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They’re boys who try to storm the food distribution sites. Killing those who try to steal food distributed in times of war and famine has happened for thousands of years, it’s critical to preventing both fatal crowd crushes (which have killed dozens or hundreds regularly at aid distribution sites across Africa and the Middle East for many decades) and, even more importantly, to preventing young men and teenage boys from taking all the food, which they’re very liable to do and which leaves nothing for the elderly, women and young children.
As the Dutch example says,
No random sample of the population, especially when in global times of famine and in refugee camp situations women tend to be disproportionately responsible for food collection.
You have a hostile, deeply dysgenic population that has repeatedly decided to commit suicide-by-IDF for 70 years, where young boys are raised from toddlerhood to believe that being martyred by an Israeli bullet is the highest calling and achievement in life. They have no fear, it’s almost impressive. This is an ethnoreligious (ethno because it doesn’t really encompass all practicing Muslims) ideology devoted to the afterlife absolutely, far moreso than any other widely practiced Abrahamic denomination. Even millenarian Christian movements often have a love for life.
If it sounds very early 2000s hitchens atheist boomerish to describe the worldview of a lot of deeply committed Palestinian Sunni ethnonationalists as a “death cult” then so be it, but there is truth to it. Most children early on develop the ability to respond to positive or negative stimulus. Animals like horses and dogs are trained with gentle(ish) physical feedback, with punishment and reward. If you’re beaten and beaten for 75 years you might just surrender - not even to a terrible, North Korean or Cuban or Yemeni QOL but to a quality of life that is still much better than the regional average for your tribal cousins (which was the life most Palestinians had before the borders were closed or tightened after the last intifada; Israel had plenty of need for decently paid blue collar labor). Gazans don’t. They just keep fighting.
In a way, the war on Gaza is kind of like the battle against psycho drug addict violent homeless people like Decarlos Brown. Is rehabilitation possible? Is “justice reform” possible? When someone has 15+ convictions and just keeps on crusading against advanced civilization, well, at some point you have to accept that they have no intention of living peacefully. Unlike countless peoples, including the Jews for millennia for that matter, the Gazans are not content to live as vassals or dhimmis. Perhaps there is honor in that, but there are consequences to it too. So be it.
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.
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.
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