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If it's really 100 hostages to each Hamas, I'd have long expected actually-starving Gazans to bum rush every gunman then immediately declare a total and unconditional surrender.
Then again, that's kind of the core problem. They're hungry, but they're not actually "surrender hostilities and return the hostages"-hungry.
So aggregate action is always harder than individual action. If the IDF offered food and a trip out of Gaza for the family of anyone who accurately reported Hamas hiding spots I bet they would win fast. Also the people are some degree of starving, so it makes fighting harder, and they may not have the weapons or chance to fight effectively at all. (Could some hungry Gazans really do better than the IDF at killing Hamas?) If Hamas is bunkered down in literal bunkers and tunnels, you can’t do shit even if you have a mob. Still the point remains that they are ultimately civilians and should this be treated like bystanders and in an ideal world as equal value as humans, like any other human.
Despite in some sense being victim blaming (it’s a toxic relationship, everyone is at least a little toxic, Hamas can be monsters and Gazans can be victims both) if we look at surveys support is dropping albeit slowly. But over focusing on the Israeli hostages is probably a poor framing since most seem to believe giving up the hostages would do nothing to stop the war. In fact a large number oppose disarmament because they think it wouldn’t stop the war either (distrust, basically). Thus fatalism is on the rise in Gaza (martyrdom is shrinking interestingly and isn’t the majority view). To be fair when asked if they would evict Hamas to stop the war, this was interesting to me, it’s still like 2/3 no and 1/3 yes. So I think it’s fair to blame Gazans to some extent absolutely yes.
I expect just as many Hamasniks would take the offer and report on some random guy too.
Of course. Just like the civilians at Nagasaki.
The core part of my entire set of posts is that we have to stop letting Hamas victimize those civilians. And the main way they are doing do is by continuing to fight a war that's so insanely lopsided and been like that for decades without even a shred of a path towards victory. Continuing to fight a hopeless war is fundamentally immoral. It's one thing to imagine civilians making sacrifices (even of their lives) to fight a war with some tangible victory condition. It's quite another let them make completely pointless sacrifices.
I mean, I agree. What would stop the war is an immediately and total surrender of Hamas and all their forces, just as in Japan.
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Knowing where Hamas are hiding has never been the IDF's problem. It's been trying to target Hamas members while causing as little collateral damage as possible, given that Hamas invariably hides among large clusters of civilians. But for something closer to your example, the Israelis have for almost a year been offering $5 million to any Gazan willing to return a hostage (I assume helping to return a hostage carries a similar reward). As far as I'm aware, they've had no takers.
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