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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6626 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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Trump, breaking with Netanyahu, acknowledges ‘real starvation’ in Gaza. Reddit discussion.

This makes him the first right winger I've seen say anything about starvation after something happened recently that made lots of places start talking about it, maybe the move to GHF food distribution? I can't really trust the UN when they talk about it, since they may have been still pissed that Israel cut UNRWA out, plus I heard it was only two dedicated Gaza writers putting out statements of that kind. I can't really trust leftists when they post about it, because they fail to show me their homework and seem to argue a very motivated stance. But Trump talking about it... I don't know about that either. He has spoken off the cuff before. But it brings me to ask: how bad is it? What footage did he see and is it reflected in the data?

Supposing that there is starvation: is that Israel's intention? What is Israel's strategy going forward? I thought that making camps to move civilians into was a good idea, and then once everyone's out, painstakingly clear the whole place, but I think that the international community wouldn't accept that because it's technically ethnic cleansing. There isn't actually anything the international community would be satisfied by except for total ceasefire and return to October 6th. But I don't actually know what the intention is, is the intention to draw Hamas out of hiding to get to the food somehow? I have a hard time discerning what is true about the war and what isn't.

The dam is finally breaking on western support for Israel as the justifications for its post-10/7 actions have become increasingly deranged. "We must starve babies in Gaza, for the security of Israel. For they are part of an evil race tribe and would surely strangle every Jew if only their tiny baby hands had the strength."

As I said in another comment, this is a really hairy situation to have the functional equivalent of the Taliban in your backyard, and every option for dealing with it looks ugly. The United States could not stamp out the Taliban. Of course, starvation is an awful thing, but what do you think should be done about Hamas? Or should anything be done about them? Should Israel stop worrying and learn to live with Hamas?

Unless it is Israel's intention to starve everyone in Gaza to death how does their current strategy deal with Hamas? It is not even clear to me that would be sufficient to end the threat of Hamas, as an organization, to Israel. Is literally ever member of Hamas in Gaza? No one to pick up the torch if everyone in Gaza were gone?

Unless it is Israel's intention to starve everyone in Gaza to death how does their current strategy deal with Hamas?

They are attempting to replace an ineffective aid stream that primarily benefits Hamas via confiscation and resale (UN channels) with another ineffective aid stream that attempts to cut out Hamas and provide aid directly to civilians (GHF aid, guarded by IDF and/or contractors). The goal is denying food aid to actual combatants (Hamas) and also denying combatants the ability to monetize aid by confiscating it and reselling it to the population, providing the combatants extra income and resources with which to carry on resistance.

It's not a complicated strategy.

It is not even clear to me that would be sufficient to end the threat of Hamas, as an organization, to Israel.

You are correct; Hamas is just the Gaza branch of the broader Muslim Brotherhood, which has many other branches in many other arab/islamicate countries. However, Hamas is the governing body of Gaza, and the quasi-sovereign entity which attacked Israel on 10/7, therefore Israel's effort is concentrated against them. Other areas with Muslim Brotherhood parties which have not conducted such hostilities (e.g. the West Bank) are not subject to military operations.

Is literally ever member of Hamas in Gaza?

No, a bunch of them are sitting on stolen billions and living in Qatar and other luxe gulf states.

No one to pick up the torch if everyone in Gaza were gone?

No, but if Israel were to target "everyone who might pick up the torch if everyone in Gaza were gone" then you'd fault them for carrying on a regional rather than a local genocide; Catch-22 and bad-faith criticism.

The hostages are a goal that they probably would accept as a "mission accomplished", but you ask some good questions here. Like I said in sarker's reply to this same post, starvation doesn't work unless they are somehow managing to feed everyone except Hamas, no small feat.

How do you know Hamas is gone? Dunno, but assumedly, someone is carrying out all those attacks on those food trucks. I brought up the Taliban because I think it's a similar issue here: you can occupy Palestine for decades, but the second you leave, maybe something bad springs up in your wake because the populace is fundamentally opposed to you. A hairy situation.

I suppose I am less confident that even if Hamas turned over all the hostages we would return to anything like a pre-10/7 status quo.

How do you know Hamas is gone? Dunno, but assumedly, someone is carrying out all those attacks on those food trucks.

Is it so difficult to believe that under conditions of starvation people might organize even outside existing power structures to try and secure food?

I brought up the Taliban because I think it's a similar issue here: you can occupy Palestine for decades, but the second you leave, maybe something bad springs up in your wake because the populace is fundamentally opposed to you. A hairy situation.

What does "fundamentally" mean here? Is there a gene Palestinians have that makes them hate Israelis?

Is it so difficult to believe that under conditions of starvation people might organize even outside existing power structures to try and secure food?

Not unbelievable at all, no. This is the nature of guerilla warfare, though. With no uniforms and a scattered organizational structure, maybe no one can tell. I would think we could trust Israeli intelligence to indicate that Hamas is still operational, since they seemed to quell concerns about Iran after the strikes, but maybe the Israelis don't listen to their intelligence when deciding what to do.

There is no gene that makes Palestinians hate Israelis, but I don't see any off-ramp in Palestinian animosity towards Israelis. Most people in Palestine support Hamas and support what they do/did. A relatively hands-off approach to Gaza with serious checkpoints and the occasional bloody and awful incident at the hands of the Israelis didn't make Palestinians hate Israel any less. I think it's unrealistic to expect Israelis to lift all restrictions and also have a perfect track record, not that they're that guiltless.

So I mean, if you don't want rocket attacks every day and terrorists next door plotting attacks on you, what do you do? I dunno. I guess my idea right now would be to do a complete sweep of the entire area, take every cache and every loose weapon, and heavily restrict incoming supplies, since the West Bank appears to be successfully disarmed and helpless. But I don't think Israel is doing that, if the "arming gangs" thing that coffee_enjoyer posted is to be believed. It happened in Syria, so I could believe it.

But how is starving babies supposed to deal with Hamas?

Ethics aside, it makes sense as part of a carrot-and-stick approach to making Hamas go away, although it would be a lot more workable if there was an escape hatch available for people to leave Gaza and move anywhere else in the region. Theoretically, a bad enough famine would depopulate the entirety of Gaza and eliminate Hamas that way, but this would be very bad for Israel's international standing compared to a scenario where Gaza is depopulated in a less deadly way.

I agree that simply killing every Palestinian would entail eliminating Hamas, but I am not convinced that killing, say, 10% of Palestinians will do that. I am especially doubtful that starving Palestinian babies will bring an army to its knees, on account of babies not being part of the army.

Are you seriously suggesting that Israel is purposely targeting babies to starve? I thought it was a figure of speech to dramatize the ones suffering the most from general failure to distribute food in enough quantities.

In the case of it being a figure of speech, starvation has long been a legitimate tool to bring armies to their knees. The problem there is that Hamas is not an army and likely has a large stockpile that will outlast the entire population of Gaza, unless Israel can figure out how to feed the civilian populace and not feed Hamas, somehow. Since facts are lacking and there is an information war happening, I don't know if that's what they're trying to do. I usually doubt it when people are trying to convince me that Israel is actually just full of moral monsters who like being evil. That's not even true when it comes to amoral more-evil-than-good regimes like most colonial powers in the early 20th century or modern day China. I don't know that the populace is united enough to implement genocidal tactics, either.

But that's not really what interests me. If you think starvation is a bad tactic for dealing with Hamas, that's totally fine, and I think I probably agree with you. I just wonder what tactics would be good for dealing with Hamas. What should Israel do?

Are you seriously suggesting that Israel is purposely targeting babies to starve?

I think the best case scenario here is that Israel is criminally negligent when it comes to avoiding starving babies. Certainly there are starving babies.

starvation has long been a legitimate tool to bring armies to their knees.

Agreed, but again, how is starving babies going to bring an army to its knees?

But that's not really what interests me. If you think starvation is a bad tactic for dealing with Hamas, that's totally fine, and I think I probably agree with you. I just wonder what tactics would be good for dealing with Hamas. What should Israel do?

There's only three options I see here. The first is to kill the Palestinians, which would be a horror that Israel would not recover from. The second is to move them, which is impossible because nobody is foolish enough to take millions of Palestinians.

The third:

When Kahane wasn’t condemning normie Zionists for having contempt for the Arabs, he liked to call them dogs. Not the most original metaphor, but vivid enough, so let’s run with it. Imagine a dog, not a Pitbull (that’s racist), but a Belgian Shepherd or similar. We observe one person who tries to reason with the dog, discusses with him the categorical imperative, and performs random unsolicited acts of kindness to appeal to its better nature. Another, swarthier person enters, perplexed at this cringe European, and pushes him to the side. He takes a good long look at the dog, walks over and kicks it square in the nuts, returning to high-five his friends. Rinse and repeat for three decades. Who is surprised that the dog is deranged?

What you do with a dog, obviously, is you train it. You don’t respond to its barks and snarls by getting down on all fours and barking back because ‘this is the yard’ and that’s what is done here. How do you train the dog? Well, go find someone who’s good at it, and ask him.

What does this look like? I don't know. But directionally, perhaps it's something like the British Raj. A civilizing mission is basically the only way to turn things around.

“Israel wants to starve innocent people in order to ethnically cleanse the land for Israelis” is the reasonable takeaway to me, because there is no evidence of Hamas ever taking aid (1, 2), Israel’s actions are entirely inexplicable unless they deeply desire to starve innocent people, nearly every independent international body paying attention to Gaza has called attention to the risk (and now reality) of starvation, important Israeli leaders like Ben-Gvir and Amichai Eliyahu have specifically advocated for destroying food supplies as a tool to get what they want, and an American retired green beret Anthony Aguilar who worked with the designated aid distributor has said that Israelis open fire indiscriminately on civilians seeking aid.

What I witnessed in Gaza at all four distribution sites — I didn’t just go to one for a photo-op. I didn’t go to one to watch a distribution and then say, “Yes, this looks great.” I spent days on end in Gaza at all four distribution sites, at Kerem Shalom, where the aid is loaded for distribution, and at both operation centers that control the daily convoys, logistics operations and distribution for the four sites. What I saw on the sites, around the sites, to and from the sites, can be described as nothing but war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of international law. This is not hyperbole. This is not platitudes or drama. This is the truth.

The sites have not only become death traps, they were designed as death traps. All four distribution locations were intentionally, deliberately constructed, planned and built in the middle of an active combat zone. Some may argue, “Well, all of Gaza is a war zone.” That may be true, but there are parts of Gaza that are direct — or, determined to be active, operational combat zones where Israeli Defense Forces are operating. Those sites were built in the middle of those areas intentionally. It’s not by accident. That, in and of itself, to designate humanitarian distribution sites to service an unarmed, starving population, to build them deliberately in an active combat zone, is a violation of the Geneva Convention protocols. It’s a violation of humanitarian law. And in my opinion, it’s a violation of humanity in general.

The things that I just described are not just opinions, they’re facts. The sites were designed to lure, bait, aid and kill. The food that we distribute, nowhere near enough. To Mr. Johnnie Moore, shame on you for celebrating 92 million meals delivered into Gaza. Shame on you. It’s a very simple equation: 92 divided by 2.2 million people, divided by 3 million — or, three meals a day. That’s what GHF proclaims. We’ve been distributing aid since the 26th of May, 26th May to now the 29th of June, 64 days of continuous distribution, and we’ve only managed to distribute 92 million meals. When you break that down, again, it’s a simple equation. That’s 14 days of meals. So, out of 64 days, we’ve provided 14 days of meals to the entire population in the enclave of Gaza. That’s inhumane.

Aguilar was previously the Commander of Special Operations of the Central Asian Command. This is not some no name guy. His testimony is confirmed by Dr Nick Maynard of Oxford University, who treated malnourished children. Maynard also suspects that the IDF is deliberately shooting children for sport, which other doctors have said in the past (I wrote a post on this a year ago or so).

But why does Israel want to starve innocent people?

IMO there’s simple answer to this, and it’s the same reason that anyone commits a crime against another for personal benefit which they believe they can get away with. There’s an insufficient “love for one’s neighbor”, an inability to feel empathy or otherwise recognize the shared humanity in another person from a different tribe. This can also be called being evil, as in, Israel has fallen so far from the standards of reasonable goodness that they are closest to its opposite, which is evil. So Israel is doing this because they are evil, very far from good. It is advantageous for them to take the land from Palestinians. It is advantageous even to starve them if you can’t take the land, because this damages longterm health, fertility rates, and intergenerational health. There is no real cultural or religious pressure that promotes love for non-Jews in Israel. So, IMO, the leaders of Israel are evil, and that’s why they are currently starving children for their own benefit.

“Israel wants to starve innocent people in order to ethnically cleanse the land for Israelis” is the reasonable takeaway to me, because there is no evidence of Hamas ever taking aid (1, 2),

The very first bullet point sub-head on your second link disproves your claim: "State Department disputes findings, cites video evidence of Hamas looting"

Also, there's plenty of mainstream coverage indicating that Hamas has been heavily involved in receiving food "aid" - look at this article from November last year, which outright admits:

Hamas' efforts to take a lead in securing aid supplies point to the difficulties Israel will face in a post-war Gaza, with few obvious alternatives to a group it has been trying to destroy for over a year and which it says can have no governing role. . . .
The new anti-looting force, formed of well-equipped fighters from Hamas and allied groups, has been named "The Popular and Revolutionary Committees" and is ready to open fire on hijackers who do not surrender, one of the sources, a Hamas government official, said. The official, who declined to be named because Hamas would not authorise him to speak about it, said the group operated across central and southern Gaza and had carried out at least 15 missions so far, including killing some armed gangsters.

They'll admit that Hamas is taking the aid meant for civilians if they can use Russell conjugation to make it sound pleasant - "securing aid supplies [from hijackers]" but when someone actually carries that thought through to its obvious and logical conclusion - that a combatant organization is taking aid meant for civilians - nope, no evidence!

It's the constant prevarications that make it so hard for me to take these complaints seriously.

Israelis open fire indiscriminately on civilians seeking aid.

Oh, OK, that sounds really, really bad.

That’s 14 days of meals. So, out of 64 days, we’ve provided 14 days of meals to the entire population in the enclave of Gaza.

Wait, what? If they're firing indiscriminately on civilians seeking aid, how is this number not zero? Is the claim that Palestinians are charging these aid stations under fire, climbing through concertina wire, and some few manage to escape with food? ... Or are they not actually firing indiscriminately on civilians seeking aid? I don't doubt civilians have been shot in these places -- It wouldn't even be hard convince me this is a deliberate strategy to deter Palestinians from accepting food aid! -- but that's not what the word 'indiscriminate' means.

The sites have not only become death traps, they were designed as death traps. All four distribution locations were intentionally, deliberately constructed, planned and built in the middle of an active combat zone. Some may argue, “Well, all of Gaza is a war zone.” That may be true, but there are parts of Gaza that are direct — or, determined to be active, operational combat zones where Israeli Defense Forces are operating. Those sites were built in the middle of those areas intentionally.

The things that I just described are not just opinions, they’re facts.

How is it, exactly, that Aguilar can confidently make statements of fact about others' intentions? Did they tell him that? If they did, I'm pretty sure he'd have said. Is he a mind reader? Actually, I rather doubt he's met whoever decided on the placement of the distribution locations; he can read minds at a distance, I suppose. Again, I'm not even saying that's not the intention! I don't know! But he doesn't either, and presenting this as though it's certain is dishonest.

The equipment, the equipment that we were issued, fully automatic weapons, which, in and of itself, is not a violation of protocol. However, we were issued M855 green-tipped ammunition. That’s important, because green-tipped ammunition is a steel-jacketed copper round that’s designed to — specifically designed to penetrate armor. It’s designed to kill. It’s designed to shoot through reinforced objects, to kill someone on the other side of it. That’s what all the UG Solutions contractors are equipped with right now in country. Everyone carries a standard basic load of 210 rounds of M855 armor-piercing military combat ammunition. Why would anyone need that, even if to defend themselves for their — defend their lives, against an unarmed population? It’s inappropriate. That, in and of itself, that action there, is a war crime.

What nonsense is this? Are the distribution locations in active combat zones or not? Anyway, armor-piercing rounds are, obviously, intended for piercing armor. Against unarmored targets, they're less lethal than hollow points. Unarmed civilians, notably, are unlikely to have armor. As for the capacity to penetrate cover: I thought these locations were designed to be death traps? Why would they leave convenient cover in the killing field? Anyway, I don't see the logic in permitting the individuals guarding the site to have weapons, but only so long as they'll be ineffective against a prepared adversary. (Especially after admitting there are prepared adversaries in the area.) I have to say, it seems very weird to me this would be a war crime. Let me do some reading...

Oh, it's not a war crime.

The M855 green tip (the American version of the SS109) is the standard issue round for all of NATO! It's actually not some super special armor-piercing variant, it's what they give every last grunt. Safe to say, issuing this round is not illegal.

It sure is designed to kill, that's true -- is this former green beret confused about the purpose of firearms and their ammunition? Or is he just so contemptuous of his audience that he believes they are? As I noted, they're less deadly against unarmored civilians than hollow points, but here's something I didn't know until I looked into it: using those is (arguably) a war crime! I'm deeply curious what round Aguilar believes would be appropriate; unfortunately, he doesn't say. Rubber bullets? Taking rubber bullets into a situation where you might well get shot at with real bullets is incredibly dumb, but that's not the real problem with the idea: no one even makes rubber bullets in 5.56. They don't exist. Blanks, perhaps?

Aguilar makes some other points that are harder to contest -- for all I know, they are using concertina wire inappropriately -- but I see very little reason to take anything he says seriously given the obvious errors -- I struggle not to say 'lie,' but unlike him, I'm willing to extend the charity to allow he might just be incorrect -- I found briefly skimming the article.

Maynard also suspects that the IDF is deliberately shooting children for sport, which other doctors have said in the past (I wrote a post on this a year ago or so).

Would that be the thread with several x-ray images of full power rifle rounds, with no deformation whatsoever, in the middle of children's heads? I'm genuinely asking; it might be something else. But that's the one I remember, because it was a transparent hoax.

Once again, I'm perfectly willing to believe the IDF is misbehaving in Gaza -- actually, I'd go so far as to say I do believe it, at least to some extent -- but if there's such overwhelming evidence for it, why do their opponents insist on mixing in obvious falsehoods? Just tactically, I'm certain it does far more damage to their position than just sticking to points that aren't trivially refuted.

I too am convinced that that many 3rd parties reporting on Israel are lying (outright or by omission). However, the information blackout from Israel makes it hard to defend them.

Hamas has lost. Israel's existential threat comes from Iran, which has temporarily been rendered sterile. There is no plausible reason for fighting a war with medieval siege tactics. Not anymore. Sure, many who're accusing them of genocide are antisemitic. But, it should not be that hard to refute it. The burden of proof is on Israel. There's little indication that the majority of Israelis want a final solution to the Gaza problem. Israelis haven't so much as articulated an endgame, let along enacted it. In this framing, Israel's current actions don't make sense, unless viewed as Netanyahu's actions.

IMO, Netanyahu's interests and Israel's interests stopped coinciding after the attacks on Iran's nuclear sites. Hamas's leaders were dead. Iran's nukes were gone. Hezbollah was over. Gazan supply lines were wiped. Israel was safe. So what's next for Netanyahu ? He's a dead man walking. He was thought to be on the way out in 2020. He swindled (all is fair in love and war) Benny Gantz into a 1 sided coalition and through morbid luck got a national emergency handed to him. His approval ratings are on a slow decline in 2025 after a post-tragedy resurgence. Democracies have a track record of ousting wartime leaders as soon as the war is over. Netanyahu won't be an exception.*

Netanyahu wants his problems to be Israel's problems. As long as the conflict remains, he can keep finding exceptions to stay in power. Global anti-semitism pushes Israel to the right, strengthening him**. He is the only one who benefits from a protracted conflict. Even today, there is sufficient internal pushback against Netanyahu within Israel.

Yet, the loudest detractors steer the conversation towards the existence of the state of Israel instead of Netanyahu as the leader who oversaw this response. To me, that's the difference between credible detractors (Tech elite, European centrists, American Jews) and antisemites. (Progressive left, Muslim leaders). Antisemites are tempted by maximalist claims and their hate makes up for the lack of due diligence. "All Israelis are evil, always have been. All Gazans are being killed. All kids are being shot in the dick. No one is getting food." No nuance. Only hate.

Either way, their detractors have served. The ball is now in Israel's court. Sympathies are wearing thin. Netanyahu better show proof refuting it, or his time might be up. Hopefully, the Israel's people are able to pin the stink of genocide onto him. Otherwise, this will cement the end of Israel's post-holocaust sympathy.

  • famous last words. There always seems to be a Netanyahu exception. Slimy bastard that man

** and Bennett, but that's besides the point

indiscriminate

Indiscriminate means “not marked by careful distinction : deficient in discrimination and discernment”. What definition were you looking at? It does not mean that they fire on everyone they see.

ammo

M855 ammo passes through soft tissue more readily, meaning in a large crowd there will be more casualties per shot; his point is that this is a terrible choice for crowd control. Police doing crowd control use rubber bullets etc. In fact the IDF specifically uses .22 LR in Ruger 10/22 rifles for riots in the West Bank. You weren’t aware of this? NATO is not supplying these munitions so I don’t know why you’ve mentioned NATO.

Taking rubber bullets into a situation where you might well get shot at with real bullets is incredibly dumb

It’s an unarmed civilian population receiving food. Rubber bullets are a smart way to do crowd control.

Would that be the thread with several x-ray images of full power rifle rounds, with no deformation whatsoever, in the middle of children's heads?

It was the one confirmed by numerous third party experts who dealt with gunshot wounds. I’m not sure how Israeli pundits responded to it but they may have called them forgeries.

obvious errors

Hm, I don’t see a single error in his testimony. Which error did you have in mind?

Indiscriminate means “not marked by careful distinction : deficient in discrimination and discernment”. What definition were you looking at? It does not mean that they fire on everyone they see.

Hmm, OK. I read 'indiscriminately opening fire' as 'making no distinction between combatants and civilians,' and since they surely do fire on enemy combatants, they must also fire on civilians at similar rates. Which is obviously untrue, or no aid would be distributed. Is it your position that they don't discriminate on that basis at all (that is, they're just as likely to return fire at enemy combatants as to fire at random civilians), or that they do, but without sufficient care? (Which would be an opinion, not a fact, but whatever.)

Maybe that's my misread.

M855 ammo passes through soft tissue more readily, meaning in a large crowd there will be more casualties per shot; his point is that this is a terrible choice for crowd control. Police doing crowd control use rubber bullets etc. In fact the IDF specifically uses .22 LR in Ruger 10/22 rifles for riots in the West Bank. You weren’t aware of this? NATO is not supplying these munitions so I don’t know why you’ve mentioned NATO.

He explicitly says the rifles are OK. .22 LR is a different caliber which those rifles can't shoot. So far as I know, there is no widely used 5.56 munition that's less deadly than M855. (Well, there's less reliable/accurate ammo; this makes civilian casualties more likely, not less.) There are rounds which have less penetration, sure: hollow points, the use of which would actually be a war crime. If he wanted to argue 5.56 rifles were inappropriate, he could have done so. Instead he fixated on the bog-standard ammo, emphasizing its spectacular lethality, and, bizarrely, claiming its issue (not even its use!) is a war crime.

I mention NATO because as a rule it can be assumed that using the standard-issue munition of the world's premier military alliance -- the whole thing, not just America, who hasn't signed on to every treaty -- is not a war crime. It's additionally abundant and, due to economies of scale, pretty cheap for its quality. I'm only harping on this because he chose to harp on it.

Who said the rifles are intended exclusively for crowd control? He says repeatedly there's active fighting in these areas -- there's active fighting in all of Gaza, as he acknowledges elsewhere, but he claims these areas are especially bad. If there's serious risk of these sites coming under fire from enemy combatants, these rifles are suitable for engaging them. If there's not, then it sounds like it's actually not an active combat zone.

It was the one confirmed by numerous third party experts who dealt with gunshot wounds. I’m not sure how Israeli pundits responded to it but they may have called them forgeries.

Well, the one I'm talking about was physically impossible. I recall there were a number of 'experts' who swore by it, thereby proving that either they're not experts or they're willing to flagrantly lie to propagandize against Israel. It's perfectly possible some members of the IDF have shot children for sport -- I certainly can't prove otherwise, and there might well be other, real proof -- but they weren't the ones in those pictures.

Hm, I don’t see a single error in his testimony. Which error did you have in mind?

I note you didn't address the claim that issuing M855 is a war crime. Here's what he said:

Everyone carries a standard basic load of 210 rounds of M855 armor-piercing military combat ammunition... That, in and of itself, that action there, is a war crime.

Can you please point me towards the treaty, the case law, anything at all, that makes carrying M855 a war crime in and of itself?

there is no evidence of Hamas ever taking aid.

Okay, where is Hamas getting its food then? Do they have a giant stockpile that they have been surviving off of since October 2023? Have they invented the world’s most efficient solar-powered hydroponics system? Does every Hamas militant spend 23 hours a day in a cryostasis chamber? How are any of them still alive if they aren’t surviving off of food aid?

Could be a stockpile. Could be tunnels between Egypt and Gaza, with one found last year so large that a car could fit through. A small tunnel for beans / flour need only be a quarter in size. It could be that civilians are giving food to their relatives, one of whom is a member. It could be a tunnel from Israel to Gaza. Could be an underwater drone of sorts. Could be drones from Egypt to Gaza, apparently being used recently.

edit another important point. There’s an assumption that the number of Hamas units is fixed since the war began, and that Hamas is a monolith. These are silly assumptions. Israel is creating thousands of boys every week who want nothing more than to fight back against Israel — because they just saw soldiers shoot their grandmother, or shoot their little sister, or kidnap their brother, or maybe Israel bombed their entire family, or maybe they were mistreated, or maybe their cousin is starving. No sane young man anywhere in the world would not seek to do something in response to this. So there are new Hamas soldiers being officiated every day. But the officiatiation is not formal and organized. They join small cell structures (in all likelihood apolitical and religiously moderate, if not irreligious) who are then provided with weaponry (and ideas) by a small number of Hamas intermediaries (and these are the extremist ones). Meaning they were civilians being fed as civilians until the inhumane oppression became too much for their heart to bear, and they fight back. The same happened with the Irish against the British —

The British policy of interning persons suspected of involvement in the IRA and the killing of 13 Catholic protesters on Bloody Sunday (January 30, 1972) strengthened Catholic sympathy for the organization and swelled its ranks”.

IRA numbers always increased when the British took an oppressive approach. Perhaps we should assume that somewhere between 5% to 90% of boys in Gaza would very much like to fight the IDF in any way they can, and they are more than happy to receive a weapon from Hamas.

in all likelihood apolitical and religiously moderate, if not irreligious

X to doubt. Not just because it's Gaza but because intemperate religion and radical politics are very appealing to the greatly distressed.

The assertion you start this post off with has got some heavy caveats to it.

Of the 156 incidents of loss or theft reported, 63 were attributed to unknown perpetrators, 35 to armed actors, 25 to unarmed people, 11 directly to Israeli military action, 11 to corrupt subcontractors, five to aid group personnel “engaging in corrupt activities,” and six to “others," a category that accounted for “commodities stolen in unknown circumstances,” according to the slide presentation.

There's no evidence that Hamas took aid! Well, the people who took the aid were aligned with unknown forces and not wearing any uniforms, similar to how Hamas operates, but they didn't say they were Hamas into convenient nearby microphones, so I am going to heavily imply that there is no Hamas theft with sleazy lawyer-like framing. Feel free to uncritically quote me, Israel haters!

That's just appalling reporting. And USAID said this? Isn't that the one getting dismantled? I was neutral about their being dismantled, but after seeing this kind of shit, I am glad. Holy hell. They're not even an intelligence agency... The information war is real. You can't trust anyone.

Along the lines of my thesis “it’s literally that Israeli leaders are evil”, they are funding gangs to pillage and monopolize aid. These are the ones most likely involved in the theft of aid:

https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/israel-recruits-local-gangs-and-foreign-mercenaries-turning-aid-distribution-centres-mass-slaughterhouse-enar

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/video/newsfeed/2025/7/18/how-israeli-backed-gangs-in-gaza-are-extorting-starving-civilians

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/06/09/israel-is-backing-a-militia-known-for-looting-aid-in-gaza_6742148_4.html

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/inside-the-israeli-governments-starvation-of-gaza-from-an-aid-group-trying-to-deliver-food/

We in the humanitarian community have repeatedly stated that Hamas is not stealing our aid. That is not to say that looting has not always been a massive challenge; it has. But it was largely being carried out by armed gangs that emerged in the lawlessness and that operate in the Israeli-controlled “red zone” wastelands. I wrote about this in a CNN op-ed as far back as a year ago. Much of that looting was taking place at the Kerem Shalom or Karam Abu Salem crossing in southern Gaza. We had long speculated that the only way for armed gangs to exist in this area would be with Israel’s knowledge. In June, Netanyahu admitted himself that Israel has been arming gangs, most notably a notorious clan operating in the Rafah area, where much of the looting takes place. He defended the decision, stating these clans were helping in the fight against Hamas

The first article quotes IDF officials praising the UN system as effective in distributing aid and having found no proof that Hamas was systematically stealing aid from the UN, although they did steal from smaller organizations that didn't always have boots on the ground. It's been widely reported that various armed gangs have formed in the power vacuum to steal and resell aid at extortionate prices.

To me there seems to be, or perhaps should be, a kind of reciprocity of honor in wartime. The Germans and British and French in the First World War wanted to take or defend disputed territory, become the first power in Europe, seize some of each others foreign colonies and perhaps effect a change of civilian government. They did not particularly wish to ethnically cleanse their opponents from the vast majority of their metropoles (a few pieces of disputed territory aside). In the Kaiser’s wildest fantasies (and they were his) he did not imagine replacing Welshmen with Bavarians and driving the former out to the sea. The war was brutal, with civilian casualties and endless military ones and war crimes, the Rape of Belgium (truth or fiction) and so on. But it was not a war to the death or to exile for every last German, every last Englishman, woman, child.

The conflict between Arabs and Jews in Israel/Palestine is not such a conflict. It is a tribal war. The Arabs have sought to ethnically cleanse the Jews (or at least all but a token handful, but probably all) from their full territory since 1948 or indeed well before given the history of violence that began during the earlier colonial waves of migration. The Jews were of mixed opinions but have now increasingly, after 70 years of violence, come around to the same opinion about the Palestinians (views on Arab Israelis are more complicated although there are plenty, it must be said, of religious zionists who would kick them out too).

Only America is powerful enough, now, to impose a two-state solution on both sides. To do so would cost trillions, require a permanent US presence of perhaps a hundred thousand or more troops on the border, and would subject the Americans to endless criticism abroad, intermittent violence by militant Muslim and likely also eventually militant Jewish terrorists, and would commit the country forever, for if columbia were to leave, the conflict would simply resume where both sides left off.

Since that will not happen, it is now increasingly clear that one side will ethnically cleanse the other. A Jewish victory would probably, although not necessarily, be permanent; the Muslim world might still accomplish a Reconquista. A Muslim victory would be permanent, at least until the arrival of the messiah, ye of little faith, or failing that another two millennia. The people of Gaza suffer and have suffered. A more intelligent Zionist movement would have settled somewhere else but, then again, without the deep, atavistic lure of Zion, it would probably never have accomplished anything.

If the Gazans surrendered, their suffering would stop. But they cannot surrender, unlike the marranos not even temporarily. They belong to a faith and tribe that conquered a quarter of the world by the sword, without mercy, without self-doubt. They submit only to God. Should I pity them?

There have only ever been three options: ethnic cleansing, ethnic cleansing, or forever war. Pick one. All are terrible and wrong.

Are the descendents of the Sudeten Germans and other Ostdeutsch who were ethnically cleansed out of eastern europe into Germany after WWII still living in refugee camps? Of course not. Population exchange is traumatic, but people can get on with their lives afterwards. The current never-ending simmer of terrorism and oppression is just categorically worse.

You know, the more I learn about Palestinians the more I'm convinced it was a bad idea to move ethnic cleansing into the category of "never under any circumstances even thinkable actions". Palestinians are brazenly explicit about their refusal to ever accept Jews living in the region and their commitment to "resistance" under all circumstances - a state of affairs practically unique in history because just about every other society to ever exist has known full well that the rewards for being even a fraction as belligerent would be getting wiped out. If they've shown after nearly 80 years they're still not going to behave, maybe threatening to move them somewhere else is the only thing that will get them reconsider their attitude.

The world made a rule that ethnic cleansing was never justified under any circumstances. Unfortunately, the Palestinians evolved a culture to exploit that rule. If they could only be so belligerent that the only way to defeat them would be by ethnic cleansing, then they win by default no matter how militarily superior their opponent. This is effectively the propaganda game they play with the West. It's almost like they're daring Israel to ethnically cleanse them, and then double-dog daring them, and then triple-dog daring them. They know that if Israel breaks the one rule against trying an ethnic cleansing, then they'll lose Western support. They intentionally do not want Israel to have another option. There is no peace, no two state solution, no compromise. If Hamas can just persevere and stay the course then they'll eventually win. Israel can either carry on essentially at war with Hamas for the foreseeable future, or it can just take the risk and ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. The latter might be a Pyrrhic victory if the rest of the world turns against Israel.

Uh, who told you ethnic cleansing is in the 'never again' category? As long as you don't seek to actually wipe out the losing side, it's ignored unless you're a US adversary. The soviet union carried out ethnic cleansing regularly within its own borders, and that trend continued with its breakup. Azerbaijan is being allowed to ethnically cleanse territory captured from Armenia. US backed forces ethnically cleansed parts of Iraq and Syria.

This makes him the first right winger I've seen say anything about starvation

Maybe you mean the first Republican. Right-wing anti-Zionists, like Darryl Cooper and Tucker Carlson, believe that Israel is intent on killing as many Palestinians as possible without completely alienating the international community, and then expelling the rest.

Tucker Carlson

He interviewed the ex Nikola motors CEO, Trevor Milton.Trevor tried to play all the cards, claiming democrats went after him, big oil was out for him etc. But he pumped a company to $60B by claiming it had a factory with thousands of employees, making working trucks etc. In reality, 20 employees and they made cardboard models of trucks, which they pushed down hills for demonstrations and commercials. And the investigation started in the Trump admin. The fraud was about the same size as Madoff's, but it only cost him $1.7mm to buy a pardon from Trump.

Eh, they're not "release the hostages" starving yet.

You know, it took a lot to get me to this position, but here I am: yes, Israel wants the Gaza problem solved by having them disappear. Deported out of the country if possible, but dead works too.

Settlers running amok and nobody stopping them, with the Israeli authorities (police on up) just winking at burning land belonging to Palestinians, shooting at them, and moving in and taking over land. Too many "oopsies, we didn't mean to hit that target" events. "Oh yeah sure we'll let in the aid convoy - oh no, we can't, security issues y'see".

Israel wants the entire territory to belong to them, and they don't see the Palestinians as any kind of citizens to remain there. "It's all Hamas propaganda, nobody is starving, if only they turned on Hamas then there would be peace". If they turned on Hamas, then they would just be bulldozed into the ground even quicker.

I'm not supporting Hamas. I think they're terrible. But I also understand why a lot of Palestinians will support them, in the face of "we're shooting people queuing for water, we're blocking aid so babies are starving to death, and if anyone says anything then we cry anti-Semitism and invoke the Holocaust".

I don't believe in Israeli good intentions anymore, if ever I did.

You know, it took a lot to get me to this position, but here I am: yes, Israel wants the Gaza problem solved by having them disappear. Deported out of the country if possible, but dead works too.

Settlers running amok and nobody stopping them

You know there's no settlers in Gaza, right?

He’s talking about the recent incidents that have been occurring in the West Bank.

The more I think about it, the more it is clear to me that there is no great way to handle this crisis. Israel can't just march in and put a flag in the center and say "war's over, pick a leader". The USA tried that in Afghanistan, and it worked for a while, but the old regime was just waiting for their chance. If a regime doesn't care about its populace at all, what can you even do to it to draw it out and kill it? It's like natural selection created the most toxic paradigm possible. I think it will be very hard to starve Hamas to death without starving everyone else to death, too, unless you "ethnically cleanse" the populace by moving them into camps where you can ensure they are all fed safely.

I think it will be very hard to starve Hamas to death without starving everyone else to death, too, unless you "ethnically cleanse" the populace by moving them into camps where you can ensure they are all fed safely.

You can't do that either; Hamas will be in the camps.

If they're in camps, then the guards control what comes in and what goes out. Basically harmless except for his ideology, and I now see the problem you've pointed out. It's even worse than I imagined writing that comment. It seems there really are no ways for Israel to solve the problem that would be acceptable to anyone involved or anyone watching from afar.

Try not rounding up the civilian population into camps, or shooting people rushing forward for food aid because they're starving. It's amazing how not being stormtroopers helps shift the views of the people on the other side.

Yes, I said stormtroopers. I don't think the IDF is behaving in an honest fashion. I'm hearing news reports on our national broadcaster every morning about what's going on in Gaza. Unless you want to convince me every single one of the people, the doctors, the volunteers, the journalists, the UN observers, interviewed on those reports is secretly a Hamas mole, horrible things are going on and Israel is doing them.

I don't have a problem with people being against camps or shooting people. But I do have a problem with that when no alternative is brought up. The "ceasefire now" folks totally miss that all of this cycle will just repeat when the next terrorist attack happens, and the previous equilibrium with the checkpoints, the rocket attacks, and the kids throwing rocks at the checkpoints was not a stable one. What is your take on what should happen with Israel and Gaza?

The "ceasefire now" folks totally miss that all of this cycle will just repeat when the next terrorist attack happens

The mistake is thinking this is a bug, rather than a feature of this way of thinking for these people. I don't think I'm being overly cynical when I say that most self-described Palestinian supporter don't want peace, they want a war where Hamas is winning. "Ceasefire now" is only a slogan that gets brought up when Israel has the military advantage.

Try not rounding up the civilian population into camps, or shooting people rushing forward for food aid because they're starving. It's amazing how not being stormtroopers helps shift the views of the people on the other side.

They tried that. It resulted in a constant series of rocket attacks topped by the 10/7 invasion.

Hamas probably does not have track of all the hostages.

Are the Israeli lives more important than the lives of the Gazan children or not?

Because at this point the Israelis are holding the children hostage too.

If you are the Israeli government, then yes, the lives of your citizens are more important than the lives of an adversary. That's what it means to be a nation-state.

Same for the US. I would expect the American government to prioritize the lives of Americans held abroad above the lives of citizens of enemy - or even of third party neutral - countries.

That's what it means to be a nation-state.

A Palestinian doctor has warned: "We are out of options, and we are running out of time."

Dr Salha, working at the al Awda Hospital in northern Gaza, warned of the dire circumstances they said the hospital was operating under.

Salha said: "We used to care for 200 women and children a day, now it's over 2,000.

"We simply can't cope. Malnutrition is devastating mothers and newborns.

"We're seeing a sharp rise in caesarean sections, miscarriages, and babies born underweight."

Salha warned they were running out of vital supplies for newborns, and that their own staff were surviving on just one meal a day.

"Three colleagues collapsed in our emergency department last week due to hunger, while working around the clock to care for patients. This is a humanitarian catastrophe," Salha said.

Sorry, newborn baby, you are an immediate threat to this poor defenceless country and have to be crushed before you can attack it. But it's okay, that doctor is really a secret Hamas plant and he's lying about it all.

So is this British doctor. Everybody is lying, it's all Hamas propaganda, and Israel is totally blameless and only wants the chance to create a nation where Arabs, Christians, Jews, secular or whomever you are, wherever you are from, are all equal citizens and cherished by the nation as its people.

Wow, it really sounds like that doctor should call for Hamas to surrender. Unconditionally, even. Has he?

Or is he a regular member of his death cult, like the old women in Palestine who weep with joy that their children were killed trying to murder Jews?

I feel like, especially in this community of mostly atheistic high decouplers, that everyone posting on this topic should have to specify if they grasp the concept of what true belief in a warrior's afterlife would entail.

Sorry, newborn baby, you are an immediate threat to this poor defenceless country and have to be crushed before you can attack it

Correct, this is what a democratic theory of sovereignty means and has always meant since the French revolution at least. If the people are responsible for empowering their government, then if a country aggresses, the people are responsible for that too.

If you don't want your people to suffer the consequences of war, don't start one. It's really not complicated.

There are no American hostages being held by Hamas:

https://www.ajc.org/news/meet-the-two-american-hostages-still-held-by-hamas

There appears to be two American citizens who were fighting in the Israeli military who were killed on October 7th.

That isn’t the claim they’re making.

The United States supports Israel militarily. There are no US hostages being held. It is not in the interest of the United States to support the starvation of gazan children regardless of how many Israeli hostages Hamas allegedly has.

The comment was making an analogy that if what happened to Israel on October 7 had happened to America (eg across the Mexican border), the US would react a certain way. I’m not sure how this relates to American hostages in Gaza.

The war situation has developed not necessarily to Gaza's favor.

About as insightful a comment as "Eh, they are not 'free Palestine' raped yet" would have been about Oct 7th.

There are several parallel subthreads already discussing to what extent the starvation actually affects Hamas, and you choose to ignore them and instead post this Twitter-level dunk.

About as insightful a comment as "Eh, they are not 'free Palestine' raped yet" would have been about Oct 7th.

Except that's a meaningful statement - "the acts of war undertaken so far have been insufficient to compel a favorable political resolution" - just glibly phrased.

Neither will Israel starve Gaza into releasing the hostages nor will Hamas rape Israel into recognizing a free Palestine. Nor were either Nazi Germany or the UK ever going to bomb each other into submission.

Both phrasings imply that there is some level of suffering at which point the other side will give in, that the cruelty is instrumental to achieve another terminal goal. While this might even be technically true (i.e. once the last Gazan starves, nobody will stop the IDF from retrieving the bones of the hostages) I think that the implication "and we already have made progress into making the other side give in" is simply false.

In reality there is no clever terminal goal for which starving Gazans or murdering Jewish civilians is an instrumental stepping stone, so we can conclude that the cruelty is itself a terminal goal.

Neither will Israel starve Gaza into releasing the hostages nor will Hamas rape Israel into recognizing a free Palestine. Nor were either Nazi Germany or the UK ever going to bomb each other into submission.

And yet Germany was starved into submission in WWI, Japan bombed into submission in WWII, Tigray starved/bombed into submission in Ethiopia, etc.

Both phrasings imply that there is some level of suffering at which point the other side will give in, that the cruelty is instrumental to achieve another terminal goal.

Yes, it is a truism that war is politics by other means.

While this might even be technically true (i.e. once the last Gazan starves, nobody will stop the IDF from retrieving the bones of the hostages) I think that the implication "and we already have made progress into making the other side give in" is simply false.

Your strawmanning aside, that's a nice hunch you have there - a shame if someone were to...test it.

In reality there is no clever terminal goal for which starving Gazans or murdering Jewish civilians is an instrumental stepping stone, so we can conclude that the cruelty is itself a terminal goal.

Blind assertion without evidence. It's quite clear that murdering Jewish civilians is envisaged as an instrumental stepping stone to "liberating" Israeli territory for Palestinians - Hamas and other Palestinian organizations openly say so. And it's not as if there is any shortage of Israeli press squabbling about the blockade, food aid issues, and what the ultimate political program that Israel should be pursuing w/r/t Gaza is (downstream of "10/7 can never happen again" of course), none of which you discuss or cite.

I think Hamas is suitably different enough that you can't really compare starving their people to the blockades of Germany or Japan. Hamas and other terrorist groups consider human suffering and death to be a good thing because of their religion. There may be no upper limit to how much death they will tolerate.

In light of this, I don't really know how you solve the Hamas problem. Maybe stop letting aid in and then also give everyone guns to turn the whole thing into a Syria-esque clusterfuck and hope the people solve the Hamas problem themselves? Is that why clusterfucks like Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Yemen happen?

"Eh, they are not 'free Palestine' raped yet"

If Hamas had the military power to actually accomplish this, that would make their actions less pointlessly evil. The fact that Hamas' power is limited to terrorizing a few unarmed civilians and then scampering away in impotent terror when the real soldiers show up is, itself, the problem. The fact that they're too weak to have any chance of victory is the reason why their futile war crimes are so heinous. It's one thing to commit a necessary evil in order to liberate your people from oppression. It's another, much worse thing to commit a pointless evil just for the sake of doing it.

As Talleyrand once said of another act of self-destructive violence against civilians: "It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake."

The fact that they're too weak to have any chance of victory

I'm sure the USA thought the Vietcong were too weak to have a chance of victory. Or the British/Russians/USA vs their flavor of Afghani opposition.

I do actually agree with you in this case, but it's kind of a funny claim to make when we have no idea how this ends.

Anyone making confident calls about any of the insurgencies I listed above partway through ended up very wrong.

I'm sure the USA thought the Vietcong were too weak to have a chance of victory.

And the viet cong didn't win. The north Vietnamese Army did, yes, eventually, against South Vietnam(not the US; the USA had actually withdrawn after assurances that North Vietnam would respect the sovereignty of the south and then chosen not to intervene when they predictably broke that promise), but not the viet cong.

Or the British/Russians/USA vs their flavor of Afghani opposition.

Of course what actually happened was getting tired of propping up the local puppet government and withdrawing to leave it to its fate, which was to get overthrown by militant groups which had consistently lost to the imperial army.

I do actually agree with you in this case, but it's kind of a funny claim to make when we have no idea how this ends.

Of course we have an idea of where this ends. The Palestinian aim to drive the jews, every one, out of the region and the Jews will not leave willingly. It can end with the Palestinians somehow accepting the Jews existing in the region or one side killing the other. Those are the options.

The Viet Cong didn't win, the Americans got tired of fighting and gave up. The Viet Cong never landed a single boot on American soil. There was never any question of the Viet Cong conquering America. In the sense that the Palestinians are too weak to conquer Israel, the Viet Cong were too weak to conquer America.

The difference between Hamas and the Viet Cong is that Hamas has invaded Israeli soil and killed Israeli civilians. The Israelis can't get tired of fighting and give up like the Americans did in Vietnam. If they could, they would have done it already. Hamas and its various sister organizations like Hezbollah will continue to attack Israel until one or the other is annihilated. Ergo, the Israelis have no choice but to continue fighting.

If Hamas had the military power to actually accomplish this, that would make their actions less pointlessly evil.

As I understand it, the original conception for Oct. 7 was a surprise Hamas break-out, coupled with a simultaneous large-scale Hezbollah offensive, would pincer Israel and overwhelm its local defenses, potentially sufficiently to spark sympathetic uprisings in the West Bank or among Israeli arabs as well.

Notably, the Hezbollah component of the attack didn't happen, and good for the Israelis that it didn't because in terms of raw numbers of fighters and weapons, Hezbollah had a lot more than Hamas (prior to Operation Grim Beeper and collateral airstrikes, at least).

Even without Hezbollah, it was very close to major disaster. The Hamas units were not supposed to be stopping to pillage the kibbutz on the Gaza border, they were supposed to be going from army post to army post and wiping them out all the way to the Palestinian Territories. Which if they had maintained their offensive time tables they very well could have, since the IDF units in the area were terribly unprepared and badly disciplined. Fortunately local police units were much more vigilant and trained for this scenario, and they did a good job slowing down the Hamas special forces units that actually were pushing forward. There was one road intersection that the IDF and police narrowly managed to hold on to, if they hadn’t the only line for reinforcements to get into most Southwestern Israel would have been cut.

Even without Hezbollah, it was very close to major disaster

This is such funny hand wringing. What major disaster? 1000 more Israeli's die (that would suck sure)?

How are a bunch of dudes in pickup trucks and paragliders ever, EVER going to credibly threaten one of the most sophisticated armies on planet earth? Yeah they'd do more damage, it would take longer to root them out sure. But airplanes and tanks > ak's and pickups, it was always going to end like this.

"Omg Hamas almost overran Isreal" is straight melodramatic bullshit. Even if the whole gang pitched in Isreal would have won, it just would have been more like Yum Kippur and less like every other middle eastern insurgency wack-a-mole

How are a bunch of dudes in pickup trucks and paragliders ever, EVER going to credibly threaten one of the most sophisticated armies on planet earth?

You say this like we didn't just have the Afghan war, with the US military fighting dudes in pickup trucks and with AKs and jerry-rigged IEDs.

Also, Israel is tiny It's literally about 9 miles wide from the border to the sea at one point, and it's only 20 miles from Tel Aviv to the border. How many people with AKs running around Boston would it take for the whole city to freak out and panic?

If a thousand more Israelis died on 10/7, Gaza would be a smoking, burning crater.

It's not hyperbole to say that Israel has no strategic depth. The distance an American drives to say, Walmart (10 miles) is further than Israel is at its narrowest width. Even a scrappy band of jihadis with no air cover can hold such a small band for a few days. With hostages? Indefinitely.

Israel doesn't get a chance to make a mistake, while its enemies only have to get lucky once to do significant damage.

I’m sure this is an opinion that will manage to piss off everyone for different reasons, but I think the IDF is highly overrated, both historically and in its current form. It’s basically what the Russian Army would be like if they had never fought in Ukraine or Afghanistan or Chechnya, and were 1/20th in size.

Their technological achievements are mostly in the field of air defense and certain high-impact intelligence operations, both of which are genuinely impressive but aren’t necessarily going to help in an October 7th kind of situation, especially when the command and communications systems have completely broken down.

if that had happened, they probably would've triggered 'Grim Beeper' (nice name) early, and it would've turned Hezbollah's army into a mob with guns

still would've been bad for Israel, but I suspect not bad enough that they'd lose.

I doubt it; IIRC the beepers were used to "call up" Hezbollah members for service. If Hezbollah was already engaged in an all-out invasion of northern Israel as envisaged/desired by Hamas, there likely would have been no need to use/carry the beepers after the fighters had assembled and gone into combat.

Notice the discontinuity with your comparison.

Hamas invaded Israel, committed a bunch of war crimes, and now has no method nor seemingly intention of feeding their own people. Which apparently is Israel's fault?

You're comparing Hamas' crimes to their incompetence, and in so doing illustrating my point.

Which apparently is Israel's fault?

When they're the ones blocking all routes and all aid in, yes.

Does Gaza produce anything besides death cultist mouths to feed?

Hamas invaded Israel, committed a bunch of war crimes, and now has no method nor seemingly intention of feeding their own people. Which apparently is Israel's fault?

Israel was blocking the delivery of aid, and after begrudgingly letting some through they were shooting at people going from and to the distribution points. Yes, both of those are their fault.

If you think the two cases are asymmetric, the better difference to observe is perhaps that the Israeli government routinely engages in war crimes against Palestinians, whose relation with Hamas is between hostile and resigned for lack of better options, while Hamas routinely engages in war crimes against Israelis, who have a broadly voluntary and enthusiastic relation with their government. The average Israeli seems to deserve suffering for the Israeli government's crimes a lot more than the average Palestinian deserves suffering for Hamas's.

(And lest we go there, history did not start on Oct 7 2023.)

I don't think you know what a war crime is.

Potshots at civilians picking up groceries is a war crime.

That seems to depend on who is making the judgment, and whether the 'potshot' is an unguided missile launched at civilian population centers (which happen to include grocery stores, and maybe a few valid military targets) or IDF forces firing at what I assume they deem (validly or not) 'suspicious' actors seeking to steal or disrupt humanitarian aid distribution.

Neither really brings joy, though.

Palestinians, whose relation with Hamas is between hostile and resigned for lack of better options... Israelis, who have a broadly voluntary and enthusiastic relation with their government

According to polls of Palestinians conducted between October 31st and November 7th, 2023, support for Hamas stood at 76%; for the Al Aqsa Briagades at 80%; for Palestinian Islamic Jihad at 84%; and for the Al Qassam Brigades at 89%. In 2023, Netanyahu's approval rating among Israelis stood at 47%.

Also, a lot of the ones who don't like Hamas dislike Hamas for not killing enough Jews. This is a twenty Stalins sort of dislike. "Doesn't like Hamas" doesn't mean "is more peaceful than Hamas".

Israel had 86.5% favourability for the IDF last year, seemingly up to 93% now but I'm only finding paywalled articles. Unfortunately there are rarely polls that measure trust in the system of government modulo the parts that it allows the public to influence (since favourability for the Netanyahu administration would more accurately correspond to something like favourability of the current Hamas leadership).

Given that IDF service is mandatory for everyone except the haredim, asking an Israeli about their opinion on the IDF is literally "do you like yourself and your neighbors?" - not terribly meaningful, or a useful reflection of Israeli opinion on state policy.

Don't people generally have a "Support the Troops" mentality even if you disagree with what the leadership is doing with the troops?

I imagine that it gets even more so when everyone and their brother spent time in the IDF when they were young.

That's a fair point.

  1. No nation at war has ever been required to feed the opposing army's solders (obviously if taken POW, not the central case) or allow the opposing army's soldiers to be supplied with food by a third party
  2. The enemy army controls the area in which the populace lives
  3. The enemy army will seize the lion's share of food aid for their own soldiers, even if requires shooting their own people to get it

That's pretty much it. You can spend hours looking up historical practice around sieges, I don't know what else you expect to find.

No nation at war has ever been required to feed the opposing army's solders (obviously if taken POW, not the central case) or allow the opposing army's soldiers to be supplied with food by a third party

Doesn't Israel claim sovereignity over the area? This isn't "they won't feed foreigners", this is "people are starving within their claimed jurisdiction" which I think plenty of countries have been blamed for in the past. A pretty significant chunk of Mao and Stalin deaths were starvation in their own territory after all.

Doesn't Israel claim sovereignity over the area?

No, they do not.

I don't think they recognize any state's claim to the territory, do they? I guess that's not completely unprecedented, but I think in practice it is for populated territory.

I believe Israel recognizes the Palestinian Authority's claim, but they don't recognize the PA as a state.

Even with that, the PA doesn't really control Gaza anyway.

Yes, but recognizing one entity's claim to a territory that another entity controls isn't unprecedented at all.

Amazingly enough, what is permissible conduct in wartime has varied greatly based on tech levels. "So after we won, we killed all the males and forced the women into marriages with us" was SOP a few thousand years ago, yet today it would be considered a war crime. For millennia, the sacking of cities involved the looting, murder and rape of civilians for the crime of living in a city which had not surrendered.

Before railroads were a thing, food logistics were often a big operational factor. The only way to move a large army to the land without them starving was to "forage", which meant sending out looting parties to nearby civilian settlements to steal their grain supplies and likely condemn them to starvation. Sieges fall into the same time.

But civilization marches on. Wartime rape is considered a war crime. Food logistics are not a big issue in most contexts. International humanitarian law recognizes that starvation is no longer a valid weapon of war.

Most damningly, just about nobody believes that starvation is effective against Hamas. If for every kid which starved to death, a Hamas militant also starved to death, I would grudgingly grant you that this might be a better way to defeat them than bombs. Instead, Hamas is not affected by starvation at all, because where they are in control they will obviously take what food they want. "Join Hamas, feed your family" is probably a great recruiting tool. Assuming they have food stashes, you would have to starve most of Gaza to death before the shortages will really affect them.

Starvation is a bit like firing a machine gun towards a Hamas militant hiding behind dozens of rows of Gazan kids. While you might claim that the actual goal is to hit the Hamas guy, it is very predictable that all your bullets will hit the kids and be stopped long before they reach the baddie.

"Join Hamas, feed your family" is probably a great recruiting tool.

So is "hey your baby/sister/mom/friend/polycule member starved to death in your arms, want to blow up the people we feel are responsible?"

International humanitarian law recognizes that starvation is no longer a valid weapon of war.

Indeed, which is why Hamas should stop starving the populace of Gaza.

Hamas, as the governing body (such as it is), is the one obligated to provide for their own people's food. This whole thing is predicated on the idea that feeding Gaza is the job of literally anyone else on the planet except the actual people who are responsible for doing so.

Look at Northern Ireland. The greatest recruiting campaigns for the IRA were when the British Army did something stupid and cruel.

If you're a Palestinian, your choice is between "Trust the Israelis and the IDF, the same IDF targeting hospitals, the same IDF shooting kids collecting water. Or Hamas, who may be sons of bitches, but they're our sons of bitches".

Hamas, as the governing body (such as it is), is the one obligated to provide for their own people's food. This whole thing is predicated on the idea that feeding Gaza is the job of literally anyone else on the planet except the actual people who are responsible for doing so.

I would say that it is not Israel's responsibility to feed the civilian population in Hamas-controlled territories. However, they are obliged to let in humanitarian aid. From my understanding, Israel's refusal to let the trucks in is why Gaza is starving, not because the international community is unwilling to buy food for Gaza.

If Hamas were to burn food as it enters Gaza, then you would be correct to say that Hamas is starving Gaza (but my model of them says they would not actually do that).

Likewise, while you can blame the Soviets for much starvation, you can not blame them for the starvation during the siege of Leningrad. That blood is on the hands of the Nazis who decided not to let any food in.

Israel has been asking the UN to send the trucks in, it is the UN who has been refusing to do so as long as the Israelis are the ones distributing it.

Please forward me a link to that. I'm hearing that the Israelis do things like deliberately route aid convoys the long way round and into territory where they will be ambushed and robbed, and similar fun things like that. Oh those wacky Zionist boys, such a sense of humour!

What I'm hearing is the Israeli ambassador claiming this, and at this point I don't believe one word out of any Israeli officials, not even "water is wet". They pulled their ambassador out because apparently us here in Ireland are so anti-Israel or pro-Palestine, maybe that's why their army is shooting at our diplomats. And our peacekeeping troops.

Okay, maybe I believe the words of the likes of this Israeli minister, because he's not pretending about what's going on:

Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu said Thursday that Israel is advancing the destruction of Gaza, and that the Strip will be made totally Jewish, drawing outcry among opposition politicians and eventually from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself.

“The government is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” Eliyahu told Haredi radio station Kol Barama. “Thank God, we are wiping out this evil. We are pushing this population that has been educated on ‘Mein Kampf.'”

Eliyahu said that Gaza will be cleared for Jewish settlement and that Jewish towns won’t be “fenced in inside cantons.”

“All Gaza will be Jewish,” he said, though he clarified that Arabs who are loyal to Israel will be tolerated.

“We aren’t racists,” the far-right Otzma Yehudit politician added. “We are fighting those who fight us.”

Eliyahu also denied that Gazans are not getting enough food, calling it a campaign against Israel, but noted that the country was at war and trying to kill “these monsters.”

“There’s no hunger in Gaza,” he said. “But we don’t need to be concerned with hunger in the Strip. Let the world worry about it.”

I mean I can give you links, but they're all going to add up to "Israeli official says they're not stopping the UN" so I don't think that will do much for you, since you are unwilling to believe anything an Israeli official says.

The AP:

Israel says it doesn’t limit the truckloads of aid coming into Gaza and that assessments of roads in Gaza are conducted weekly where it looks for the best ways to provide access for the international community.

Col. Abdullah Halaby, a top official in COGAT, the Israeli military agency in charge of transferring aid to the territory, said there are several crossings open.

“We encourage our friends and our colleagues from the international community to do the collection, and to distribute the humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza,” he said.

An Israeli security official who was not allowed to be named in line with military procedures told reporters this week that the U.N. wanted to use roads that were not approved.

He said the army offered to escort the aid groups but they refused.

The U.N. says being escorted by Israel’s army could bring harm to civilians, citing shootings and killings by Israeli troops surrounding aid operations.

MSN:

Former Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy ultimately accused the UN of “unforgivable negligence” in its actions preventing food from reaching Gaza.

“The failure of the UN aid mechanism in Gaza is truly catastrophic. 600 trucks’ worth of food the IDF is urging the UN to pick up. I saw mountains of pasta, lentils, hummus, cooking oil, sugar, and flour,” he wrote on X, accompanying a video of him walking among aid supplies.

For its part, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said trucks traversing Gaza have to contend with traveling through an active war zone, along with hoards of desperate people rushing to get the supplies, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Criminal gangs have also previously attempted to ransack the vehicles as they enter the Strip.

“Taken together, these factors have put people and humanitarian staff at grave risk and forced aid agencies on many occasions to pause the collection of cargo from crossings controlled by the Israeli authorities,” OCHA said in a statement last week.

Interesting that the AP claims the UN doesn't want military escorts because it could bring harm to civilians, while MSN gives us the UN claiming they can't send their aid in because their trucks might be ransacked by gangs. So which is it: do they not want an escort because of potential civilian harms, or are they saying they can't do it without an escort because they'll get robbed? It seems to me that they just want the new Israeli aid organization to fail so that they will let UNRWA back in, and any excuse to keep aid out of Gaza is good enough to blame on the Israelis.

Does Hamas control anything at this point, in the sense that I could go to an office and talk to my local boss to get something?

If it is damning of anyone it is damning of the Hamas militant. I do not recall any Western warrior mythos that would permit a warrior to hide behind children. At most it would happen once before the warrior realizes that the enemy is actually not bluffing, and then comes out to fight.

Guerrilla warfare certainly isn't uniquely Western but is positively viewed and admired. Most Americans seem to have broadly positive views of the Viet Cong, whose calling card was using innocent villagers as cover.

Most Americans seem to have broadly positive views of the Viet Cong, whose calling card was using innocent villagers as cover.

"The Vietname war was a mistake" is a common sentiment among Americans, but "the VC were good guys" is not.

Okay, maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but Westerners don't have a problem with guerrilla tactics if it's their side doing it.

There is a moral universe of difference between ambushing patrols in the jungle versus using your children as human shields, or holding a gun to the stomachs of your own pregnant women to threaten your enemy into compliance. The latter in particular literally assumes that your enemy is morally superior to you.

I do not believe that "Americans who think positively of Viet Cong" and "Americans who know Viet Cong's calling card was using innocent villagers as cover" are sets that overlap too much.

It isn't necessary to starve Hamas, merely to deprive them of money. Hamas's allies in the various NGOs and aid organizations help them steal most of the food that comes into Gaza, far more than they can eat themselves. They then sell that food to the starving civilians at high prices, which nets them millions of dollars to fund their war effort.

Israel is under no obligation to help the UN finance a terrorist organization.

There is no exception to the requirement to let humanitarian aid through if your enemy uses it to gain a financial advantage.

Also, I doubt that the average Gazan has a lot of savings which they could pay Hamas by now, and Hamas certainly has other ways to extract any resources from the Gazan population. For example, they might require a donation to be exempt from human shield duty. Also, flooding Gaza with food (to the degree that NGOs are able to provide it) would likely collapse the food prices in Gaza and cut out that stream of resources for Hamas.

Realistically, most of the funding of Hamas probably comes from Iran anyhow.

Flooding Gaza with food would lead to Hamas taking it all, selling it to Gazans, and destroying that part that they can't sell.

It's not as if having excess food means that the food goes to people who need it. Hamas is just as capable of taking excess food as they are of taking necessary food.

I am not aware of any requirement that would need an exception to be made. Allowing neutral actors to provide humanitarian aid to civilians is one thing. Allowing hostile actors to aid and abet active combatants is something else entirely. As a credible case has been made that this falls under the latter rather than the former, I don't think there is any international law that actually requires the Israelis to do anything.

As a rule of thumb, international agreements never require states to do anything that would be to their strategic disadvantage. If they did then no state would ever agree to them in the first place. That's why they only ban weapons that are too impractical to actually use, like mustard gas and bioweapons. Nobody would ever seriously suggest banning stealth bombers or cruise missiles, because none of the states that have those things would ever agree to stop using them.

Instead, Hamas is not affected by starvation at all, because where they are in control they will obviously take what food they want.

That's exactly why Israel needs to do it: it is impossible to prevent civilians from starving because Hamas takes all the food. Israel taking the food affects only Hamas (although there are plenty of civilians to point to, who will be starved regardless of what Israel does but who can be blamed on Israel.)

Starvation is a bit like firing a machine gun towards a Hamas militant hiding behind dozens of rows of Gazan kids

Which you may have to do (at least to the extent of getting blamed for killing them). Hamas hiding behind civilians and forcing Israel to kill them, or to look like they're trying to kill them, has been a ubiquitous tactic already.

it is impossible to prevent civilians from starving because Hamas takes all the food.

Pretty much no one was starving to death before Israel implemented more stringent aid restrictions this March.

Almost everyone claiming that Gazans are starving now has been claiming the very same thing since the war started.

There's been widespread malnutrition and hunger of course, but few actual deaths directly from starvation until recently.

Again, everyone (apart from you) claiming that people are dying of starvation now has been claiming this since the end of 2023.

I thought Gaza has been continuously starving for 40+ years. I was told this, anyways. Despite the massive population growth.

Gaza pre war had an obesity problem. I don't think anyone was accusing them of being underfed.

The aid organizations were helping Hamas and had to be stopped regardless of whether they were also providing food.

I'd also ask just how much "pretty much no one" is and how many are starving now. Hamas is known to have used food to control the people even before October 7, so I do not believe "nobody used to be starving".

In a coincidence of timing, I've spent much of the day going through the telegram channel "Palestine English News Updates" (gazaenglishupdates) in another round of my continuing effort to locate video of the alleged mass murder of civilians. Content in the channel is only very rarely blurred, so if any of you plan on opening it, be warned: it contains extremely graphic images and video. I found a single video of the moment an individual was shot, and none depicting the moment where a group was shot at or attacked with explosives, but I relied entirely on search terms, and in a channel going back to Oct 23 that has 10K images and 20K videos, that's plenty of chances for me to miss one or several hundred.

What I didn't miss is the plentiful video and images of starving children. While the cause might be up for debate, that children are starving isn't. It's intuitive anyway: not easy to feed people in a warzone, the only food is coming in from the outside, people and especially children are going to die from malnutrition and starvation.

Israel might not "intend" (apply as heavy caveat to that as you wish) for civilians to starve, but starvation walks hand in hand with war and death. They knew it would result from the start, and it is strictly true that if the IDF stood down and withdrew, fewer people would starve. Should they? Good luck finding an impartial answer to that.

You do realize you're watching curated propaganda designed to outrage and pull heartstrings, right?

How are images of the facts on the ground curated propaganda? Is reality propaganda at this point?

Whenever I try to figure out how mad I should be about this I do my best to translate it to a local Western frame.

If Canadian native peoples crossed the border, raped and murdered a bunch of US civilians at Burning Man, dragged hostages back to Vancouver and the Canadian government was like "lol get fukt America u r settler colonialists" I would absolutely support blowing the shit out of them until every native was dead or captured and every hostage was returned. If every Canadian starves to death as a result, well that sucks but they should consider revolting against their own government if they have a problem with that.

We're responsible for our people and I will be furious if we fuck around at all with bringing them home.

Looking at it this way makes me sympathize with Israel so much more.

I feel like you're also approaching this from the assumption that the Canadian attack is an unprovoked sucker punch against an innocent America. In which, yeah, fuck them.

How would your feelings about this change if America was on its 20th(ish?) year of controlling Canada's borders, the country was absolutely destitute, and America kept pushing the border further into Ontario? Also I guess in this metaphor America is also pumping the water out of the great lakes as fast as they could, regardless of how many Canadians used it to drink.

Further continuing this absolutely tortured metaphor, how much responsibility do you assign to the roughly 50% of the population who if I remember correctly, is under the age of 20? These children were born into a world of shitty poverty, have absolutely no freedom to leave their shitty poverty city, and are profoundly aware that the reason they can't have nice things is the hostile mega-power that gets to decide things like "how much food and medicine they get on a monthly basis". They're propagandized too by Hamas sure, but the Isreali's don't exactly make Hamas propaganda job hard.

In some ways, Isreal has developed Gaza into one of the world's foremost Jihadist factories. I have a hard time imagining a setup that would radicalized young people born into it better than the current status quo.

We don’t have to imagine fake Canadian history, we can imagine real American history. Let’s say tomorrow the Navajo decide they’re done being the white man’s bitch and attack the Grand Canyon with smuggled Iranian weaponry. They kill about a thousand people and take a few hundred tourists hostage. The entire white population of the Navajo reservation is evacuated. Twitter is overflowing with clips of Navajo warriors doing the ghost dance over the dead bodies of raped American girls. Big Chief Leaping Antelope declares no surrender until the entire Colorado basin is free of American influence. Bands of raiders take potshots at towns across the Southwest. Dozens of American troops are killed or wounded every week during the attempted occupation by ununiformed partisans blending in with the population.

You know exactly what would happen next, the same thing that happened to all the other tribes who refused to accept American sovereignty.

The American government sponsored multiple real life cross-border terrorist attacks into Canada. The Fenian Brotherhood was pretty well behaved towards civilians but they did kill dozens of Canadian soldiers.

Now put the situation in the greater context of what the UK/US did in the founding of Israel, the wiping out villages, the absolute inhumanity of the IDF in the Intifada towards the Palestinians and the fact half the western world decided to back Israel to fuck everyone in the region. And you just might start to consider when they say From the River to the sea, they might have a point.

I'll go a bit further: if Hamas were white evangelicals wearing MAGA hats, rather than brownish Muslims, a large amount of the people claiming Israel is doing warcrimes would be calling for the IDF to take its gloves off and turn the land into a parking lot.

This is true, but by the same token, a lot of people wringing their hands over the poor Palestinians being ethnically cleansed, if it was another Arab nation doing it would not give one single fuck.

And if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle.

And if the debate centered around how people's views of your aunt depended on her belonging to a specific outgroup, such as women, whether or not she had balls would be pretty relevant.

Israel may do what it pleases (as is the right of a sovereign state) but it doesn't necessarily follow that Israel should be given tens of billions in supplementary US military aid, on top of already existing military aid. I don't accuse you of calling for this but Israeli strategy can only sensibly be considered in context, just like how one can't look at Hamas or the Houthis as sole actors. $18 billion in just one year, more since then. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-military-aid-for-israel-tops-17-9-billion-since-last-oct-7

America and to a lesser extent Britain are enabling Israeli strategic incoherence, providing air cover and munitions. If it weren't for US munitions the Israelis would need to wrap things up quickly because they would not be able to prosecute this extended, bizarre campaign.

What is this military aid buying? It's buying enemies in the Islamic world, it's depleting Western arsenals of air defence missiles. Years of THAAD and SM-3 production down the drain defending Israel. In the short term these air defence missiles are priceless, there's no capacity to quickly ramp up production.

It makes no sense to send aid to Gaza so they can survive and send munitions to Israel so they can kill them. Better to do nothing at all.

It's buying enemies in the Islamic world

Ah yes, enemies.

America and to a lesser extent Britain are enabling Israeli strategic incoherence, providing air cover.

If such aid was not given and this was signaled well in advance, do you still think they would need to wrap up quickly, or could they just have spent more on military and gotten the same result?

Israel is a small country, and they can only afford spending this much of their economic power on military before they would start looking like North Korea. This whole narrative that the aid isn't actually necessary because our allies are strong and can win on their own just fine (but we must urgently Do The Right Thing and send more of it!), seen also in the context of Ukraine, is among the more intellectually galling aspects of Western propaganda.

I dont think Ive particularly seen that messaging, and Im genuinely asking. Obviously Ukraine isnt like that, but Israel generally seems more diplomatically than materially limited. Looking things up now, Israels military spending was about 5% of GDP in previous years, up to 9% last year. US aid was approximately(second chart) at 1%, increased to 3% last year (and presumably continuing for the current conflict). Probably those numbers dont include everything, but thats far from "obviously impossible" territory. North Korea is quite a bit higher than that, and you can see in the first link that Israel was there previously. For another comparsion, support for the former east german states seems to have been around 5% of west german GDP in the initial years.

before they would start looking like North Korea

Which is to say, stable and at peace (if an uneasy one) with their neighbors?

I was saying this in December of 2023. If the Mexican cartels breached the San Diego/Tijuana border, killed 40,000 people and kidnapped 8,000, the United States Military would be boots-on-the-ground occupying Baja California, Sonora, and probably Chihuahua within a month, if not 2 weeks.

and if the Mexican government objected, it'd probably only take us another 2 weeks to be in Mexico City.

Yes this is indeed actually more plausible.

I still prefer my version because it's clear to me I would even be willing to annihilate very white Canadians if they supported something like a 10/07 on America.

The fact that Palestinians are full of jihadis makes them repulsive to me but the basis of my indifference is game theory.

American soldiers wouldn't be shooting innocent civilians, especially unarmed children in the process of trying to obtain food; were they to do so, the backlash would make "Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" look positively quaint.

If Andrew Anglin and his ilk want to convince the normies that Jews are all ethno-chauvinists who will excuse any atrocity committed by their co-ethnics, they'd just point to this thread, where Mottizens hilariously (and mendaciously) insist that shooting kids at aid stations trying to obtain food is completely justified because Israel isn't required to feed Gazans (wtf?!?!?! how does this even make sense to you?)

American soldiers wouldn't be shooting innocent civilians, especially unarmed children in the process of trying to obtain food

Are you really sure about that?

Canadians are (mostly) white though.

So are afghans and Iraqis.

I would absolutely support blowing the shit out of them until every native was dead or captured and every hostage was returned. If every Canadian starves to death as a result, well that sucks but they should consider revolting against their own government if they have a problem with that.

We're not going to get to verify this, but I'd be willing to bet this is absolutely not how it would play out. The response would be police, not military, and you'd be called racist for saying that the larger group is responsible for the actions of their people.

The response would be police because the Canadian government wouldn't actually say "get fucked"; they'd track down said native group using both their own resources and those the US provided. A world where the Canadian government would say "get fucked" is one different enough that Canada could indeed be invaded over it.

This hugely depends on the degree of association between the group messing with Americans and the government of the territory they operate off. The Taliban were clearly happy to host Osama Bin Laden and the Al-Quaeda training camps and they got regime changed, but the US was never willing to engage in total war against Afghanistan. Mohammed Atta actually planned 9-11 out of Germany, but nobody supported punitive operations against Germany because he was very obviously operating without the support of the German government and people.

The 7th October attackers were not uniformed Hamas soldiers, but only because they were perfidiously fighting out of uniform. Hamas publicly praised the attacks and boasted about its responsibility for them. That level of involvement is closer to "Japan did Pearl Harbor" than "Afghanistan did 9-11." And the US was absolutely up for total war against Japan after Pearl Harbor.

The default assumption at this point is that Israel is waging a cargo-cult war. They're shooting people, and blockading checkpoints, and bombing suspected targets, but they don't seem to have any coherent goal beyond, "do war stuff to bad guys". They know cutting off supplies to the enemy is good, but they're also scared of the mass starvation that would ensue if they won too much.

If we take as an assumption that Israel knows what they're doing, then it sort of looks like their strategy is to technically let in enough food to feed the population of Gaza, but simultaneously to destroy the institutional infrastructure that would enable actual distribution. That way they can go, "see, we gave them enough food, Hamas was just too evil to give it to their people. They ethnically cleansed themselves," as if effectively rationing supplies to an entire population is no big deal.

That doesn't look like it to me, so why would it be the default assumption?

What it looks like to me is Israel is fighting with two hands tied behind its back. What they, IMO correctly, perceive is that most of "the international community" doesn't want them to win, nor would it tolerate them using META strategies in furtherance of an Israeli victory. So what they end up doing, and we end up observing, is a bunch of tiny motions in the direction of victory that advance the goals of Israel a little bit at a time, while mostly carefully avoiding any dramatic moves in that direction, which would have a high likelihood of generating massive blow-back, even if there was no alternative plausible avenue to generating whatever that strategic gain is/was.

META strategies

I don't know what this is intended to mean. Is META an acronym for something? Or what are "metastrategies" in this context?

Most Effective Tactics Available

I've heard some people in gaming think meta refers to "most effective tactics available." Maybe that?

Why is Palestine entitled to Israeli food? They can't pay for it, and actively stymie distribution of any food that arrives onshore. Thefts are unattributable because Hamas keeps its uniforms only for parades not for enforcement or fighting Israel - which it has largely stopped doing only because its proximate threat is the Gaza clans that now have a chance of fighting for their own slice of the narrow pies.

However you slice it, the governing body of the Gaza refuses surrender yet demands food for its own people from the Israelis it swears to destroy. When Armenia held Nagarno it supplied the enclave, not the Azerbaijanis. Israel ceded occupying power decades ago, yet the Gazans have expected Israeli water food and electricity without any expectation of paying for it even when waging war. If Gazans want to not starve perhaps kicking Hamas out might help.

Why is Palestine entitled to Israeli food?

A combination of "with great power comes great responsibility" and "you break it you bought it".

They're not entitled by default, but given the amount of control Isreal likes to exert over the strip (and who can blame them), they are now de-facto responsible for the outcomes.

If Isreal decided "fuck it, Gaza's borders are open. We're just gonna sit behind the border wall and do our thing, the people of Gaza are free to do whatever" then yeah, I would assign them zero responsibility.

They don't like having rockets shot at them (fair), so they don't do this. But because they chose to do something, they get to inherit the consequences.

If Isreal decided "fuck it, Gaza's borders are open. We're just gonna sit behind the border wall and do our thing, the people of Gaza are free to do whatever" then yeah, I would assign them zero responsibility.

They did do this in 2005 when they removed (sometimes at gunpoint) all the Jewish settlers in Gaza. The naval blockade and walls went up years later in response to the rockets and other attacks. I think this is part of why the Israelis question whether peace is possible at this point: Gaza's government, and arguably it's populace that hasn't overthrown it, supports attacks on Israel, even questionably effective ones, at almost any cost to themselves.

Why is Palestine entitled to Israeli food?

Well, human rights come to mind. Rather, they're the reason individual Palestinians are entitled to food generally, whatever it takes to get it to them - not Palestine as a political entity, and not Israeli food in particular.

Do those human rights exist if neither side chooses to enforce them?

Hamas has relied on the concept of human rights to win the ideological part of this war. They don't believe in it, but they know we do, so they weaponize it. Western liberals demand Israel enforce this idea of human rights because they are the more capable and, supposedly, moral side. Liberals invoke human rights when it comes to Israel, all while Hamas intentionally holds their own people hostage in order to create a moral dilemma and pit Western countries against Israel. The Stockholm syndrome cannot be denied.

Imagine for a moment if Hamas and Palestinians knew these human rights would no longer be upheld by other countries. Would the majority of Palestinians continue to support Hamas? Maybe they would, and maybe they would rather starve to death or get blown up than cede ground to Israelis. My instincts tell me that a majority wouldn't continue to support them, but then again I'm a Westerner and can't really put myself in that situation. What seems obvious to me though is that the cost-benefit analysis for Hamas continuing their strategy appears much more feasible when you have 3rd parties supplying aid and moral support.

I acknowledge that what is happening to Palestinians is horrible. I don't wish it on any human. However, third party empathy is Hamas' greatest weapon. Israel knows this but Westerners don't, and I do not expect Israel to cave to outside pressure. What this means (and what it has resulted in thus far) is an even more prolonged ordeal, where more Palestinians die and Hamas gains more support from other countries. Maybe this will result in Israel's demise at some point. It's a brilliant strategy by Hamas, but it will come at a great cost because Israel will not succumb to the empathy games directed at the world's liberals. They believe that might equals right and nobody has been able to prove otherwise.

Do those human rights exist if neither side chooses to enforce them?

Well, if you aren't a nihilist, yes. The morally correct course of action remains the morally correct course of action even if nobody implements it. Under most western ethical philosophy, the right thing is under no cosmic obligation to be easily achievable for people who are also trying to secure geopolitical goals. Sometimes doing the right thing for the needy means you risk your own comfort and safety, and that's just the way it is.

We instinctively understand this where individual life-or-death situations are involved, eg running into a burning building. But somehow when we're talking about whole populations, both sides of the conversation pretend that a case that XYZ is the right thing to do also needs to prove it's the advantageous thing to do. No. It's perfectly coherent to say "The right thing to do is to prevent children from starving. It might in fact result in losing the war, but it's the right thing to do anyway. A victory that can only be won by starving children to death through inaction would be morally bankrupt and is not worth pursuing."

It's coherent but you are invoking a moral truth, whereas I am discussing realpolitik. Can you enforce what you believe in? I think not. Will Israel's "morally bankrupt" actions have consequences down the road? Potentially, yes.

Will you convince an entity who believes that their existence is under threat that they are morally wrong if they feel they are protecting themselves? Maybe later, but not in the moment. What can that moral correctness without leverage really accomplish in the moment?

It's coherent but you are invoking a moral truth, whereas I am discussing realpolitik

Perhaps you are, but I think talking about "human rights" in terms of realpolitik is a category error. I was originally springing off of 2D3D asking what entitled Palestinians to Israeli food. "Moral rights," I replied. Your jumping to say 'what are these human rights worth, if no state actually enforces them?' is the equivalent of bringing up gun ownership and effective self-defense in the context of a conversation about whether innocent people getting murdered is wrong.

What can that moral correctness without leverage really accomplish in the moment?

Even if it can't sway Israel (let alone Hamas), it can influences the choices of people on the sidelines ie the rest of the world. Whether we're talking about the big picture of "should America support Israel's war effort even though it results in starving children", or the small picture of "should I, personally, donate to that online fundraiser to send help to starving little Abdul".

More comments

The strategy seems to be based on eroding the power base of Hamas, possibly with a side of forcing Gazans to confront the reality of their situation and their complete military defeat.

Apparently Hamas had previously been seizing food and using it to maintain power and influence by controlling who got what, which the new system pushed by Israel and the US is designed to thwart. This makes sense and seems like it would be effective, so I wouldn't be surprised if Hamas and those aligned with them would do a great deal to try and undermine that effort.

If your military victory left you a completely unruly population that you can't control outside of genociding them and you can't completely genocide them without compromising your military victory then I'm not sure you have a military victory.

Israel feeding Gazan children will create Gazan men and women. Those men and women are raised with a strong sense of having more Gazan children. To that extent I'm not sure if claims by either side of who is trying to starve who are in any way sensical.

The "completely unruly" part is doing the heavy lifting here. The only reason Hamas and the broader Palestinian movement keeps waging its pointless self-destructive war against Israel is because of its quixotic belief that Israel could ever be defeated militarily. As Richard Hanania argues, Israel must crush Palestinian hopes. If the current generation of Palestinian children are raised under the understanding that Israel will never be defeated (and hence they might as well learn to play nice with them and stop being completely unruly), that serves everyone's interests. If Israel can achieve a durable peace in the region without having to resort to genocide or ethnic cleansing, I'm sure they'd vastly prefer that over the alternative.

If the current generation of Palestinian children are raised under the understanding that Israel will never be defeated (and hence they might as well learn to play nice with them and stop being completely unruly), that serves everyone's interests.

There won't be a current generation, they'll be dead before they can leave infanthood. And any who do survive will have learned: you don't have a place here. Israel wants you gone. Not even toleration, they intend to take this land and give it to their people.

You and Hanania are telling the Warsaw Ghetto to just play nice with the German government, then it'll all be okay once they have total rule.

they'll be dead before they can leave infanthood

Are you predicting that literally no Palestinian children in Gaza will survive to adulthood?

If the current generation of Palestinian children are raised under the understanding that Israel will never be defeated (and hence they might as well learn to play nice with them and stop being completely unruly), that serves everyone's interests.

I think that 1) that is totally true and 2) this is profoundly unlikely given the long history of these two peoples and human nature to say "fuck you don't tell me what to do" with a side helping of Isreal being unable to keep its hands to itself re: settlements, etc

We shall see!

I have no idea whether it's a plausible outcome. But it does have precedent in living memory, namely the post-war American occupations of Germany and (especially) Japan. It's not completely outside the realm of possibility.

That's true

Less of a long painful history though.

Also both Germany and Japan had much better cultural scaffolding for bootstrapping back into friendly productive 20th century neighbors.

I would be inclined to agree with you and others as far as peace goes but this is ignoring expansionist ambitions of Israel. Israel wants land occupied by Palestinians. All Palestinians have to do on that front is not leave. To that extent they can win battles and drag the conflict towards a stalemate of sorts.

Then your definition of victory is narrow and unsuited to this conflict, or any other of the many interminable conflicts that clutter up the history books, there are kinds of victory other than those which are absolute or permanent.

Degrading or destroying Hamas reduces the danger posed by Gaza substantially, the remaining population can be as unruly as they like, if they lack the equipment, networks or know-how of how to turn ther discontent into military force then they simply are not a threat, not in the short to medium term at least. Sure they might eventually overcome these shortcomings and become an actual threat again in the long term, but in the meantime Israel can enjoy peace and security, which is absolutely a win.

This all assumes that the Gazans decide that yes, they really are going to learn nothing from this whole experience and just repeat the exact same mistakes that lead to them being bombed flat for 0 gain, which I really don't think is guaranteed. Yes the Gazans aren't going to come out of this experience overflowing with love for Israel, but I can't imagine they'll be very happy with Hamas either, or anyone who has the really bright idea of triggering an unwinnable war over what amounted to a very violent PR stunt. By all accounts Palestinians before the war had a delusional perspective on the conflict and their chances of victory against Israel, vastly overestimating their own population and vastly underestimating that of the Israelis, there is a chance that this conflict might knock some sense into them.

If you need to broaden the definition of victory to include whatever short term gain you allege Israel has now and preclude any longer term concerns then I'm not sure my definitions are the problem.

I mean, the peace and security Israel bought for itself seems extremely hard fought and eerily similar to what they had before. Outside of the Oct.7 attack, which was a defensive blunder, is all the manpower and material spent on this battle justifiable in any sense if we are comparing before and after?

In 2021, there was a singular combat casualty for the IDF. And of the 54 attempted significant terror attacks, there were 3 deaths and 34 wounded. And 2021 seems to be on the lower end of average.

I stand thoroughly unconvinced.

Outside of the Oct.7 attack, which was a defensive blunder, is all the manpower and material spent on this battle justifiable in any sense if we are comparing before and after?

If they didn't fight, it would be October 7 constantly. You are saying that there's no danger, so the military operation isn't needed. But there's no danger only because of the military operation.

If they didn't fight, it would be October 7 constantly.

Well, that's the question. Hamas would certainly attempt October 7 constantly. But "Oct 7 was a fluke caused by an unforced error in the Israeli defense strategy, Hamas did not have the capacity to achieve regular Oct 7-level attacks and Oct 7 itself could easily have failed if Israel had put in a bit more effort" is a reasonable claim.

But it didn't. And once it happens everyone knows it's possible. And now that's the reality both governments have to live in. Just as Israel has to respond if only for domestic reasons, Hamas may also be emboldened.

We're also operating with hindsight about how (in)effective Hezbollah would be here. A situation where Hezbollah is also emboldened while Hamas is still effective and untouched looks significantly more dangerous after Oct. 7.

It sets up strong push pressure for their upcoming "voluntary migration" plans.

Migrating where? Which country would take 2.1 million refugees?

I don't think that is Israel's intention to starve civilians to death, but marely a consequences of how Hamas blatantly ignore international convention of war leading to a lose lose situation for IDF/Gazan civilians, where IDF need to be accused of commiting war crime en masse, and Gazan civilians being stave to death.

While Israel had been criticized for their dubious non-humane military tactics, they seems to still put certain restraint on themselves when it comes to civilians. IDF don't kill civilians for fun, at least not openly.

I think the starvation here, if real, is an unintended consequences of international humanitarian organizations did not put effort to protect their humanitarian resources, leading to Hamas siphoning military resources for free practically.

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