I think IDF will find it impossible to eliminate Hamas. IDF if left to their own goals will do the same in Southern Gaza as they did in Northern Gaza with massive innocent civilian deaths from bombings and depravation. Then the Israelis will then be called the butchers of Gaza.
NO they did not!
and
NO it will not!
You are stomping your feet again.
You do not know. Stop assuming Israel is evil.
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Netanyahu is saying to lay down your arms and negotiate.
I am saying Hamas needs to recognize Israel.
They do. They recognize it as needing to be destroyed. NOT the recognition desired by others.
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Russia is evil for murdering thousands of children and kidnaping thousands of children and sending them to Siberia.
Israel is evil for murdering thousands of children.
Garbage
Russia started the war in Ukraine.
Israel will end this war. You are proposing that Hamas end this war. That won’t happen.
The US is reforming the Progressives on this topic. We won’t put up with scapegoating the Jews or using the pretext that is just faulting Israel garbage talk.
Start faulting Hamas and this conversation would make sense.
Hamas has been raping Israeli female noncombatants. Answer for that.
Those who are dying are sitting with Hamas militants. Often their family members.
Hamas members have large young families. Going to war you’d think they would not just sit there with wives and babies. The IDF is not going to give up their own lives to save Hamas families. Hamas needs to do that. Don’t just sit there holding toddlers while fighting a war and then say the innocent are dying.
The regular Gazans have proven repeatedly that their numbers will move fast away from Hamas in the 10s of thousands per hour to be safe. No Gazan stays near Hamas militants in battle. The innocent Gazans are not the main casualties.
None of this is about Israel. This is only about Hamas.
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I said nothing of the kind. I said Israeli IDF is evil for the barbaric bombing and killing of thousands of children and they even kill Israeli children.
How many were sitting as family with Hamas militants?
4/5s for more?
Palestinian women are raped and tortured by Israeli soldiers and civilians. Answer for that.
It had achieved this penetration on Monday, but the announcement was only made on Tuesday. The IDF took a variety of maneuvers to penetrate Khan Yunis. Simultaneously, the IDF invaded Khan Yunus from the east so that Hamas would need to fight on multiple fronts…
Several hundred Hamas terrorists were killed on Sunday, marking one of the deadliest for Hamas’s forces…Based on these estimates, Hamas is assessed as having around 20,000 remaining potential fighters of its original 30,000.
DB2
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Meanwhile, the IDF has been planning to pump seawater into the Hamas tunnel network in Gaza for weeks, the Wall Street Journal has reported and the Jerusalem Post was told weeks ago.
Five large pumps have been assembled north of the al-Shati refugee camp during the last month, with each one capable of pumping thousands of cubic meters of seawater into the tunnels.
The Post had been told by top defense officials that this was one of a series of methods which the IDF hoped to use to destroy and neutralize Hamas’s vast tunnel network.
Israel informed US officials that they were considering this option last month and needed to weigh feasibility and environmental factors against military necessity.
Due to the nature and structure of the tunnels, it is unclear whether the method will be a cure-all for the tunnel threat, or will be useful, but will remain just one of a series of important tactics,
Some US officials expressed concern about the plan while others supported it.
The process could take weeks and therefore could allow Hamas’s fighters to evacuate, potentially taking the hostages with them. However, it isn’t clear whether Israel would wait until all hostages are returned.
One of the major concerns over this plan is the environmental impact of pumping seawater into the ground.
Sea water seeping into the soil is a major cause for concern as it can poison already semi-salinated aquifers deep in the ground as well as making the surface extremely unstable.
Fears are that seawater would salinate Gaza’s soil, making it extremely difficult to grow crops. There are also concerns that substances stored in the tunnels could also seep into the soil further contaminating the area.
Former US officials told the Wall Street Journal that the plan would perhaps bring global condemnation, but they conceded it might be one of the few ways to permanently disable the tunnels.
Egypt flooded Hamas tunnels with seawater in 2015, which led to complaints from farmers in Rafah that it had damaged their crops.
Militaries typically use dogs and robots to clear tunnels, however, the effectiveness of flooding the tunnels may prove too lucrative an option for the IDF, saving them time, money, and manpower.
The last few weeks of bombing has made much of Gaza uninhabitable. Israel has said that they will demand an uninhabited “buffer zone”, on the Gaza side of the border. Isn’t there a Biblical thing about “sowing their fields with salt”?
Ah, the net is a wonderful thing:
In other examples, barren wastelands are described in terms of being salty. Land sowed with salt, then, was a symbol of desolation. Such a concept is revealed in the Book of Judges, in which Abimelech, king of Shechem, destroyed the city of Shechem and sowed the land with salt afterward to ensure its complete devastation. This same idea was, supposedly, employed by the Romans during the destruction of Carthage.
There you have it. “Official” endorsement of salting the land to make it uninhabitable.
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As we’ve discussed many times, there are no good outcomes here. Only choices between bad outcomes.
Flooding the tunnels with seawater would allow Israel to deprive Hamas of that asset. It would certainly allow Israel to deprive them of that asset at a lower cost of Israeli military lives. It would probably allow Israel to eliminate that asset at a lower short-term cost of Palestinian lives, since flooding them will probably cause fewer immediate casualties than bombing.
But there are long-term negative outcomes. Israel doesn’t want Gaza to be uninhabitable, because there’s nowhere for the 2 million people who currently inhabit it to go. Israel probably doesn’t want Gaza to become even more dependent on food imports, which necessitate large volume cross-border goods shipments that increase the perceived security threat to Israel (though Israel may reduce their concerns about maintaining the blockade if they regard Hamas as having been successfully uprooted).
Again, no good outcomes when trying to defeat an enemy belligerent that is embedded within a civilian population.
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Would it be possible to pump out the tunnels once Hamas is flushed out of them? I don’t know how long it would take for the salt water to penetrate through the soil, but I suspect any significant removal of the salt water would make the long term damage less bad.
Putting on my “ethno-centric” hat, what if Israel’s only concern is Israel? What if Israel regards where the Pals go as “an Arab problem”?
In other news, the UK government is floating a proposal to sharpy reduce immigration. iirc, from the report on the BBC last night, they require immigrants to have a job lined up that will pay a minimum of $42KUS/year. Immigration of family members to be sharply cut. Seems that ethnic purity is the coming thing in several countries.
Steve
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Regardless of whether their concern is only Israel, how they “regard” a problem doesn’t actually make it “an Arab problem.” If Gaza were rendered incapable of agricultural production due to salinization of the groundwater, there’s no way Israel could avoid being affected by the food needs of more than two million people.
Egypt also. Israel isn’t the only bordering country. The blockade of Gaza isn’t solely the result of Israeli policy, but Egypt as well. If Gaza can’t feed the population, then food will need to be brought in - and that will affect both Egypt and Israel.
Israel’s not naive. They understand the impact of ‘facts on the ground.’ Two million people in Gaza is a huge ‘fact on the ground,’ and they can’t make that into someone else’s problem. Except Egypt’s, to a partial extent.
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IIRC, the Pals are Muslim. Why can’t Muslims step up? Somebody posted here that there are over 50 officially Muslim countries. Indonesia alone has 250-300 million Muslims and could handle some refugees.
DB2
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Things could have been negotiated several times over since 2007. One of the parties made a demand that would never ever be met.
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Chasing the people out of Gaza, establishes a new “fact on the ground”, just like building scores of settlements on the West Bank. Originally, the Pals in Gaza City were told “go south of Wadi Gaza to be safe”, except the IDF continued to bomb all of Gaza. Then the IDF said the boogyman is in Khan Yunis, told the Pals there to go to Rafah, as Khan Yunis is bombed into rubble. So, what happens when 2M Pals are packed up next to the border fence? Will the IDF say “the boogyman is in Rafah”, and bomb that area into rubble? If that happens, 2M Pals will be running across the border, to try and save their lives. Will the Egyptian army gun down 2M people? Once across the border, into Egypt, international law wrt refugees makes them Egypt’s problem, just as people escaping poverty and violence in Guatemala, who make it across the Rio Grande, become the US’ problem.
Recall the Kushner plan?
More than half of the $50 billion would be spent in the economically troubled Palestinian territories over 10 years while> the rest would be split between Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan. Some of the projects would be in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, where investments could benefit Palestinians living in adjacent Gaza, a crowded and impoverished coastal enclave.
The … administration hopes that wealthy Gulf states and nations in Europe and Asia, along with private investors, would foot much of the bill, Kushner told Reuters.
“I laugh when they attack this as the ‘Deal of the Century’,” Kushner said of Palestinian leaders who have dismissed his plan as an attempt to buy off their aspirations for statehood. “This is going to be the ‘Opportunity of the Century’ if they have the courage to pursue it.”
I would suspect El-Sisi would like the opportunity to skim a few Billion off that plan for his own pocket. I am just as confident that Europe, Asia, and “private investors” would koff up the money, just like Mexico would “pay for the wall”./sarcasm
Some have been saying, from the start, the Gaza op smells of ethnic cleansing. So far, there is zero evidence of it being anything else.