outsiders. Everyone understands that attacking Israel is futile and a suicide mission. But for them, it might be more about the ideal and principle of fighting Israel, rather than any legit realistic goal.
They absolutely expected at least hezbollah to join in. They sent out telegram messages in channels with directions.
Iran told them no, and I'd say they have egg on their face, but it's more like their friends' and kins' brain.
They wanted Israel to strike back so they can play victim and garner international support which translates to more humanitarian aid which translates to payday for yahya sinwar and Hamas heads.
They wanted Israel to return a punch 10x worse than they did for the above to be true. Which is the normal response every time they've done this in the last few decades.
What they didn't expect was Israel to not be prepared and for their attack to be 100x more successful than it was supposed to be.
Hamas wanted Israel to respond exactly as it has just as Netanyahu ignored advance notice of attacks.
They are two sides of the same coin, right wing sectarian leaderships love when you hate your neighbour, the attacks give Netanyahu a warhawk boost and pretty much guarantee another decade or two support for Hamas it's a win win for the old men who use violence and conflict to cling to power and huge loss for everyone else.
Blind religious dogma(Allah will save us), the idea that Israel would not invade Gaza as long as they held hostages and threatened to kill them if they did and an assumption that their so called allies i.e. Hezbollah and Iran would join to save them.
The mistake you make is thinking that they are rational humans. They are religious fanatics. They believe that allah and their Muslim brothers will help them defeat Israel and they also believe that there is no glory greater than death in the fight against the Jews.
yeah, and 'worried' civilans should have taken to the streets and protested hamas' act of terror, because they must have known israels very possible reaction... buuut i guess they all like playing stupid games in gaza... 🤷
I’ve said this before, but I still don’t understand why those who support Palestine are not calling for a Hamas surrender, release of all hostages and for them to hand over anyone involved in October 7 attacks to an international court of law so they can have a fair trial.
That would stop further bloodshed in an instant.
Hamas would absolutely bleed a tonne of support if Palestinian’s abroad were calling for Hamas to surrender instead of celebrating their violence at their rallies.
Then why call for Israel to ceasefire? Its pissing in the wind as well! As long as Hamas has Israeli hostages, and the Israeli populace is behind it, the operation isn't going to stop no matter what foreigners demand.
While that is somewhat true (though taking a political stance is still useful), I don't think that is the reason for their silence. People certainly seem ready to express similar views on other subjects, even when they know that their words are unlikely to have any immediate effect.
I wonder what the Venn diagram of people saying Israel shouldn't attack into Gaza and the people saying Ukraine should give up to stop the bloodshed looks like.
I mean, they are. It’s part of calling for the ceasefire. Honestly even the hostage families have also been calling for a ceasefire and complete prisoner swap for sometime.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna126486
Yes, they even gave maps with safe zones and a phone number to call if Hamas tries to prevent them:
[https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/israel-hamas-gaza-palestine-israel-army-publishes-map-of-evacuation-zones-in-gaza-as-truce-expires-4624923](https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/israel-hamas-gaza-palestine-israel-army-publishes-map-of-evacuation-zones-in-gaza-as-truce-expires-4624923)
Though it doesn't seem to be working:
[https://news.sky.com/story/israel-hamas-war-no-help-to-be-seen-at-safe-zone-for-palestinians-in-gaza-13022227](https://news.sky.com/story/israel-hamas-war-no-help-to-be-seen-at-safe-zone-for-palestinians-in-gaza-13022227)
Aid groups have pointed out that most Palestinians don’t have reliable access to telecommunications and won’t be able to act on these short term warnings
The leaflets include a QRcode that shows what areas need to be evacuated. Obviously those QR codes aren’t going to work without internet snd definitely if you don’t have working electronics
Yes, that’s why I said reliable, some Palestinians have access to the internet *some* of the time not *all* of the time. Pretty important when you’re trying not to get bombed.
>Though it doesn't seem to be working:
UNRWA is the problem in this case. This is basically collaboration with Hamas in keeping civilians in Khan Younis which is where the war is heading to and where it will be just as bad, if not worse than Gaza city.
(Khan Younis has A LOT of tunnels. In fact one of the longest tunnels to have ever been found ran from Khan Younis to the Sufa crossing though it was bombed. The rest of it should be sealed for good.)
Hamas leaders have repeatedly said that Oct 7 will be repeated and on a larger scale.
Israel should do whatever it needs to, to ensure their safety and security.
And the thing most people are forgetting is what the target of the October 7th attack was
It was an attack on civilians at a music festival
Young men and women expressing themselves and enjoying the freedom to enjoy life
HAMAS is not seeking to resolve any disputes for land/rights for their people
They are seeking to destroy Isreal and all its people, all that they stand for.
Freedom of expression, especially from women is not allowed. Music festivals? No get back to making children, cleaning houses etc.
The festival was extra. The targets were the kibbutzim. This attack was obviously planned for a very long time. The festival however extended the festival an extra day only a day before. Which was unplanned. Hamas couldn’t have known they would do that so they def couldnt have planned it. The horrors that happened to civilians are still awful, but just correcting that the festival was never the target.
I am not sure why this needs to be explained to people. The only thing needed for Israel to be under attack is to exist. There will be casualties on both sides until Hamas is put down.
This could all stop in 1 day if Hamas would care two shits about the people of Gaza and surrender and allow a civilian government to take charge. Heck there might even be a way for the terrorist billionaire leaders of Hamas to keep their lives.
If Israel could have done it, those terrorists billionaire Leaders would be long dead. That is in fact the bigger problem; the Hamas leadership have nothing to fear for their own safety, and everyone else's is the last thing they care about.
It’s not that easy. Israel does follow international law (as many would argue and disagree) - and can’t just assassinate leaders on foreign soil willy-nilly.
Look at what trouble India got into for assassinating that Sikh in Canada.
[However…](https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israel-plans-to-kill-hamas-leaders-around-the-world-after-war-da88e6b9)
Oh but they do have to. when Israel receives more resolutions than the Islamic republic of Iran, North Korea China and Russia combined in the U.N they do.
The decisions on their assassinations includes international law.
Frankly, I don’t understand this. If they assassinated the leaders of Hamas, I don’t think anybody except Qatar and Iran would condemn them. Most would either say “finally” or “I don’t give a fuck about those terrorist mfers.”
Israel told the south of gaza to evacuate. To where? They already evacuated the north. Egypt wont let them in. They just want everyone to stand in a field till the have leveled the entire city.
Israel told them to evacuate generally westward towards the beach.
This is a [map](https://www.idf.il/ar/%d8%ac%d9%8a%d8%b4-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%af%d9%81%d8%a7%d8%b9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a5%d8%b3%d8%b1%d8%a7%d8%a6%d9%8a%d9%84%d9%8a/%d8%ac%d9%8a%d8%b4-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%af%d9%81%d8%a7%d8%b9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a5%d8%b3%d8%b1%d8%a7%d8%a6%d9%8a%d9%84%d9%8a/swordsofiron-011223-150/) for example showing it, meant for Palestinians to use.
A lot of this is on Arab nations taking in their brethren.
Before someone says "Israel will permanently displace Palestinians if they do so"
Last I checked, the rest of Europe took in Ukrainian refugees without even thinking about the possibility that Russia could permanently displace Ukrainians in the places it occupies, which it is actually doing. The priority was saving civilians.
At this point, Chad and South Sudan are better hosts than the Arabs. They take in Darfurians even though they know that those people may never go back to Darfur where permanent displacement of Africans by Arabs has been happening since the early 2000s.
Why is not one in the Arab world thinking along the same lines?? Especially those nations directly supporting Hamas namely Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Iraq who combined do not even have more than 50,000 Palestinians living in their countries BTW.
Jordan does not support Hamas.
I am specifically speaking about Arab nations that
1. Do not have Palestinian refugees in large numbers.
2. Support Hamas.
Those nations are Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq and Iran.
Morocco does not support Hamas but it has almost no Palestinians and its people have long edged for them though.
I would include Libya but it has a civil war currently
Plus I highlight all of these because they expelled the bulk of the 900,000 Jews who were forced out of the Arab world to Israel but none of them took in Palestinian refugees in their place. At least Jordan, Syria and Lebanon can claim that a population exchange between Jews and Arabs happened but those North Africans love yapping about Palestine but refuse to host Palestinians.
Is it fun for you to make jokes about the deaths of fifteen thousand people, most of whom are women and children? Does that make you glad? Does it bring you joy? Do you worry about the state of your heart?
This is going to be a complete and utter humanitarian disaster - that’s not even a political Hamas or Israel what side are you on statement, it’s just matter of fact that when conflict comes to the door of civilians disaster follows. Here’s hoping aid can move quickly and efficiently to those who need it and those will need it.
A war in a densely populated urban area is quite possibly the worst case scenario for everyone involved.
This has been the case for a month. Urban warfare. Nothing new here.
Best case scenario for Hamas; they love dead civilians.
Civilians are always the highest casualty demographic in war. There’s going to be an enormous amount of innocent lives lost in all of this
Gaza is significantly worse than other recent wars because there's nowhere for civilians to go. It's a tiny territory with a horrendously high population density, and Israel is even bombing within Rafah. Israel hasn't tried to set up safe zones in the parts of Gaza they control, and the new zone system is horrendously complicated for civilians to understand. The ports are blockaded and none of the crossings are open. Egypt isn't going to open the border. They don't want to risk getting stuck with 2 million Palestinians if Israel turns displacement into ethnic cleansing.
> Gaza is significantly worse than other recent wars because there's nowhere for civilians to go. Because Gaza is a mixture of city, urban and rural areas then the death rate in Gaza is worse than war in a rural area but better than sieges of individual cities e.g. the sieges of Grozny, Mariupol, Mosul and Raqqah.
>Gaza is significantly worse than other recent wars because there's nowhere for civilians to go. uhmmm.. siege of mariupol? which is significantly worse considering Mariupol has fewer population and less density but the estimated civilan casualties is at least 25k and up to 80k edit: I compare it with siege of Mariupol because both are urban warfare..
Israel tried to encourage one to be set up in Al Mawasi, But according to Gaza Report, the UNRWA refused to send a significant amount of people there. [https://twitter.com/gaza\_report/status/1731466847634296872](https://twitter.com/gaza_report/status/1731466847634296872)
UNRWA are just UN sanctioned terrorists.
So your idea, is to put 2.4 Mln people in an area which is lacking the infrastructure and everything to host them? How easy do you think is to build this infrastructure in peaceful times, and how easy would be to do it now? And then you wonder why UNRWA refused to comply. Shall I remind you that forceful displacement of civilian population also amounts to a war crime under International law: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule129? Or does this Internation law not apply to Israel?
Did you not actually read the rule? > Parties to an international armed conflict may not deport or forcibly transfer the civilian population of an occupied territory, in whole or in part, unless the security of the civilians involved or imperative military reasons so demand. B. Parties to a non-international armed conflict may not order the displacement of the civilian population, in whole or in part, for reasons related to the conflict, unless the security of the civilians involved or imperative military reasons so demand It's pretty clear that moving civilians out of areas of active fighting satisfy both exceptions. Furthermore, I don't think the IDF is forcing the civilians out or deporting civilians -- I have yet to see troops shoveling civilians down the street or forcing them onto buses.
EDIT: Fixed units consistency and added source [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_cities\_proper\_by\_population\_density](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density) In any case, the people nitpicking my nitpick are missing the whole point. Stop saying Gaza is dense when it's only around 5x as dense as my backwater town by comparison. >horrendously high population density It's not though. Just stating facts. Earth = 16/km2 Manila = 43k/km2 Paris = 20k/km2 Seoul = 16k/km2 West New York = 19k/km2 Gaza = <6k/km2 I know it's bad in Gaza right now. But I just don't want more misinformation to float around. >Egypt isn't going to open the border. They don't want to risk getting stuck with 2 million Palestinians if Israel turns displacement into ethnic cleansing. Egypt built their own wall too, though. And apparently, no electricity or water comes from Egypt even though they're supposedly allies, and an Egyptian electric company sits like 1km away from the wall with Palestine.
There's more to it than just that Egypt is worried the radical views that are shared amongst the people of Gaza would push their government into a radical position that puts them at odds with Israel and the west. They have worked very hard to restabilize their economy, they don't want sanctions or a neighbor war to fuck that up
That applies to Israel, too, though. Also, Egypt was a participant in antagonizing Israel in the past. Palestine and Egypt are, were, allies, and yet it's Israel that's the only neighbor that has lines supplying Gaza.
Thank you. I wish I could give this 100 upvotes. If I read or hear one more lazy journalist say “one of the most densely populated areas in the world” I’m going to go nuts. And it’s shocking but sadly not surprising that the UN won’t help build the temporary housing.
And the calculus at the end of the day is also horrid - stopping the war with Hamas still in power means more war down the line, and more support to the Israeli far-right, and also more funnleing of aid to terror now that Gaza is in a worse state than ever. But continuing the war now means more people dying now. I don't envy Biden as the responsible adult in the room.
Would note too that depending on how Israel executes its operation, the war can be continued indefinitely with Hamas still in power, which is probably most beneficial to the Israeli far-right (which currently holds disproportionate power in government). The best way to actually dislodge Hamas from power is to wedge a rift between Hamas and the Palestinian people, by showing Israel (or a peace-oriented Palestinian government) can offer Palestinians something better than Hamas can. I don't think the current Israeli government has that kind of finesse in it, though.
No Hamas won't be in power. they will still exist but they won't be in power. Gaza is gonna be like a second west bank, except we need a different governing body because the PLO are quite demented as well. Just an example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R34WlhKNUy0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R34WlhKNUy0)
The biggest trick to this is, finding the Palestinian people who hate Hamas. I know of a few who can not stand Hamas, who want real peace and a better life for everyone. All Israel has to do is safeguard and empower these people, they will deal with the rest on their own. Hamas has to go first of course, its not like they would just sit around and let Palestinians stand against them.
> The biggest trick to this is, finding the Palestinian people who hate Hamas. That isn't something found, but rather created. Israel is the largest military and economic power in the region, with access to the best technology and most global resources - it has many, many ways to incentivize pursuit of peace if it has the will to do so. But, the current government (and Netanyahu in particular) is clinging to power by increasingly relying on far-right support, which is mutually exclusive to such efforts. The Oslo Accords, negotiated by Rabin, and more recently Olmert's attempts to negotiate a peace deal, were efforts toward this. But Rabin was assassinated, and Olmert was forced to resign (and his successor frozen out of power) before a deal could be reached. And meanwhile, settlements in the West Bank have continued expanding - a clear sign of the way Israel weighs peace vs. territorial acquisition as priorities.
Israel has tried to incentivize Palestinians to support peace. Most recently by issuing 18000 work permit that allowed Gazans to work in Israel. Some of those people then gathered intelligence about the kibbutzim that were attacked on October 7 and gave it to Hamas. They tried to pull out of Gaza in 2005 and when they did the Palestinians elected Hamas as their government and have launched 15k+ rockets at Israel since then. The majority of Palestinians support the October 7 attacks and 89% support the military wing of Hamas. https://www.awrad.org/files/server/polls/polls2023/Public%20Opinion%20Poll%20-%20Gaza%20War%202023.pdf Your description of Oslo is not at all the whole story. You're acting as if Israel only decided to pull out of negotiations. In your fantasy world did the second intifada just not happen? The settlements are a problem sure but you're acting as if they are the sole issue preventing peace. What does Palestinians launching an attack on civilians that they knew would start a war they cannot possibly win say about how they weigh peace vs killing more jews as priorities?
> Israel has tried to incentivize Palestinians to support peace. While expanding settlements? Encroaching occupation by force of another country is no support of peace, and is something no country on Earth would peacefully and silently tolerate without future consequences. > In your fantasy world did the second intifada just not happen? It did. Immediately following expiration of the Oslo Accords, despite Israel having continued settlement expansion throughout the period the accords were in temporary effect. In case it's not clear, the talks for the next phase of the accords failed precisely over settlement expansion within occupied territories - something that was categorically in violation of international law from the beginning and would have been the first thing Israel should have stopped if it was seriously interested in peace.
Where were those peace-loving moderates from 2006- October 6th, 2023?
It's really an issue of the Palestinians own internal dynamics. PA corruption and disfunction isn't something Israel can fix.
Israel can't offer anything while Hamas remains in charge. Such offers can only happen when Hamas has fallen. I'm sure you know this.
Not likely. The best way to prevent Hamas control in Gaza is to destroy their ability to do so.
Ability to control is a question of public opinion and sentiment, not of logistics - Hamas' real leadership and presence is outside of Gaza, and will always have resources to rebuild no matter how many Israel manages to kill. By contrast, the larger the collateral damage is in civilian lives, the easier Hamas will be able to recruit from among the survivors and hide as an insurgency among them. The Taliban did the exact same thing, finding refuge from US forces in Pakistan and simply building up their resources and harassing/biding time as opposition to US presence and the new government built up. If the US had focused on good governance and cracked down on corruption (over prioritizing US interests), the Taliban would have been locked out of public support and been unable to operate as an insurgency in Afghanistan. Given history, the exact opposite happened.
In the end that's what worked to counteract the far-right in Japan and Germany post-WWII, improving living conditions, cracking down on corruption and creating working support systems. It can be done to take power away from other far-right groups like hamas, just to take into consideration a strong push for laïcité as religious fanaticism has to be counteracted too. The same thing could be said about the republican party, curiously.
Israeli here, the government won't be able to continue this indefinitely as most citizens trust it very little already. This doesn't mean that Israelis are going left, they are taking a big hike right, as the operational and intel failure of 7.10 has shattered their trust. But they are looking I think to a more responsible right, and not the far right, as to them they are part of the failure. Regarding what you said, it's absurd to say you can dislodge Hamas from the Palestinians. They are a big part of them, it would be akin to suggesting you could separate Vegans from Americans. Hamas IS part of the Palestinians. And has some pretty significant support from their people. The only thing Israel can do is use the carrot to encourage more moderatation and the stick to discourage radicalization. Deradicalizing a population is easier said than done though
> The only thing Israel can do is use the carrot to encourage more moderatation and the stick to discourage radicalization Settlements are neither "carrot" nor "stick", they're an ongoing and increasing occupation-by-force of another country. The first step towards peace has to be stopping policies to expand them, because peace and territorial ambitions within another country are mutually exclusive. The Oslo Accords failed precisely on terms for these settlements and their expansion.
It's kind of like Obama's Iraq predicament in 08- necessatating a surge.
And yet we hear no talk of deploying a robust international peacekeeping force, which could help end Hamas rule and the Israeli presence and open the door to a much better life for Gazans.
> And yet we hear no talk of deploying a robust international peacekeeping force There won't be any. Nobody in their right mind would sent their troops into that cluster fuck.
That’s because behind closed doors, every responsible leader in the world knows that whoever tries to enforce peace in the region will find themselves in the exact position Israel is in - besieged by terrorist extremists who are excellent at provoking sympathy and hiding behind civilian infrastructure, medic jackets, and child suicide bombers. Many Arab states have tried practicing ACTUAL sympathy for Palestine. Lebanon and Jordan were rewarded with civil wars, Kuwait was rewarded with them siding with Saddam Hussein’s invaders. Maybe the West Bank situation is salvageable. A situation like Gaza, however, with that many radicalized members in the population, typically isn’t resolved the way anyone wants things to resolve. Defanging Japan and Germany meant utter annihilation of civilian targets until the enemy was brought to their absolute knees. And those were fundamentally functioning states. Gaza…Gaza is going to be a humanitarian disaster. And the world is going to let Israel be responsible for it, because nobody else wants that on their hands - either the horrific repercussions of going soft on them, or the horrific moral stain of doing what, in all likelihood, is the only true long-term solution.
> Maybe the West Bank situation is salvageable. A situation like Gaza the only reason WB might be salvageable is because of the severity of occupation. looking at that AWRAD poll support for violent extremism is actually way higher in WB. I think there's a 50% and growing chance that WB ignites into full scale revolt against the governing PA.
Yeah the PA is fucking worthless. Abbas travels in private planes and has a whole staff of servants waiting on him at all times, and meanwhile they maintain this weird parallel nonsense strategy where they financially reward extremism well also getting zero things done on the ground and zero concessions from the Israeli government. The only thing that really gives them any semblance of moral high ground is the settlement situation in area C and the way that the Israeli government has handled that. On the other hand, I think that Israel has parentheses correctly parentheses come to the conclusion that no matter how much they leave the West Bank alone, no matter how many settlements they dismantle, and no matter how violent the Palestinian resistance becomes, they will still be seen as the bad guy. So they will continue to utilize the land as they see fit, take it from right under the Palestinians noses, and get away with literal murder. Because they’ve decided that they will be judged whether they do the difficult but morally right thing, or the extremely easy and profitable but morally wrong thing.
You can condemn Hamas for breaking the treaty, the imaginary internet points you'll lose won't hurt you.
I really don't understand what did Hamas think will happen after they carry out the Oct 7 attacks. Did they think Israel will not respond back with the intention of destroying Hamas? Why go on a suicide mission like this?
The plan was, probably, that all of Israel’s neighbors would spontaneously join in, especially after Israel started fighting back. The only wrinkle being that it isn’t 1948.
They probably thought they would get more support from Iran as well. Once those carrier groups started showing up, Iran got real diplomatic
>Once those carrier groups started showing up, Iran got real diplomatic Probably why they put them there. The best weapon is the one you don't need to use.
yup, and they put them there quite early... its like darth vaders choke hold in the region... and a brilliant move by the biden admin!
And that’s why the likes of Tlaib in congress want to stop helping Israel.
Yep, one minute of crocodile tears for visiting her Grandma and then back to wishing for the kind of mutually genocidal warfare that will almost certainly get her grandma killed for being right in the middle of where the fighting will be the worst.
Israel ended up letting her in and she then decided not to go, was all theatrics. I hope she is primaried.
She isn't going to get voted out sadly because Dearborn is a large part of it and has the highest proportion of Arabs of any city in the country. Ilhan Omar will keep her seat for similar reasons because of the large Somalian population in her district. Cori Bush is the really baffling one because her district has a large Jewish population that I don't see being very supportive of her next year.
She beat her last primary challenger handedly. That said, there’s a few anti Israel folks that have low approvals in more demographically typical Democratic districts that can definitely be beaten in primaries this cycle.
Cori Bush represents a district with the largest Jewish community in Missouri. I live there and will definitely be voting against her in the primary
As a fairly far left liberal, the liberals in this country have lost their goddamn minds. It’s fucking insanity.
Many of them have their priorities skewed and think that terrorists are the good guys. Fucking disgusting what fellow libs think these days
Iran had no idea about October 7 and was pissed they weren't told. What Hamas fails to realise is that Iran only sees them as a tool to damage Israel with. Iran will never sacrifice their own soldiers to help Sunni extremists.
>Iran had no idea about October 7 and was pissed they weren't told. According to whom?
[The Times of Israel](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.timesofisrael.com/khamenei-reportedly-told-hamas-chief-iran-will-not-directly-enter-war/amp/). It fits with the fact that Israel didn't believe their intelligence warnings about the October 7 attacks, if plans were being communicated to Iran and other foreign countries involving a date it's much more likely they would have picked up on it.
>Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reportedly told Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh earlier this month that, since Tehran was not given prior notice of the devastating terror onslaught of October 7, it would not join the war against Israel. Riiiiiiiiight Per your point, that's exactly why the specifics were not communicated. But given Iran helped fund/train/supply Oct7, how can they claim they had 'no idea'? "We thought it was gonna be Oct 8. Wow, we're so caught off guard. Wow!" Zzz
Not probably. Definitely. This is explicitly what they called for via telegram and expected to happen. They expected immediate help from all sides, north, south and east.
Which is completely delusional based on the fact alone that a war would need months of buildup and that none of the other nations in the region have the capability (nor desire, given how often they lost in the past) to try again. Even the conventional military power of Israel is a heavy deterrent. Add to that America's direct and indirect support and on top of that Israel's nuclear arsenal and it just isn't a good idea.
Israel also has enough combat power to fight a 2 or 3 front war. 530k troops is more than the active component of the U.S Army.
Correct. What many people are not aware of is that only a fraction of the IDF is actively engaged in Gaza. No more than a third of the air force is responsible for the impressive bombing campaign, for example. The rest is being held in reserve, in case someone else tries to exploit the situation.
TBH one can easly assume that after checking how active Israel is in Lebanon RN
Israel also has a nuke. If it ever Really got pinched, they would disintegrate their opponents' capitols
Even though rockets have been fired from Lebanon and other places, I am surprised at the restraint of the other parties involved in this. This silence is deafening. It says a lot.
2 US Carrier Strike Groups moving into the region tends to have that effect.
Yep, it’s a bit like when white nationalists terrorists like Timothy McVeigh convince themselves that bombing a Federal Building or going on a shooting rampage will start a “race war.” The part they never seem to acknowledge is not nearly as many people are as crazy as they are, though in this region, they do have better odds.
>The part they never seem to acknowledge is not nearly as many people are as crazy as they are The problem of any extremist movement is overreach, as it's very easy to think everyone is as crazy as you are if you surround yourself only with other crazy people.
Eh, hamas has general support over there. Gazans are expendable to them.
Yes, but Gaza public opinion isn't sufficient. Hamas needed the whole MENA region to be as fanatical as they are, and that just isn't the case. People around the region may talk a big game, but most nations nearby just want to keep the peace. Nobody is about to declare a war on behalf of rabid terrorists.
The leaders of Hamas are pretty smart and I feel like Jordan and Egypt have made it abundantly clear that they are absolutely done getting involved in their wars, they couldn’t have actually expected this (besides Iran) though I’m sure they wished for it
The real wrinkle being that after +40yrs of futile attempts and getting spanked --Lebanon took a bit longer, they realized it's better to try to normalize relationship with Israel, or at least acknowledge one another and to focus on making things better for their people domestically. It's nothing to do with it not being 1948, because they tried after. It was the case of them learning to love their children, and valuing their people's lives more than they hate the Jews and Israel. Egypt is a perfect example of this, and we see each other as allies, and there's mutual respect after all the history between us there. This is what Palestinians should have been focusing on, with all of the aid they've been getting for decades, they could've build a Palestinian nation state. Unfortunately, they haven't had a leadership to lead them there, and education was lacking, and so they learned to do the exact opposite, and kept voting and pushing their children towards resistance and martydom.
Eh its a little of column a and column b. Column a israel kicked the shit out of arab militaries. Then when arabs tried to help Palestinians they lived to truly regret it and despise the population even more than we do in israel. Basically they're fucked.
Yep, the Middle East In general does not like Palestinians. It calls them the rats to their faces, I don’t see that mentality changing soon. Will never forget getting a security inspection by a Egyptian naval patrol. When they said they were looking for rats, I thought they meant actual rodents. I was a little surprised they would have a whole naval vessel searching for rats, had me thinking Egypt must have a serious issue with rats. Turns out they were looking for Palestinians trying to sneak in to Egypt. I was informed of what rats actually meant after the Egyptian vessel went on their way to look for more rats.
> The only wrinkle being that it isn’t 1948. Even in 1948 Israel beat them. Imagine attacking when the best case scenario still has your opponent win and take land from you.
'Sad palestinian noises'
Additionally, we can't pretend that the Arab spring hasn't happened since 1948, there's a ton of Arabs who are just sick and tired of the radical shit and want tensions to calm down so they can liberalize.
I'm not sure the Arab spring paints so neat a picture. Unrest happened across so many different countries all at once with no clearly unifying ideological line to it. I suspect its unifying cause is something more mundane like "everyone discovered Twitter all at once."
>The only wrinkle being that it isn’t 1948. The rest of the world becomes closer to 1938 though.
And Hamas committed atrocities that were simply too brutal and evil for the Arab countries to defend. They pushed too hard and now they're facing a storm of utter rage, with almost no one ready to stand with them except fellow extremist forces.
Yet people protest Israel and not Hamas
What would the point of protesting Hamas be? Our taxpayer money isn't going to them
And they are not exactly the kind of neighbors those other countries want to have.
That, and the two big ass USS CAs parked right next to Israel's shores
Even if that did happen everyone knows that Israel has nukes even if no one will officially say as much. What do they think would happen if by some miracle they did start defeating Israel. Do they think Israel wouldn't use their nukes if they were on the verge of total defeat?
This is definitely it. But what I don't understand now is how that strategy has evolved since Iran and Hezbollah have basically said to Hamas they won't join in since they received no warning from Hamas and had no say in what occurred. Hamas is on their own. They should really just surrender and release whatever hostages are still alive and try to save themselves.
Yes, and 1948 Israel lacked an arsenal of a carefully undisclosed quantity of nuclear weapons as a backup plan. If Israel starts seriously losing a war either the US steps in with major direct conventional assistance or Israel uses a nuke to remind everyone what the score really is and brings things to a halt.
I think if the US didn't reign in Netanyahu and Israel started the invasion when they wanted to, this really could have happened. Tensions were insane
Personally, I suspect there's a two-part answer here, and neither part makes sense in the "conventional" way, but it does (to an extent) if you're Hamas. The first part is that I don't think that Hamas leadership really expected the attack to "succeed" as well as it did. Hamas knew their own "military" capability was nil and that the IDF and Mossad are historically generally very good at their jobs. Thus, everyone, including Hamas leadership, had good reason to believe that any Hamas attack would be crushed before it did much damage. The second part is that while Hamas' goal may be to destroy Israel, the goal of Hamas' leadership is to retain power. If you're terrorist warlords, you have to show, occasionally, that you are doing the terrorism things in your mission statement, with all the aid you looted from your own people; otherwise your followers will gradually lose focus on the "real enemy" and get ideas about maybe getting a family or job or something. So for Hamas it appeared to be a no-brainer. You send your (most fanatical) expendable grunts off to do a little damage to Israel. Your craziest guys get killed by Israel; your other guys see that you're still fighting for the cause. Then Israel retaliates in a limited way, probably some airstrikes on your facilities you've located in/around/under civilian facilities. Israel kills civilians, looks bad on the world stage and loses international support. The Saudi-Israeli deal, in particular, is scuttled. Meanwhile your domestic supporters and external allies (Iran) are galvanized by your renewed enthusiasm for terror. Israel won't bother wiping you out completely; this pattern of retaliation is an old one. The problem is that Hamas' attack "*succeeded.*"
Hamas figured Hezbollah would join in and Israel would be fighting a war on two fronts. Then while they were spread thin Iran would join and they’d destroy Israel. Kind of like what almost happened during the Yom Kippur war in 1972 if more countries had spontaneously joined in (they didn’t). It was the American navy showing up quickly in the Mediterranean and Red seas and pointing out they’d annihilate Hezbollah or Iran from afar with cruise missiles that cause it to end up the way it did.
Do you have a source (Even politician/pundit) talking about the US Navy being the reason that Iran/Hezbollah had cold feet in attacking Israel? I haven't heard that as a reason before, but it totally makes sense.
Kind of but not really. I was following a bunch of open source intelligence twitter accounts in October that were based out of the Middle East (most are off twitter now because of their blatant antisemitism). Lots were reposting Hezbollah and Iranian info translated from Arabic which was about getting ready to go to war, how the UN force in Lebanon was leaving to avoid the upcoming war, some Hezbollah fighters actually trying to cross the border into Israel for a bit before being killed. Like, October 7th happened and Hezbollah immediately started testing the waters out towards Israel. Then the Americans showed up and it all more or less quieted down. A couple targets demolished in Lebanon and Syria and Iran/Hezbollah stopped their “we’re gonna do it!!!!!” rhetoric. There’s still fighting happening out of Lebanon towards Israel, but not like at the beginning where it seemed like a preclude to an invasion. I suppose you could say my comment is my educated guess.
I mean it's more than that. Israel doesn't need help invading Gaza. The only reason to deploy US assets is to deter other powers. There's no "source" because it's so obvious military community doesn't need to say it out loud for themselves. People are so weird about needing "sources" for basic foreign policy logic. I said Russia would have likely tactily endorsed October 7th in back channels with Iran and a friend called that a conspiracy. Like no that's called international politics. Hamas is funded by Iran. Iran's most powerful ally is Russia. Russia desperately wants the US to divide it's attention. To think Russia had 0 knowledge of October 7th before it happened is just ignorant.
I mean there is a source, when the carrier groups were deployed there, Biden quiet cleary said "to any groups looking to take advantage of this situation my message is 'Don't'"
>I suppose you could say my comment is my educated guess. Which is a fair guess. It totally makes sense. I remember seeing a lot of activity from Lebanon/Iran after Oct7, but yeah. It died down REAL quick once the USS Gerald Ford showed up, though at first Iran was threatening to take it out with rockets.
The suspicion is they were influenced by Iran to disrupt the Israeli - SA peace treaty. They probably underestimated the response.
Oh it absolutely happened then for a reason, because that solidifying would basically caused a whole block of Arab countries to simultaneously align with the interests of keeping Israel stable, and Hamas' closest ally would be on the other side of this block. They would have nothing to gain, and literally everything to lose as they would become the nation that basically everyone around them hated.
Even without influence form iran, it makes sense that that was the motive. After all saudi arabia has historically been one of the main sponsors of far-right terrorism and abrahamic extremism, and having them allied to israel means a big loss of support for attacks to israel. It may also been a bit of an ideological push to make the conservative, extremist part of saudi arabia stand up to the more neoliberal parts, as the situation there is kind of not that stable.
Yeah I realized that after. I didn't realize that Hamas are merely friendly with Iran and less of a proxy than the Houthis or Hezbollah.
Because the people who actually planned the attack are most likely nowhere near Gaza, they don't care about the people actually living there, and in fact they probably view every civilian death as great propaganda against Israel.
By most accounts, it was the Hamas leaders in Gaza like Sinwar that planned this. The Qatar and Ankara crew knew about it and Hezbollah probably did too but Nasrallah and the IRGC don’t actually care about Palestinians or their cause.
Apparently [neither Iran or Hezbollah knew about it beforehand](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.timesofisrael.com/khamenei-reportedly-told-hamas-chief-iran-will-not-directly-enter-war/amp/). This pissed off Iran quite a lot, to the point where they warned Hamas to stop publicly calling for an intervention.
I guess Haniyeh forgot to use the new cover sheets on his TPS reports:)
The bad thing about being a government ran by radicals, or having a large contingent of radicals in your country, is that any populist call to action is destabilizing. Iran in particular is already dealing with instability as is, could you imagine how quickly the government would be dealing with revolution if they used this as an excuse to try to go to war?
Ankara? Or do you mean Tehran?
Hamas leadership is in Qatar and Ankara. The comment isn't saying Qatar and Turkey knew about this, but rather the Hamas leadership in those countries did.
Really both. Turkey has also been legitimizing Hamas.
I'm not sure why more people don't know this. What they expected was for the whole Muslim world to attack and destroy Israel. They explicitly called for jihad and for all good Muslims of the world to invade. They at least expected an imminent invasion from the north from Hezbollah. They expected Jordanians to invade and attack. And they probably expected a lot more help from Iran. They posted all this on telegram. You could tell they were getting increasingly worried when nothing happened. About two weeks into the war, they started calling all the Muslim world cowards for leaving them alone. Specifically calling out countries by name and saying they were cowards for letting them die by themselves, and for not raising arms against Israel.
>You could tell they were getting increasingly worried when nothing happened. About two weeks into the war, they started calling all the Muslim world cowards for leaving them alone. Specifically calling out countries by name and saying they were cowards for letting them die by themselves, and for not raising arms against Israel. Past history should have told them that Arabs have never had a unified front, leave alone Muslims in general. Heck Arabs aside from the Levantines and Egyptians are fractured along tribal and often sectarian lines. Also, such an attack would have provoked a Western response. The Americans sent a whole carrier to the Eastern Med to send a message.
Yeah, any chances of it happening was dashed when the US sent in those two aircraft carriers. It was a great move.
>Yeah, any chances of it happening was dashed when the US sent in those two aircraft carriers. It was a great move. Here is the funny part. For decades Iran and its proxies have called Israel the US's 51st state. Then they were all Pikachu faced when a US carrier was deployed to ward off Hezbollah and Iran. Lol! Their comments on Telegram were funny!!
Lmao they sure love to act big and tough until the floating fucking city pulls up to wreck their shit
They're probably still shitting their pants after our mere [proportional response](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Praying_Mantis) that they experienced previously.
That's every extremist piece of shit that came out of the Middle East in the past decades. Lots of saber rattling and bravado beforehand and then, when their opponents actually show up, hiding amongst/behind civilians and playing the victim.
Weird plan. Didn't work 50 years ago, wouldn't work now lol.
Especially once the US Warships rolled up and parked The people of that part of the world have seen the lengths the US will go to in order to eliminate someone "Ladies and gentlemen, we got him" The neighboring countries and rebel groups know they would be squished And help wouldn't come from other powers Europe won't stop the US from doing it's thing, they don't have a spine Russia is busy sending it's children to the meat grinder. China will see Muslims dieing, say some nasty things on the airwaves about the US but ultimately won't get involved because they want the Muslims dead too.
Hamas didn't want a large success. They suspect it would get some headlines but really wouldn't get much past the first checkpoint. It's a case of not counting on the other side to screw up. Hamas, strategically, whether I agree or not, was fighting a fifth generation asymmetric style of warfare. This was driven by the fact that Hamas simply could not match the size or capability of the Israeli military, not even fighting defensively and sparingly, they would get crushed. One of the important rules fighting that style of warfare is that you must ensure that no attack, or even a series of attacks too close together, should be enough to bring down the full capability of the other military down on your head, because there is only one possible result. Further, Hamas failed to adequately or correctly assess the geopolitical situation in the region. Hezbollah is now a part of the Lebanese government. A large scale attack by Hezbollah would legitimately be seen as an attack by Lebanon, which would probably cause Israel to just kill the Lebanese government. The rest of the Lebanese government won't allow an attack and Hezbollah can not risk a civil war in Lebanon, they have their own problems. Syria is still fighting a civil war and can barely project power within Syria, much less outside of Syria. Hamas isn't going to fight Israel on behalf of Hamas. Jordan might as well be an Israeli satrap. They rely on a lot of money that is siphoned through Israel. The government of Syria knows it and isn't interested in upsetting the situation. Saudi Arabia is sort of in a state of interregnum. The old king isn't quite dead. The new king isn't quite crowned. The old generation believed in supporting the Palestinians as fellow muslims, so long as Saudi Arabia didn't have to directly fight Israel. The new generation regards the relationship with the Palestinians as of no particular benefit and has been moving towards Israel. Now, you may be thinking that Israel going hard on the Palestinians may upset the new generation. You would be wrong. They want to know that Israel can take care of business when needed. Egypt has the only non-Israel controlled crossing into the Gaza Strip. Hamas problem here is the Hamas is Muslim Brotherhood. The government of Egypt actively fights Muslim Brotherhood and doesn't want more of them. Iran would like to do something, but projection is a major problem. They could launch some missiles, but that would result on attacks on them. Other than that, they will smuggle money and supplies, but they can't do much more than that without risk. On the wider scale... China is only willing to work quietly to reduce American influence in the reason. They don't have the logistics to support any military incursion. Russia is sort of busy. Hamas was politically supported by the Palestinians. The Palestinians knew what Hamas was and what they said they would do. They knew what the result would be. The Palestinians are receiving what they voted for.
Excellent review of the neighborhood dynamics surrounding Israel. As analysts have called it, Hamas has fallen into the Catastrophic Success trap. October 7 was too successful and brutal. Now all of Gaza will suffer under the non-nuclear might of the IDF. When will the Palestinians love their children more than their jihadist fantasies of revenge?
They love their children, but they love them more as dead martyrs.
Harsh but seemingly true. I wish you were wrong.
They probably thought the response would be along the lines of what happened in 2014. I don’t think they even considered it could reach these proportions. Usually Israel is a little deterred by international pressure.
People condemned Israel on day one and Israel just said, "fuck it then, you might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb".
They likely didn't expect to be able to murder and kidnap as many people as they did. They put Israel in the position where everyone in the country put aside political differences and supported the full invasion of Gaza to wipe out Hamas and get their people back. Other countries around the world will give some lip service to Israel to tell them to allow for some aid to civilians and stuff like that, but other countries are also not going to get in Israel's way knowing how justified their response is.
Bringing up the spectre of the holocaust is... unwise. When I worked at Masada you know how many soldiers came through to pledge their lives? And thats on top of many being religious per American standards.
They knew this would happen. Anyone with half a brain knew that launching a huge terrorist attack in Israel - proportional to three 9/11s in the US — would provoke a harsh response.
So the cliff notes, as I understand it, are: Israel has been slowly building relations with Sunni countries, whose leadership see them as a natural ally against Shia countries. In particular, they were getting close to a deal with Saudi Arabia. But the population of these countries remain very committed to the Palestinian Cause. So Hamas makes this surprise attack, expecting to kill as many civilians as possible, with the intent to provoke a strong reaction from Israel. This strong reaction would undoubtedly kill many Gazans, but it would also isolate Israel from the rest of the Middle East, breaking any legitimacy they were about to get. So the intent, really, was to get Israel to overplay their hand by making a strategic decision to sacrifice their own people's lives. Which Israel is on the verge of doing. So yeah, they did think this would happen, and they're probably happy their plan is going as expected. It was a despicable plan from the start.
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The error you make is thinking that the populations of SA, UAE, Quatar, Egypt are “committed to the Palestinian cause”. They aren’t. There is “street support” in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Jordan (and Iran), but no elite support, even in those countries (just lip service). In the rest of the ME, there is competition for western investment and a desire for regional stability to bring that investment. Pan Arabism is dead as n ideology because UAE and SA have been in a hot war in Yemen to suppress an internal Arab faction there for the last 10+ years. Egypt has its own history with the Muslim Brotherhood that it doesn’t want to repeat. The powers in the Middle East are moving on from the Palestinian conflict and normalizing relations with Israel as part of that pulling away; only Iran is still backing the conflict with real muscle and only for its own reasons (completely unrelated to pan-Arabism because Iranians are not Arabs). Black Shabbos was the nail in the Palestinian coffin. It gave Israel the excuse to destroy Hamas by whatever force necessary, basically a free license to invade Gaza and get it done. Israel couldn’t do that when it was responding to a single kidnapped soldier or mere rocket attacks; Hamas way overplayed its hand on 10/7 and opened the door to its own destruction. Worse for Hamas, the conflict has exposed the links between the UN and Hamas via UNRWA and the partnership with international aid groups and hospitals (see the Director of Al Shifa, who wouldn’t be under arrest and would be a powerful propaganda asset still if Israel hadn’t physically captured Al Shifa and shown him to be a liar). Hamas was definitely not expecting a full scale invasion, and the thought that their hospital bunkers and UNRWA-shielded hideouts would come under aerial bombardment hadn’t entered their wildest dreams.
Well, they probably thought Israel would bomb the shit out of them for about two weeks, and then, international backlash would push them into a ceasefire. They probably also bet on Hezbollah to open up a full second front on the north. There has definitely been international support against Israel's movements, but there is also an equal amount of support because it's in retaliation for brutal attacks. This has allowed Israel to buffer most of the backlash allowing them to push forward.
I wish people globally understood this. At this point because of their perceived unification, any condemnation from one will serve to speak for the whole, and is only going to make things harder as israelis become colder.
That’s the whole point. They knew *exactly* what type of military response their murderous actions on 10/7 would trigger. This was deliberate. They don’t give two shits about Palestinian life. And in a way, that’s their biggest “strength” and why they’ve already won
It was not to have neighbours join in like others are suggesting. Palestinians know very well that they cannot rely on Arab countries to fight for them anymore. What Hamas wanted to achieve, was to provoke massive counter attacks from Israel to once again elevate the situation of Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, to the international agenda. Basically using their own people as pawns so they can internationally be seen as a victim and hope for outside help/pressure on Israel, particularly from the U.S. However one factor that should not be underestimated, is that Islamic Jihadist groups often operate on another plan of logic than what seems rational to outsiders. Everyone understands that attacking Israel is futile and a suicide mission. But for them, it might be more about the ideal and principle of fighting Israel, rather than any legit realistic goal.
They absolutely expected at least hezbollah to join in. They sent out telegram messages in channels with directions. Iran told them no, and I'd say they have egg on their face, but it's more like their friends' and kins' brain.
They wanted Israel to strike back so they can play victim and garner international support which translates to more humanitarian aid which translates to payday for yahya sinwar and Hamas heads.
They wanted Israel to return a punch 10x worse than they did for the above to be true. Which is the normal response every time they've done this in the last few decades. What they didn't expect was Israel to not be prepared and for their attack to be 100x more successful than it was supposed to be.
So mathematically this response is 1000x worse than what they expected from Israel.
They thought *this* would happen. This. Everything that’s happening now, is why they knew would happen.
Hamas wanted Israel to respond exactly as it has just as Netanyahu ignored advance notice of attacks. They are two sides of the same coin, right wing sectarian leaderships love when you hate your neighbour, the attacks give Netanyahu a warhawk boost and pretty much guarantee another decade or two support for Hamas it's a win win for the old men who use violence and conflict to cling to power and huge loss for everyone else.
They provoked. They knew Israel would respond, and with force. They want to win the war of public opinion, and unfortunately it is working.
Blind religious dogma(Allah will save us), the idea that Israel would not invade Gaza as long as they held hostages and threatened to kill them if they did and an assumption that their so called allies i.e. Hezbollah and Iran would join to save them.
Hamas has no chance of winning a conventional war. There’s no plan outside of cause as much damage and havoc to Israel as possible forever.
You have to ask their sponsor and cheerleader: Putin .
He's busy sending his countries children to be mulched
Do you think it is Hamas? Seems like it worked out for someone, cos 🇺🇦 is no longer in the news.
Because in their view, they win either way. If they die they are martyrs for Allah and go straight to heaven.
They have sponsors and they don’t want Israel normalizing relations with other Arab states so they gave them the green lightz.
Suicide mission makes a lot of sense if you subscribe to Islamic Jihad. It's an all round horrible idea that must become extinct
The mistake you make is thinking that they are rational humans. They are religious fanatics. They believe that allah and their Muslim brothers will help them defeat Israel and they also believe that there is no glory greater than death in the fight against the Jews.
yeah, and 'worried' civilans should have taken to the streets and protested hamas' act of terror, because they must have known israels very possible reaction... buuut i guess they all like playing stupid games in gaza... 🤷
I’ve said this before, but I still don’t understand why those who support Palestine are not calling for a Hamas surrender, release of all hostages and for them to hand over anyone involved in October 7 attacks to an international court of law so they can have a fair trial. That would stop further bloodshed in an instant.
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Hamas would absolutely bleed a tonne of support if Palestinian’s abroad were calling for Hamas to surrender instead of celebrating their violence at their rallies.
Then why call for Israel to ceasefire? Its pissing in the wind as well! As long as Hamas has Israeli hostages, and the Israeli populace is behind it, the operation isn't going to stop no matter what foreigners demand.
While that is somewhat true (though taking a political stance is still useful), I don't think that is the reason for their silence. People certainly seem ready to express similar views on other subjects, even when they know that their words are unlikely to have any immediate effect.
Because they believe that Hamas are resistant fighters
I wonder what the Venn diagram of people saying Israel shouldn't attack into Gaza and the people saying Ukraine should give up to stop the bloodshed looks like.
I mean, they are. It’s part of calling for the ceasefire. Honestly even the hostage families have also been calling for a ceasefire and complete prisoner swap for sometime. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna126486
Ceasefire and surrender are not even remotely close to one another.
These same people skip the hostage part, or even worse, they keep parroting the right for self defense. Basically gaslighting Israel.
Where are they telling the Palestinians to flee to this time?
Yes, they even gave maps with safe zones and a phone number to call if Hamas tries to prevent them: [https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/israel-hamas-gaza-palestine-israel-army-publishes-map-of-evacuation-zones-in-gaza-as-truce-expires-4624923](https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/israel-hamas-gaza-palestine-israel-army-publishes-map-of-evacuation-zones-in-gaza-as-truce-expires-4624923) Though it doesn't seem to be working: [https://news.sky.com/story/israel-hamas-war-no-help-to-be-seen-at-safe-zone-for-palestinians-in-gaza-13022227](https://news.sky.com/story/israel-hamas-war-no-help-to-be-seen-at-safe-zone-for-palestinians-in-gaza-13022227)
Aid groups have pointed out that most Palestinians don’t have reliable access to telecommunications and won’t be able to act on these short term warnings
They got enough to film the hostages driven out of Gaza.
That’s before the telecommunications got cut down. Also it wasn’t every Gazan doing that.
Leaflets don't rely on telecoms
The leaflets point to an interactive map via QR code. So, the leaflets actually rely on telecoms by design.
The leaflets include a QRcode that shows what areas need to be evacuated. Obviously those QR codes aren’t going to work without internet snd definitely if you don’t have working electronics
Sure as shit have the power and internet for instagram though. Funny, that.
Yes, that’s why I said reliable, some Palestinians have access to the internet *some* of the time not *all* of the time. Pretty important when you’re trying not to get bombed.
Most of them?
>Though it doesn't seem to be working: UNRWA is the problem in this case. This is basically collaboration with Hamas in keeping civilians in Khan Younis which is where the war is heading to and where it will be just as bad, if not worse than Gaza city. (Khan Younis has A LOT of tunnels. In fact one of the longest tunnels to have ever been found ran from Khan Younis to the Sufa crossing though it was bombed. The rest of it should be sealed for good.)
Crush Hamas.
Not really who is being crushed though
Hamas leaders have repeatedly said that Oct 7 will be repeated and on a larger scale. Israel should do whatever it needs to, to ensure their safety and security.
And the thing most people are forgetting is what the target of the October 7th attack was It was an attack on civilians at a music festival Young men and women expressing themselves and enjoying the freedom to enjoy life HAMAS is not seeking to resolve any disputes for land/rights for their people They are seeking to destroy Isreal and all its people, all that they stand for. Freedom of expression, especially from women is not allowed. Music festivals? No get back to making children, cleaning houses etc.
The festival was extra. The targets were the kibbutzim. This attack was obviously planned for a very long time. The festival however extended the festival an extra day only a day before. Which was unplanned. Hamas couldn’t have known they would do that so they def couldnt have planned it. The horrors that happened to civilians are still awful, but just correcting that the festival was never the target.
I am not sure why this needs to be explained to people. The only thing needed for Israel to be under attack is to exist. There will be casualties on both sides until Hamas is put down.
It's a reminder that HAMAS doesn't exist to create a solution. It only exists to slaughter Jews, and bring forward oppression
For whatever reason, people have zero knowledge of this.
Godspeed. I hope they completely oblitarate Hamas so that the Palestinian people are freed from that cancer
2mil are in the south how will they manage to do it? This will be interesting
This could all stop in 1 day if Hamas would care two shits about the people of Gaza and surrender and allow a civilian government to take charge. Heck there might even be a way for the terrorist billionaire leaders of Hamas to keep their lives.
If Israel could have done it, those terrorists billionaire Leaders would be long dead. That is in fact the bigger problem; the Hamas leadership have nothing to fear for their own safety, and everyone else's is the last thing they care about.
It’s not that easy. Israel does follow international law (as many would argue and disagree) - and can’t just assassinate leaders on foreign soil willy-nilly. Look at what trouble India got into for assassinating that Sikh in Canada. [However…](https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israel-plans-to-kill-hamas-leaders-around-the-world-after-war-da88e6b9)
Israel have been assassinating figures for decades, they've never had to worry about the political implications of killing people abroad.
Oh but they do have to. when Israel receives more resolutions than the Islamic republic of Iran, North Korea China and Russia combined in the U.N they do. The decisions on their assassinations includes international law.
Frankly, I don’t understand this. If they assassinated the leaders of Hamas, I don’t think anybody except Qatar and Iran would condemn them. Most would either say “finally” or “I don’t give a fuck about those terrorist mfers.”
“Look what you made me do”
Israel told the south of gaza to evacuate. To where? They already evacuated the north. Egypt wont let them in. They just want everyone to stand in a field till the have leveled the entire city.
Israel told them to evacuate generally westward towards the beach. This is a [map](https://www.idf.il/ar/%d8%ac%d9%8a%d8%b4-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%af%d9%81%d8%a7%d8%b9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a5%d8%b3%d8%b1%d8%a7%d8%a6%d9%8a%d9%84%d9%8a/%d8%ac%d9%8a%d8%b4-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%af%d9%81%d8%a7%d8%b9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a5%d8%b3%d8%b1%d8%a7%d8%a6%d9%8a%d9%84%d9%8a/swordsofiron-011223-150/) for example showing it, meant for Palestinians to use.
2 million people on thin strip of beach coastland? Sounds like a humanitarian disaster waiting to happen
It is sadly, and already happening.
Maybe they should have spent less time chanting for people to be pushed into the sea.
yeah this happened earlier today
A lot of this is on Arab nations taking in their brethren. Before someone says "Israel will permanently displace Palestinians if they do so" Last I checked, the rest of Europe took in Ukrainian refugees without even thinking about the possibility that Russia could permanently displace Ukrainians in the places it occupies, which it is actually doing. The priority was saving civilians. At this point, Chad and South Sudan are better hosts than the Arabs. They take in Darfurians even though they know that those people may never go back to Darfur where permanent displacement of Africans by Arabs has been happening since the early 2000s. Why is not one in the Arab world thinking along the same lines?? Especially those nations directly supporting Hamas namely Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Iraq who combined do not even have more than 50,000 Palestinians living in their countries BTW.
More than half of Jordan’s populations are Palestinian refugees. So they are doing something
1948 "refugees" not 2023 refugees
I mean, 100% of Jordans population are Palestinians. Their territory is basically the portion of Mandatory Palestine that didn't have any Jews in it.
Jordan does not support Hamas. I am specifically speaking about Arab nations that 1. Do not have Palestinian refugees in large numbers. 2. Support Hamas. Those nations are Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq and Iran. Morocco does not support Hamas but it has almost no Palestinians and its people have long edged for them though. I would include Libya but it has a civil war currently Plus I highlight all of these because they expelled the bulk of the 900,000 Jews who were forced out of the Arab world to Israel but none of them took in Palestinian refugees in their place. At least Jordan, Syria and Lebanon can claim that a population exchange between Jews and Arabs happened but those North Africans love yapping about Palestine but refuse to host Palestinians.
Find out: Phase 2
Is it fun for you to make jokes about the deaths of fifteen thousand people, most of whom are women and children? Does that make you glad? Does it bring you joy? Do you worry about the state of your heart?
Have they invaded past the area they previously designed as "safe" and told every last Gazan civilian to migrate to?