Israel - Hamas War IX

[Heartofice]

40 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

The fear of the Palestinians is that they will not be allowed to return to their land once they've left. Also, some people are unable to evacuate for medical reasons.

That's an understandable fear, but the area IS going to be a warzone and staying there would be incredibly dangerous.

[Craving Peaches]

9 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

That's an understandable fear, but the area IS going to be a warzone and staying there would be incredibly dangerous.

I agree, but most of the people in Gaza are refugees and descendants of refugees who were displaced in previous conflicts. In addition, the south is being bombed as well, there were recent strikes in Raffah and Khan Younis, not to mention people being bombed while evacuating. Someone people feel they're in danger no matter where they go. At least one man said something along the lines of 'I'd rather die in my own home'.

[Heartofice]

5 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

I agree, but most of the people in Gaza are refugees and descendants of refugees who were displaced in previous conflicts. In addition, the south is being bombed as well, there were recent strikes in Raffah and Khan Younis, not to mention people being bombed while evacuating. Someone people feel they're in danger no matter where they go. At least one man said something along the lines of 'I'd rather die in my own home'.

I understand, but at the same time Israel has openly said it's going to go in militarily to the area and done it's best to encourage civilians to leave because they are putting themselves into danger by being there. Anyone choosing to stay is very likely to end up as a statistic. 

[kissdbyfire]

A bit long but very good interview w/ Nathan Thrall talking about his book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama and life on the West Bank and how much worse ot got after October 7. 

 

 

[Mudguard]

The article on the extended phone calls to evacuate was interesting, but it also raises a lot of questions.  I also wonder what the military objective was.  I think it's very unlikely that they were targeting actual Hamas terrorists there, because giving an advance warning would defeat the purpose of killing them.  If they thought that some Hamas terrorists lived there and just wanted to destroy their homes, that seems pointless and punitive to the civilians, because the Hamas terrorists can just sleep somewhere else.

We do know that when there really is a Hamas target they will bomb without warning despite the presence of many civilians.  Maybe the whole exercise served mainly to help bolster the IDF's claim that they are doing everything they can to avoid civilian casualties, because when they do cause massive civilian casualties, they always point out the leaflets and the phone calls and that no one else does as much.  Whether blowing up dozens of apartment buildings in a residential neighborhood would be considered proportional to achieving that objective, who knows.  There is no real way to weigh these things, so it's very possible that the IDF could have came to the conclusion that it was proportional.

Regarding the general request for people to move south, I wonder what Israel is going to do when they finish clearing out the north and turn their focus to the south.  It's clear that Hamas is also in the south, based on the constant bombings there.   Are they going to tell the people to move back north to a pile of rubble?  Are they going to push the line further south to Rafa so that all the displaced Palestinians are all concentrated right at the border with Egypt?  Then to clear out Rafa, where would the people go?  To Egypt?  There doesn't seem to be anywhere left to go.  I don't see how this ends well for the civilians.

Edited November 8, 2023 by Mudguard

[Ran]

Look, I'm just going to first speculate on what sort of targets might lead the IDF to decide to drop those buildings:

1) Knowledge that there are substantial IDF supplies stored there, such that even with a warning at least some part of it won't be removed.

2) Knowledge that the towers have been rigged with communications equipment used as part of the Hamas communication capabilities, and that some substantial portion could not be removed in time.

3) Knowledge that exits/entrances to the local tunnel network were in the site and that dropping the towers would seal them up, crippling the ability to effectively use the network.

4) Knowledge that generators and equipment on the site were used to provide power for the local tunnel network, and they could not be removed in time.

Like I said, speculation.

This then leads in to two aspects of Israel's approach to these things: their attitude towards dual-use infrastructure, on the one hand, which I mentioned before; and the paradox of precision in relation to their habit to give warnings.

First, as I noted in the past, they are unusual in that they do not consider the civil value of a structure that they judge is being use for a military purpose when deciding how to approach it (this interpretation appears to be shared by Denmark, of all people, but they add some language about considering that damage in the overall picture of a campaign rather than in specific instances). The rules of proportionality, when viewed by some other country, might suggest that you do a precision strike on, say, a floor and hope that that destroys the thing you're after while minimizing the damage to the future civil value of the structure. But according to their interpretation of the relevant laws and customs, because they don't take future civil value into account, this weights the value of the military target higher, and so they're willing to drop entire buildings to get at the target.

The other aspect of things is the paradox of precision. The idea, articulated by Amos Fox (see here for one articulation of it), is that precision weapons that allow the reduction of collateral damage also, paradoxically, lead to way more strikes taking place. Like you target a floor, and you find out you took out two of ten terrorists you were targeting, and the rest have gone to another building -- so you strike again, and again, and again, chasing after them, whereas one bomb dropped to take out the whole structure would have taken them all out, perhaps sparing wider damage. Now, as I said above, the Israelis don't really think much about civil value of buildings that are dual-purpose. But because they take extraordinary steps to warn people to get out, this leads to the same thing: the enemy manages to get some of their materials out and moves it somewhere else, and so knocking down one building isn't enough, they'll have to knock down another and another and another to achieve total destruction of whatever the material is.

I don't think this account is some sort of put on or that Israel does it just to "look good". They do it because they acknowledge that they are fighting in an incredibly dense urban area with a population that is restricted in its ability to get away from the conflict. I promise you, the IDF would absolutely love it if there were no civilians to worry about -- it'd make the fight much faster and much cleaner, and they'd probably lose fewer people themselves. 

[Ran]

4 hours ago, Ran said:

Per the IDF, they have extended the safe passage to 3PM local time (from 2PM) because it was so successful. Apparently the footage showing people making it safely through has galvanized more and more to take up the protected route the IDF is providing, with the IDF saying that in the last three days 22k have gone south... with 15,000 of those just on Tuesday.

At this pace, the north of Gaza will be empty of any but Hamas in a couple of weeks.

Err, couple of weeks seems to be a pessimistic assessment. This just in via the AFP:

 

 

[Kalbear]

Note that Israel does not (and, at least militarily, should not) warn ahead of time to evacuate areas based on at least a couple of criteria:

- if there are active attacks happening from that spot (as they want to destroy the equipment and munitions that are there and not allow them to relocate

- if there are specific targets of people they're going for (such as the targets at the refugee camp)

In those cases there will be no warning via phone/roof knocking/etc given. 

There is also some very reasonable speculation that Israel has simply gone after high-civilian-value targets in the past to punish, as was the case with their targeting the highest building in Gaza early on in the war. As with almost every such instance in the past there has been almost no oversight publicly given for any of these types of attacks in the last 20 years and even less accountability. 

[Mudguard]

28 minutes ago, Ran said:

Look, I'm just going to first speculate on what sort of targets might lead the IDF to decide to drop those buildings:

1) Knowledge that there are substantial IDF supplies stored there, such that even with a warning at least some part of it won't be removed.

2) Knowledge that the towers have been rigged with communications equipment used as part of the Hamas communication capabilities, and that some substantial portion could not be removed in time.

3) Knowledge that exits/entrances to the local tunnel network were in the site and that dropping the towers would seal them up, crippling the ability to effectively use the network.

4) Knowledge that generators and equipment on the site were used to provide power for the local tunnel network, and they could not be removed in time.

Like I said, speculation.

 

All these things could be stored underground, besides an antenna for communications, and blowing up dozens of buildings for an antenna is idiotic.  I find it unlikely that substantial amounts of valuable equipment were being stored in that large block of apartment buildings, when they've spent decades building out this extensive tunnel network.  And again, when the IDF thinks something is of actual value at a site, it just bombs it without any warning.  Warning civilians is secondary, and they can already point to the mass leaflets.  

Hundreds of tunnels entrances leading to hundreds of miles of tunnels exist all throughout Gaza.  Blowing up a whole neighborhood to seal a handful of tunnels is pointless and seems way out of proportion when there's likely another tunnel and entrance very nearby.  If the presence of tunnels is enough justification to blow something up, they can just go ahead and essentially blow up all of Gaza.  Which they admittedly might be in the process of doing.

It's possible there was some other military objective beside being a public relations objective, but I 100% think the PR angle is something they considered.  They've already gotten a lot of mileage out of it.

I agree that the IDF wants to drive the population south because it makes things easier for them in the north, so as another poster suggested, maybe part of the military objective was to do just that.  All these people don't have homes, and all their neighbors just watched the buildings right next door get flattened, so I'm guessing a lot of these people moved south.  Do that repeatedly, as the IDF has done, and the civilian population will be so in terror of getting bombed that they will move south.

[Ran]

10 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

if there are specific targets of people they're going for (such as the targets at the refugee camp)

There were active gun battles just to the west of the camp, and the target was said to be coordinating the Hamas efforts in the command and.control center under the camp.

So it's not just that a high value target was there, but rather that he and what they say we're many militants were actively engaged in fighting the IDF at the time.

[Kalbear]

2 minutes ago, Ran said:

There were active gun battles just to the west of the camp, and the target was said to be coordinating the Hamas efforts in the command and.control center under the camp.

So it's not just that a high value target was there, but rather that he and what they say we're many militants were actively engaged in fighting the IDF at the time.

There were no active fights at that location though, and 'to the west' is like 2 km. I don't think it really matters since they bombed it AGAIN later when the fighting wasn't nearby. And they've done plenty of other bombings like that that had no combat specific focus, such as the ambulance or some of the hospital bombings, or some of the attacks south of Gaza in those refugee camps. 

[JoannaL]

I think it farfetched that this was just for public relation. Also in the article it is said that BBC activly searched for and contacted this dentist.

Is not the easiest explaination the most likely? That the IDF -in the cases whe some forewarning doesn't hurt- just wants to warn civilians? I

[Ran]

14 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

and 'to the west' is like 2 km

Which is nothing if you're calling in mortars or moving troops via vehicles.

14 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

AGAIN later when the fighting wasn't nearby.

Casualties then? Less, I assume, since even the first strike was revised by the Health Ministry as "more than 50" people killd rather than the "112" initially reported.

17 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

such as the ambulance

It's true that they don't warn moving targets.

[Craving Peaches]

UN rights chief says war crimes committed on both sides of Israel-Hamas conflict | Reuters

2 minutes ago, Ran said:

It's true that they don't warn moving targets.

Proof the ambulance was a target? Israel still, has to my knowledge, released nothing that shows that ambulance convoy was a valid target. Or did you mean another ambulance?

[Ran]

4 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

Or did you mean another ambulance?

There was an ambulance the day prior that was struck, and Hamas seemed uninterested in complaining about that one for some reason.

[Kalbear]

7 minutes ago, Ran said:

Which is nothing if you're calling in mortars or moving troops via vehicles.

I guess, but it's also not really a great justification for hitting a refugee camp. And the 'calling in mortars' or 'moving troops' is just speculation. We don't know what they were doing, only that the IDF reports that they were coordinating an attack. 

7 minutes ago, Ran said:

Casualties then? Less, I assume, since even the first strike was revised by the Health Ministry as "more than 50" people killd rather than the "112" initially reported.

Dunno! I'm not sure it matters exactly how many casualties since they also didn't announce why they did it, either. 

7 minutes ago, Ran said:

It's true that they don't warn moving targets.

They also don't warn a whole lot of other targets. They didn't warn the refugee camps south of Wadi that they bombed recently, as an example. They didn't warn at least a couple of the hospital strikes. My point was simply that they have a fairly broad set of criteria on when they do not warn anyone about an attack and you see both cases in Gaza, and some of the worst, most outrageous things they've so far done have been without any real warning. 

[Kalbear]

20 minutes ago, JoannaL said:

I think it farfetched that this was just for public relation. Also in the article it is said that BBC activly searched for and contacted this dentist.

Is not the easiest explaination the most likely? That the IDF -in the cases whe some forewarning doesn't hurt- just wants to warn civilians? I

I think it's probably better to simply say that they do it, and not ascribe motive. And that it's a good thing regardless of their motive, but it doesn't absolve them of the casualties that they commit or needing to do even more, nor does it make it better when the casualty rate has been so very high. 

There are a lot of very good reasons beyond the goodness of their heart that Israel may have this as their policy, but ultimately the intent matters a great deal less than the impact. 

[Mudguard]

42 minutes ago, JoannaL said:

I think it farfetched that this was just for public relation. Also in the article it is said that BBC activly searched for and contacted this dentist.

Is not the easiest explaination the most likely? That the IDF -in the cases whe some forewarning doesn't hurt- just wants to warn civilians? I

I don't doubt that the dentist got the call and things happened as he described.  In fact, if PR was part of the motive, the more people that pick up the story and the more people that are interviewed about it, the better.  I'm just trying to figure out when such forewarning doesn't hurt their operations.  And so far, two reasons make sense to me.  

Some of the normal justifications for bombing just don't make sense if you tell them you are dropping the bomb in several hours.  If this was a power plant, sure, it makes sense to give some advanced warning.  But a block of residential buildings?  

Whatever the reason, I do agree with Kalbear that it's a good thing no one appeared to be killed.  It really sucks for them that their homes are reduced to rubble, but at least they are alive.

 

 

[Zorral]

Listening right this minute to a report on NPR's All Things Considered in which the journalists attempt to visit a Palestinian farm that has been ripped up and seized -- more than once by Settlers. Their sponsor is a Jewish rabbi.  What happens is horrific. Particularly for the Palestinian farmer, whose family have had this land and farm for generations.

Israel's government and military are making so many enemies around the world, while not making any new friends, and losing the friends it has had.

It's sickening what is being done to the Palestinians every frackin' hour of the day, and done long before Oct. 7.

Edited November 9, 2023 by Zorral

[kissdbyfire]

26 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Israel's government and military are making so many enemies around the world, while not making any new friends, and losing the friends it has had.

Yeah but until their (Israeli government) BFF doesn’t let them and the world publicly know that while they have the right to defend the country they have crossed many lines, nothing will change.