Altherion

It's only an evil statement if you put words into my mouth. I never said anything about the entire US population of Arab-Americans nor can what you said be implied from what I said by any reasonable reading. My point was simply that Biden's handling of the conflict was quite reasonable and consistent with the views of the vast majority of Americans. Had he been less pro-Israel and more pro-Hamas, he would have lost much more than he did.

Biden chose by far the lesser political evil though. Had he tried to placate the terrorist sympathizers, he would have have lost a lot more than 1% of the vote. There's an immense amount of external pressure right now. I think the Israelis are sufficiently provoked that they won't stop until they either get what they want or they have absolutely no choice (either the war goes badly for them or the US tells them to stop).

I meant according to the modern laws of war, not what is physically possible.

No, it does not. It does mean that if Hamas is hiding a rocket launcher in a refugee camp or has its headquarters in tunnels under a hospital, it is legal for Israel to attack these targets even though hospitals and refugee camps are usually off limits. However, there does have to be something military being attacked; the Israelis can't just randomly bomb anything in Gaza.

Nobody is going to explain anything to anyone during an active conflict because if they start telling people why thought some target is worth hitting, that tells the other side something about their intelligence capabilities. Since the usage of human shields is a core part of the strategy of Hamas (in fact, it's by far the most important element of that strategy), a large fraction of Israeli attacks are going to affect civilians. They are not war crimes because one is allowed to do that as long as there is a military objective, but they make for good Hamas propaganda since Israel is not going to explain what it was they were aiming at. And yes, every once in a while the Israelis will make a mistake and bomb the wrong location entirely. It happens to every military and it's probably more likely here because the area is small and everything is packed together.

Of course not. I have no access to any of the information necessary to prove anything. However, neither do the people making these accusations. To discuss this knowledgeably, one would have to know what exactly the targets of the bombings are and how often these targets are eliminated. We don't know any of that and it's not public info. Answering your questions in order, to the first one, I would assume so, but it's hard to say (see my comment about having no idea what the targets are). The Israelis claim to be delivering warnings and Hamas threatened to execute hostages if they don't do that so I think the warnings are being delivered. I have no idea about how much time is allowed on average and neither does anyone outside the conflict. I don't know what "enough" means in this context -- they've clearly let some organizations keep operating. I assume every organization tries to learn from past mistakes, but again, I have no idea as this is internal to the IDF. I think they were trying to get Hamas to use up their supplies, but I do not know for sure. More generally, the questions you are asking are nearly all operational questions that are impossible for an outsider to answer. Maybe the US military or other organizations with excellent surveillance capabilities can answer some of them, but mostly, they're unknowable unless one somehow can make the IDF talk (which, for obvious reasons, they're not going to until at least after the war is finished).

I did not say they are solely bombing fortifications and you answer your own question: they're bombing all sorts of Hamas assets. To know exactly how many Hamas fighters they've killed they'd have to have people on the ground telling them that -- and Hamas is obviously not going to broadcast that information. The Israelis have confirmed that several Hamas commanders have been killed, but they don't know about how many rank-and-file (as I've mentioned previously, that would be a very interesting piece of information). Why do you think the latter? They've clearly done some damage to Hamas; it's just not very prominent in the media.

The US is helping in the two ways that it can help: we're keeping a massive amount of fire power in the area to prevent Iran and others from escalation and, as soon as Congress gets its act together, we will give Israel some aid in the form of weapons and munitions. However, what the US will absolutely not do is send troops to fight in Gaza. And nobody else will do it either because everyone knows that there are exactly two ways urban warfare can go: 1) A bombing campaign like the one Israel is currently carrying out. 2) The meat grinder that is created when one sends in soldiers into a densely built up, densely populated area where the enemy has had time to lay traps and fortify. I think most of your objections stem from the fact that you either do not understand or do not agree with this military reality. The Israelis are not bombing Gaza for their own amusement or for revenge or anything of the sort. They're doing it to soften up the defenses because they know that when they send in boots on the ground, their own casualties will be extremely high and they're hoping that by taking out at least some fortifications, they can reduce them a bit.

That seems like a non sequitur to me. How would a ceasefire deprive Hamas of support? The people supporting them now would just start saying that Gaza has been punished enough and there should be no resumption of hostilities and so on and so forth. In the best case for Israel, it would give Hamas time to rearm and would take us further from the time of the October attacks.

It does have a similar effect, but this is not by accident and it's not because the area is small. It's because Hamas has deliberately positioned its military assets right next to or underneath civilian installations. This is against the Geneva Conventions, but Hamas doesn't care and they won't let people leave these places. It's a despicable way of waging war, but it seems to be working for them in that a substantial fraction of nations is now calling for a ceasefire.

It depends strongly on what fraction of those casualties are members of Hamas and other terrorist groups. Hamas is very quick to broadcast civilian casualties as widely as possible, but, like nearly all military groups, they don't advertise their losses. Furthermore, it's unlikely that this kind of bombing campaign can be kept up for long -- if nothing else, one runs out of dual-use infrastructure to bomb. Also, there's no way this will last years. Judging by the funding currently being debated in Congress, the US will probably give Israel some leeway for a few months, but eventually they'll be told to wrap things up.

There are hostage negotiations going on in Qatar. They're not very public so it's not clear how they're going, but they exist. That's probably what he is hoping for since regardless of how the war goes, the time that it lasts is also the time that he stays in power. Even if Israel succeeds in all of its objectives from this point on, Netanyahu's political career is finished.

If the one and only thing on the other side was retaliation, then yes, the choice would be easy. However, in reality, this is a variant of the trolley problem: one can let the trolley roll (leave the hostages where they are) or one can redirect it onto another set of people (release thousands of terrorists who will then almost surely go on to kill more people and take more hostages). There is no answer that everyone agrees to even to the original trolley problem, never mind the variant where you don't know how much harm acting causes.

How is it verifiable? All of the information ultimately comes from Hamas or entities controlled by Hamas. The names and ID numbers might be real (or might not -- I do not know), but there's no way to prove anything about the state of the person corresponding to each one unless you believe Hamas.

First, the vast majority of Americans are currently strongly supportive of Israel. Harvard and Harris do a large (more than 2000 registered voters) national poll which, starting this October, asked about Israel and the current conflict (it starts at page 38 of the link). Somewhere between three quarters and four fifths of American voters believe Hamas are more appropriately called terrorists (page 41), that the Hamas attacks cannot be justified by Palestinian grievances and that these attacks were genocidal (page 43). On page 45, you can see that 58% of Americans approve of Biden's handling of this conflict (which is much higher than his approval in most other areas). Finally, there is this very specifically worded question on page 47: "Does Israel have the right to defend itself against rocket and terror attacks on its cities by launching air strikes on terrorist targets in heavily populated Palestinian areas with warnings to those citizens or does it not have the right to launch to launch such attacks?" And the answer to it is Yes by 84% of the respondents (which is a bit surprising because it's hard to get to 84% of American voters to agree on anything nowadays). Second, if you look at the breakdowns by age for all of these questions, the 65+ cohort is always more strongly pro-Israel than the majority -- and Biden himself is of course part of this cohort. I suspect that Biden himself supports Israel and believes the pressure he is placing on them is adequate. Also, he has more information at his disposal than we do and he does not believe the numbers of casualties: He does caution Israel in this comment too, but mainly it drew fury from a long list of Hamas sympathizers.

If there were truly no signals at all, then of course it's impossible to intercept them. However, no military force can operate without any signals at all and Hamas will undoubtedly have other forms of communication. Disrupting the dual-use networks actually makes such intelligence work a lot easier since much more of the communication traffic that is left will be military in nature.

This is part of the tragedy of such actions though. There is no doubt that Israel will change its behavior, but it takes an amazing leader with very strong and widespread support to implement the kind of changes you are talking about. It's much more likely that the changes will be along the lines of stronger fortifications along the border, a more thorough blockade to let fewer weapons through, etc.

That assumption is there for a reason though: a group that does not retaliate strongly when attacked will be attacked again and again and again. You are correct in that the retaliation is often not military in nature, but that is because most such attacks are not perpetrated by something the size of a small nation state which sends on the order of 1500 attackers. It's necessary and sufficient for the retaliation to be substantially greater than the attack that provoked it, but, crucially, only with respect to the size of the attacking group. When the attacking group is on the order of 10 people total, a military response is obviously unnecessary. Yes, but only because the police officer's nominal job is to protect the hostages. The situation with a nation state at war is not the same: a government has a duty to protect its own people and to refrain from attacking purely civilian targets, but there are no protections for civilians who are unfortunate enough to be near military and dual-use infrastructure when it is attacked.

I don't think it's that so much as he was trying to argue for a ceasefire and managed to more or less sweep the fact that the attack on October 7th was extraordinary under the rug. Here is the full set of comments. He does start by unequivocally condemning the unprecedented attacks for all of one sentence... and then spends the rest of the rather long speech equivocating and listing Palestinian grievances. If his goal was to infuriate the Israelis, those comments are definitely the way to go. If not, he's not a very good diplomat.

This is putting the cart before the horse: the animosity of the Arab nations towards Israel was the direct cause of the "injustice" 75 years ago (I put the word in quotation marks because it was not so much an injustice as it was a war). Back when the UN was not a hopelessly corrupt and nearly useless agglomeration of bureaucrats, it came up with a plan for the partition of the territory between Jews and Arabs. Today, this partition would be considered extremely generous for the Palestinians, but the Arab states would not agree to it and invaded the newly formed Israel instead. They lost a whole lot more territory than they won and they've been angry about the results ever since. So far, I fully agree with you. But this is not what happened in Israel and Palestine. There was an attempt to come up with some division that most of the world could agree on, but the Arabs would not have it -- they wanted the whole territory.

I don't think this is true. The British undoubtedly made an unholy mess of this region (as they did in many places) and so yes, modern colonialism is responsible for the initial conditions that ultimately lead to this conflict, but colonialism has little to do with what happened in the next three quarters of a century. The issue here is that this specific bit of land is extremely important to the participants of the conflict and no side will give it up without being forced to do so. In fact, this has been true for a very long time now and this region has been hotly contested for millennia and changed hands dozens of times. It's not at all the same set of motivations as colonialism.

CNN says Biden will visit Israel on Wednesday.

It's not even that it has the potential to go wrong, it's that it's almost guaranteed to be a mess of epic proportions. Hamas has had more than a decade to fortify and trap the places the Israelis will be marching into and there is no technology out there right now that enables urban warfare without very high casualties (either on one side because the other is simply reducing the urban landscape to dust or on both sides because neither is willing or able to perform said reduction). It's going to be bad.

Of course there are other ways -- war is full of options -- but the siege (obviously) makes it easier for the Israelis in that it makes it more difficult for Hamas to resupply. It's one method among many. Not instantly, but they will obey (more realistically, they will keep things from getting to that point). And it's not that I don't care, it's that I've (sadly) seen enough of this kind of actions to know what the consequences will be. It was completely obvious that there would be many more casualties the moment the scale of the initial attack became apparent. I bother posting for the same reason that I think most people here do -- it's an extraordinary event and we want to say something even though it's not likely to make any difference whatsoever. I don't think that is what it means. That sounds like the usual hedging that pretty much everyone does. The US certainly does have limits, but thus far it's letting Israel go ahead and even sending them additional weapons and munitions. To me, that looks like the US is ready for a longer term conflict and will tolerate it unless the Israelis really go too far.

No, the Israelis will continue to go after Hamas -- I don't think they can stop now short of catastrophic failure of some sort. However, if they exceed the patience of the US, they will have to do so without the siege and such.