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naraburns  nihil supernum  7mo ago (text post)   28901 thread views

Israel-Gaza Megathread #1

This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

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What's a good anti-tunnel strategy for the Israelis? A few things immediately come to mind:

  1. Blowing them up / collapsing them
  2. Flooding with water
  3. Sealing / flooding with concrete & rubble
  4. Attacking clean air with smoke / toxins
  5. Occupation / patrol / drones / auto turrets

I think the tunnels are the main infrastructure advantage for Hamas, and Israel will need to confront them directly somehow.

Also important to mention that very probably a large number of the hostages brought to Gaza are in those tunnels.

They send robots down the tunnel. When the tunnel is cleared, they map it and blow it all up. There are a few specialized units in the IDF for that.

Rats with GOF-d rabies. I liked the Brad Pitt World War Z more than the book, Yonkers gave me an aneurysm, my brains are eminently vulnerable to hydrostatic shock even if zombies aren't.

It would fit the cycle of escalation seen in the 20s, and serve as a nice palate cleanser alongside getting the aliens watching to suspend disbelief when the Isreal-Palestine conflict ends.

Well, if teaching microorganisms to only attack Islamists fails, I think nerve gas might work, I'm sure there's some variant that rapidly degrades and isn't too lethal unless you're stuck breathing it. Maybe just pump carbon monoxide, and have sensors that detect the leaks where Hamas opens the air holes every now and again.

Or starve them out. Bunker busters. And as someone suggested, flood them.

https://zombie.fandom.com/wiki/Battle_of_Yonkers

It's about the dumbest military conflict I've had the misfortune of reading.

There's no way a bullet to the head would kill those things if their insides being liquified under artillery bombardment wouldn't. Worst case, you drive over them with tanks they can't hurt, and if you keep moving, you're not getting bogged down either.

I just re-learned about rabies, in the last 10 days:

  • if you're symptomatic, you're a dead man walking
  • symptoms take weeks to months to present
  • symptoms include hydrophobia, which is an intense thirst combined with your musculoskeletal system refusing to accept water (via the nervous system)
  • IV fluids for some reason do not ameliorate
  • "foaming at the mouth" is related to increased saliva production combined with an inability to swallow said fluids
  • zombie-like symptoms including an instinct to bite others
  • transmitted primarily via saliva
  • zoonotic reservoirs are mostly bats and rodents, with dogs as the bridge to humans
  • very few canine or human cases in countries like USA
  • a really shit way to go
  • less prevalent but more scary than I thought

There's a reason that even us lazy interns in a government hospital in India didn't fuck around with jabbing our patients who got so much as scratched by a stray cat with their shots. And we chased people who suffered road traffic accidents out onto the streets, as soon as we were reasonably confident they wouldn't die as soon as they left.

If you watch archival footage of the rare cases caught on video, it's a horrible way to go, the only way to ease their passing is to sedate them into oblivion.

I'm glad I've never seen a real case, even India isn't so backward that a normal doctor, even in a rural area, can expect to see one.

Probably the worst thing bats have done for us, COVID notwithstanding.

Do you know why IV fluids fail to hydrate? I am only going off wikipedia here, and maybe errantly...

The short version is that it gives you a very bad brain infection and then you die (encephalomyelitis, if you like). What actually results in death is as usual more complicated than expected but that's the short version.

If you scroll to the "pathophysiology" section of the below article (accessible for me without a login) it should be pretty understandable even without specific training. It also mentions the whole hydrophobia thing.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK448076/

Rhabdoviridae

Interesting, is this related to the rhabdo that Crossfitters get? Rhabdomyalysis? Something to do with kidneys and hydration?

The article is ungated for me, FYI

Rhabdomyolysis is essentially a process where you work out too much and one of the good parts of that (muscles breaking down, which leads to better muscles in the long run) becomes excessive and overwhelms your kidneys. This generally occurs with very excessive workouts like a marathon or people going all in on CrossFit, but in the case of poor kidney function or fitness it can happen with milder activity (and hydration is a component as you mention). Importantly doesn't need to be "exercise" - psych patients who are restrained and on PCP can get it from fighting the restraints, if someone has their arm run over by a truck they might get it. The word is from Greek - "Rhabdo" "Myo" (Muscle) "Lysis" (Breakdown). Rhabdo more generally means "rod" but in this case species "striated muscle" which is the type of muscle we except to be causing Rhabdo by breaking down.

In the case of the rabies it's a rhabdovirus because it's sort of rod shaped, which is a boring but common way of naming shit in medicine. Many bacteria are called "bacilliform" because they are rod shaped (with that being Latin for rod).

It's not something I've thought about, but after looking it up, it seems what kills them isn't a lack of fluid, per se, but pretty much every organ in the body shutting down.

Don't merely flood the tunnels, flood the area. Then you don't need to locate the tunnels. You also create a tactical asymmetry for fighters unable to equip themselves with the proper footwear.

High capacity seawater pumps exist: https://www.tobeepump.com/sea-water-pumps/tsh-large-seawater-pump.html

At 14,400 cubic meters per hour, you could flood a football pitch a meter deep in about half an hour.

Downthread /u/bro posted a video from a tunnel expert which would make 1 and 4 infeasible. 2 is probably infeasible because of steel doors. 3 would require finding all the tunnels and 5 would require a risky amount of personnel within drone distance.

https://www.themotte.org/post/705/israelgaza-megathread-1/147199?context=8#context

Related, I think nothing less than total destruction of all known tunnels should be a, if not the, primary strategic objective for Israel. Or at least how they frame it. They can't count on UN support for killing Hamas, but they could probably muster international support for eliminating the tunnels.

In the process, Hamas gets wiped along the way.

Surely the greatest challenge is finding them

Agreed, but once you're in, you should be inside the network. No doubt there are segments and isolated clusters, but all it takes is one entrance per segment.

There are quite a lot of IEDs and booby traps in those tunnels.

Airborne ground penetrating radar.

Not as easy as it sounds, unfortunately. Effective range is rather limited; the last GPR I worked on was humvee-mounted. Finding a steel can 6 inches under the ground might be easier than a rough tunnel.

There are air-mounted magnetic imaging devices that penetrate deep underground and are used in geological surveys. They're helicopter-mounted and able to pick up the depth at which the material of the rock underneath changes composition, so would presumably be able to pick up on the metal used in the tunnels somewhat easily, though I can't guarantee that.

I tried to look into this, but I only found a couple scuffed wiki [pages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_survey_(archaeology). I’d be really interested if you have any more details.

My experience with it is from working with a mining company that surveyed a rather large area, including our property, looking for mineral deposits. It was a large array, probably around 10'x10', carried by a helicopter, and the results were impressive. Can't remember if they let me keep any copies of the study, but I'll dig and see if I can pull it up as it may have more details. It was definitely considered pretty cutting edge at the time, but it was like 10 years ago. Might have been more of a proprietary secret than I realized at the time.

I thought LIDAR was good at finding underground structures, even in dense urban build-up. Am I imagining this?

Yes, I imagined that. I am big dumb.

I don't see how lasers could penetrate the ground.

You're not using enough power.

...right. I should really think before I post.

I know LIDAR is pretty good at finding recently disturbed soil: cut and cover trenches, landmine holes, fresh backyard graves, etc.
You'd need a pretty good laser to make it work 6' underground though.

It’s not just the tunnels, as tough as those are, it’s also the mountain of cheap drones they’ve no doubt stockpiled.

Time to import championship skeet shooters?

Thermobarics?

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