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What do you suggest the IDF do instead? Let them take all the food?
Machine-gunning and shelling people to avoid crowd crushes is obviously and inherently counter-productive.
If the IDF cared so much about how food was distributed in Gaza, they should try doing some food distributions themselves, win hearts and minds. Having food makes you popular amongst the hungry! US/British troops were very, very popular in Germany post-war since they controlled the food and treated the Germans with a very, very basic level of respect - even though they'd just bombed and blasted the country to ruins.
The IDF doesn't want to distribute food, they think it's too risky getting close to these guys? Then let some UN or NGOs do it.
But the IDF wants to starve the population as part of their campaign strategy and out of hatred, which is why they shoot people trying to get food and make it so extremely difficult to bring food in at all.
US/British troops post-war were in full control of Germany, so they didn't have to deal with Nazis who would forcibly take the food when they tried distributing food to German civilians.
US troops also were in full control of Japan, a nation expected to violently resist such, but they didn't, in part due to a careful occupation and how we actually imported quite large quantities of food to keep them from starvation there too. What do you know, now we're allies. Weird.
We should also just get this out of the way - if there's a sufficient amount of food going in to Gaza, food riots don't happen. Because, you know, people have enough food. Israel dropped the ball on food imports from the very early days! If I remember right, they declared a blockade a few days after the attack, and it was almost two weeks or something like that until food began flowing again - and even then, slowly and not enough. I feel like people aren't really aware of, or thinking through, the absolute numbers involved. A bit down this page there's a nice little chart. Before the attacks, it took 500 trucks a day to "break even" food-wise. That's about 15,000 truckloads per month, yes? Please look at that chart. November 2023 only 2,548 trucks entered over the entire month. Now, people have disputed these numbers, and I'm not 100% sure of the correct ones. But some have tried, here's one attempt which landed on a ca. 200/day figure, or 6,000 per month. That was never hit even once even at maximum aid flow. The chart shows that aid showed up more in the 3,000 per month range. So there's quite obviously a major gap here. And by gap I mean malnutrition, and even death, because food distribution systems have variability in coverage, even the really good ones.
It built up to critical mass over the last nearly two years. And now some people are stating with a straight face, oh look at all the riots, it's the fault of the Gazans, as if the situation just happened out of nowhere. That's a good example of victim blaming missing the point.
The point is that they could only do this because they were in full control. Israel cannot do this, because they don't have full control over Gaza.
That doesn't follow. Food that goes into Gaza freely would just be taken by Hamas. Hamas would then offer it only to people who follow their orders, up to and including becoming suicide bombers so their family gets fed.
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Yes, let the organizations that are actively trying to secure a Hamas win distribute food. That'll definitely fix the problem.
An explicitly pro-Israel NGO doing it would have better results, because they will genuinely attempt to make sure that does not occur, but their work would be frustrated because of (and by) the above.
So the army doesn't want to distribute food. They don't want to let anyone else distribute food. But they do want to shoot people coming up to get food... Doesn't take a genius to see what's going on here! And it's not a sincere concern for crowd crush and equitable distribution of aid.
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Airdrop an overwhelming amount of non-perishable food into Gaza. Hamas wants to control the population by controlling the food supply? Make sure that everyone has access to such large amounts of food that Hamas can't realistically take it from everyone.
This doesn't help. There's no amount of food that Hamas can't realistically take. There's an amount that they can't realistically eat themselves, but they'd just take it and destroy the amount they can't eat.
I'm pretty sure there is zero evidence of this, and it frankly doesn't make any sense. Especially this far into the war, most of "Hamas" is probably not grizzled veterans, they're young men who have been radicalized by suffering around them - in other words, regular Palestinians who have an affinity for the local people (because they are the local people). They aren't going to be destroying food to spite Israel by some kind of convoluted logic.
They wouldn't do it to spite Israel, they would do it because having control over the food supply means having control over the people.
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Seems like the sort of thing that would be easy to document terrible optics for Hamas. They're usually pretty good at managing optics.
Hamas has done plenty of things that are terrible optics already. The media just refuses to publicize them.
Even sending rockets into Israel was terrible optics, but Hamas got away with it.
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I also want an overwhelming number of guns (specifically pistols) airdropped into Gaza too. A Tokarev for every man, woman, and child.
Hamas is already as armed as they need to be and wouldn't benefit from more guns (and these personal defense weapons aren't really suitable for waging a non-civil war). I want everyone else to be, so that when Hamas tries to seize the food or set up forward bases in places in which they are not welcome they get shot the fuck up. Israel already has to assume every Palestinian is armed because Palestinians and Hamasi look the exact same, so it's not hurting them.
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That is a fantastic idea, and I would strongly endorse it. how much would this cost? It can't possibly be more than we waste on any number of military or social programs of far more dubious effectiveness.
My estimate is that it'd cost ~$10B / year to drop 2 humanitarian daily rations per person per day (4400 calories / person / day) on Gaza by helicopter. You might be able to cut those costs by 3x in a reasonable way, I'm doubtful that you could drop them by 10x.
On the other hand I bet you wouldn't actually need to keep it up for a year to break the Hamas stranglehold on food distribution.
What's your estimate on flight costs for helicopter versus C-130? Because I bet you could figure out a way to drop those things out the back of a cargo aircraft by the palletload and have 90%+ reach the ground intact; from eating MREs a few times, I don't remember them being very heavy for their volume, and the packaging is durable...
Maybe ditch the Humanitarian rations and just start dropping sacks of dry beans and rice with cut-rate parachutes? Like, really optimize for usable calories on the ground for the cheapest price possible, where harm to the payload is a minimal concern.
I think a literal palletload of MREs dropped out of a C130 has a pretty high chance of being an accidental kinetic weapon. Probably possible to do a bit better though.
Part of it, though, is that helicopters are just not that expensive in the grand scheme of things - I see $2400 / ton from the World Food Program for their program of doing very similar airdrops of food over South Sudan.
And yeah beans and rice are cheaper, but even if you cut the cost of the food itself to $0 you still need to ship about 1-1.5kg / person / day, which works out to 1M metric tons / year of food. At that point the cost of delivering the food by air is the strong limiting constraint.
Israel has already spent $30B on this war, so if getting costs down by 10x really is viable I am even more confused why they haven't done it, absent the obvious explanation of "they really are trying to put food pressure on Gaza".
I was thinking more hot-glue two packs to a stick and see if you can get them to airfoil like a maple-seed, or even just dump the packs out loose from, say, 200 feet up. I've never seen one of these packs, I'm going off handling MRE packs before, which were relatively light and packaged in very tough plastic.
My assumption is that Israel is absolutely trying to put food pressure on Gaza; I think there was a link in the international thread that 10% of the gazan population is now dead, and I would expect that number to increase significantly before this is over.
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Israel and friends did parachute pallets in late July/early August in coordination with the UAE and Jordan. Footage and image of a pallet. It was criticized for being a dangerous (probably untrue) and token (true) effort.
A big Berlin airlift that aims to feed everyone is doable if the US is supporting in a major way. Israel has maybe 15 Hercules. UAE/Jordan around the same between them. If everyone tries hard, and the US matches with airframes and maintenance support, you get 40 planes.
Running the numbers through the robot, bottleneck is space (only 6-8 pallets per flight) and available airframes. Somewhere between 200-400 flights to deliver one daily ration of ~2100 calories to 2 million mouths. The high numbers were when I tried to get a guesstimate on the GHF's 20kg 3-5 day rations. To get to the low end we need x5 sorties per day from our fleet of 40. If, however, you managed to fill the back of the plane with loose grains of rice until max load, you could cut that down to 60 flights. The robot tried really hard to convince me "you can’t pour loose grain in the cabin" because "loose bulk will shift during flight and create dangerous center-of-gravity," but I am not convinced.
Actually, I saw something about how dangerous it is for ships, I imagine it's similar issues for planes.
If this video is to be believed, such an incident (poorly secured cargo shifting on a plane) was responsible for a Tu-104 crashing and taking out 16 of the USSR Pacific Fleet's top admirals in a single shot.
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Unironically, you could probably also figure out a way to shoot them out of a canon. Or a literal trebuchet.
Wouldn't be the best way to do so, obviously, but if we're looking for cost-efficient airdrops, why not blimps and zepplins?
Maybe we could get steampunk zepplins after all.
yeah, I see the skepticism over cost as a challenge. 4.70 per ratpack x 2 ratpacks x 2,050,000 inhabitants = $18.8 million, so obviously the large majority of the cost estimate here is delivery. I'm pretty sure cargo planes have <10x the capacity of a helicopter with significantly lower costs per flight hour.
Greater (>10x), since you can pack a helicopter into the largest ones, and yes (mostly), but also not necessarily.
The larger issue is more the relative precision of drops. You can not only greatly increase the survival / receipt of food delivery when doing it via helicopter rather than plane, but you can also even manage a loose idea of who will receive it. Such as, say, a clan enclave that has defensible positions against a Hamas seizure/retaliation group, as opposed to airdropping into Israel or the Mediterranean. So you could absolutely carry X ration packages cheaper in the plane, but you'd also need to carry far more than X packages on Y planes to get the same effect.
High-air drops aren't really effective, and tend to assume you have relatively free mobility across the land area being dropped upon. There's a reason the Berlin Airbridge was overwhelmingly land-unloads while the airdrops were propaganda.
Just carpet-bomb the place -- make your $20M $200M and drop pallet loads of rice on chutes all over the place -- if people are literally getting machine gunned for food, they will figure it out if the odd bag breaks.
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