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So what, the IDF machine-guns them to avoid crowd crushes??? They draw invisible, imaginary lines that, when crossed, get the Gazans shot? Come on, there's a very simple answer here. Few would justify Palestinian suicide bombings like this - 'it was for the Israeli's own good that the Palestinians blew up that bus full of civilians, they crossed an invisible Palestinian security line or something.' Suicide bombings are acts of hatred.
The Israelis also hate the Palestinians. That's why they torture them, blow them up, steal their land, knock down their houses, use all these elaborate terror tactics, shoot them when they're unarmed and obviously no threat. They've been doing this for years, before and after the present conflict.
The Palestinians sure are easy to hate. But there's no way to replace 'Israeli hatred' in the equation here. I fully imagine a skeptical mottizen might try to look into this, is there context, could he have thought she was carrying a bomb? Of course not:
Naturally the soldiers leave the command post, there's this random girl they need to kill!
Hatred is a clear and necessary requirement to understand what's going on in key elements of the Israeli military and society. Otherwise we're just left with absurdities like 'we were shooting the children with heavy machineguns and artillery so that older men wouldn't steal all the food and leave them with nothing'. The 'drug addict who gets let out of jail for the 15th time' analogy isn't appropriate, it's a case where some well-organized, well-connected home-invaders beat the crap out of the home-owner, lock him up in the basement and while lambasting his poverty and squalid conditions, use them as proof of why they should be in charge.
Countries do this, that's how borders get made after all. But dressing it up like this is ridiculous. Israel can't have it's anti-genocide, anti-imperialist, we're just defending ourselves cake and chow down on imperial expansion, ethnic cleansing and forceful subjugation.
Let's not forget these guys outwitted Mossad and the whole Israeli-American intelligence complex with their surprise attack on October 7th. You'd think these high-IQ Israelis with all the most amazing gadgetry wouldn't get sneak-attacked a second time on Yom Kippur but apparently that little bit of readiness is too much to ask.
What do you suggest the IDF do instead? Let them take all the food?
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.
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.
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.
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