naraburns nihil supernum
7mo ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed 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.
NEW: The Biden administration has privately been pressing Israel in recent days to flush out what its strategy is for the day after it completes its stated goal of eradicating Hamas in the ongoing Gaza war, a US and an Israeli official tell [The Times of Israel]
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his inner circle have indicated to their Biden counterparts that Israel has not yet come up with such a strategy and instead are more focused on the immediate goal of removing Hamas from power in Gaza, the US official says. (2/4)
But the US official cautions against this approach, saying that devoid a strategy for who will control the Strip if and when Hamas is removed, IDF is more likely to get bogged down in Gaza indefinitely, despite Israel insisting that it does not want to re-occupy the enclave (3/4)
[] National Unity chair Benny Gantz and fellow faction member Gadi Eisenkot demanded the creation of a Gaza exit strategy a upon their entry into the government and that they have tasked a committee with drawing one up. (4/4)
Speculation abounds that this indicates that US intelligence is finding out that things are much worse in Gaza than we realize. There is very little information coming out of Gaza right now. Journalism seems to be dead, it's a black box in there, and whatever reports we get later are going to be urban myths.
I wonder what all this will amount to. I doubt this will achieve any credibility with the Arab world for saving Arab lives, even if it works to do just that. If it doesn't work, no one in Israel will remember Blinken's advice when they're trapped in the quagmire.
Blinken's meeting with the Israelis also got interrupted by incoming rocket fire, which suggests some combination of a) Hamas' ability to restrain its own military forces is gone, b) its ability to get news is gone, or c) it really wants to make the US Secretary of State mark them as impossible to try diplomacy with, or some combination of the above.
The aftermath of that meeting's that Biden is going to Tel Aviv to meet Israelis Wednesday. I don't expect too much from his away game in general (or, tbf, from any President of the last forty years), but it's a pretty major investment to buy a couple days before a ground invasion. Hopefully it doesn't get a repeat of Blinken's jump to the bunkers or worse. Optimistically, there might be unique abilities to describe why this is obviously Hamas trying to bait an intervention that blows apart any chance of friendly relations with any Muslim country, and perhaps more importantly literally any political alternative to jumping into that trap, but the Biden administration has shared the Obama admin's bizarre Iran hard-on, so for all I know it's just going to devolve into something something Iran Nukes.
Speculation abounds that this indicates that US intelligence is finding out that things are much worse in Gaza than we realize.
... there's also a more morbid bit no one really wants to say out loud, but that the US might have intelligence or 'intelligence' on, that's also one of the most serious time pressures.
It's quite possible a majority of the hostages are dead.
Just on a statistics thing, a lot of them were captured with serious injuries, some few probably resisted after capture and it didn't end well, there's a lot of really young babies and a few very vulnerable old or chronically ill people, Israel's been lobbing explosives one direction (Hamas says this has killed just shy of two dozen, for whatever you want to read that to actually mean) and Hamas hasn't exactly taught its fighters to treat prisoners with a ton of respect. Under the more pessimistic look at Hamas' unit discipline, it might not even know which of its troops (or unofficial combatant civilians) even took anyone to start with, and the sorta people who volunteer to go a-Viking in those circumstances tend toward the Bates side of the equation. On the more specific side, Hamas has been studiously resisting Red Cross access, there's only a handful of hostage videos, and comparing the current Hamas demands against the Shalit prisoner exchange is... not something that looks good.
Like, there's probably more than six living ones out of the claimed 199 right now? Maybe a quarter, maybe a third?
When there's a literal Holocaust survivor in a wheelchair with a Hamas gun pointed at her head, and Hamas demanding you send them thirty prisoners (one of which tortured children to death last week) to return her, sending troops into a meatgrinder tunnel is a hard choice made by hard men. A bad choice to make, of course; to borrow from a better writer than myself, maintaining the safety of a hostage during a rescue is the sort of unsolvable problem you want to make someone else's concern. But the survivors are mostly healthy-ish (before the beatings) dual-citizens or soldiers? The calculus changes a lot: there's a non-trivial chance that months or even years of negotiation might result in someone getting home alive, rather than getting parts of a body.
I don't know how they justified such an absurd ratio in the Shalit prisoner exchange (more than 1000 for 1). Apparently 79% of Israelis were in favour of the exchange, so there must be more context that I've skimmed over. How could it not incentivize the further taking of Israeli prisoners? Heck, it was only 10 years ago. There's a not insignificant possibility that freed Hamas prisoners took part in the recent raids.
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Notes -
Reports emerging that the USA is "pressuring" Israel to have a fully developed exit plan before invading Gaza to which Netanyahu presumably replied "Leeeeeroooooy Jeeeeenkiiiiiiins."
Meanwhile Blinken has reportedly been meeting with the Israelis for 8 hours.
Speculation abounds that this indicates that US intelligence is finding out that things are much worse in Gaza than we realize. There is very little information coming out of Gaza right now. Journalism seems to be dead, it's a black box in there, and whatever reports we get later are going to be urban myths.
I wonder what all this will amount to. I doubt this will achieve any credibility with the Arab world for saving Arab lives, even if it works to do just that. If it doesn't work, no one in Israel will remember Blinken's advice when they're trapped in the quagmire.
Blinken's meeting with the Israelis also got interrupted by incoming rocket fire, which suggests some combination of a) Hamas' ability to restrain its own military forces is gone, b) its ability to get news is gone, or c) it really wants to make the US Secretary of State mark them as impossible to try diplomacy with, or some combination of the above.
The aftermath of that meeting's that Biden is going to Tel Aviv to meet Israelis Wednesday. I don't expect too much from his away game in general (or, tbf, from any President of the last forty years), but it's a pretty major investment to buy a couple days before a ground invasion. Hopefully it doesn't get a repeat of Blinken's jump to the bunkers or worse. Optimistically, there might be unique abilities to describe why this is obviously Hamas trying to bait an intervention that blows apart any chance of friendly relations with any Muslim country, and perhaps more importantly literally any political alternative to jumping into that trap, but the Biden administration has shared the Obama admin's bizarre Iran hard-on, so for all I know it's just going to devolve into something something Iran Nukes.
... there's also a more morbid bit no one really wants to say out loud, but that the US might have intelligence or 'intelligence' on, that's also one of the most serious time pressures.
It's quite possible a majority of the hostages are dead.
Just on a statistics thing, a lot of them were captured with serious injuries, some few probably resisted after capture and it didn't end well, there's a lot of really young babies and a few very vulnerable old or chronically ill people, Israel's been lobbing explosives one direction (Hamas says this has killed just shy of two dozen, for whatever you want to read that to actually mean) and Hamas hasn't exactly taught its fighters to treat prisoners with a ton of respect. Under the more pessimistic look at Hamas' unit discipline, it might not even know which of its troops (or unofficial combatant civilians) even took anyone to start with, and the sorta people who volunteer to go a-Viking in those circumstances tend toward the Bates side of the equation. On the more specific side, Hamas has been studiously resisting Red Cross access, there's only a handful of hostage videos, and comparing the current Hamas demands against the Shalit prisoner exchange is... not something that looks good.
Like, there's probably more than six living ones out of the claimed 199 right now? Maybe a quarter, maybe a third?
When there's a literal Holocaust survivor in a wheelchair with a Hamas gun pointed at her head, and Hamas demanding you send them thirty prisoners (one of which tortured children to death last week) to return her, sending troops into a meatgrinder tunnel is a hard choice made by hard men. A bad choice to make, of course; to borrow from a better writer than myself, maintaining the safety of a hostage during a rescue is the sort of unsolvable problem you want to make someone else's concern. But the survivors are mostly healthy-ish (before the beatings) dual-citizens or soldiers? The calculus changes a lot: there's a non-trivial chance that months or even years of negotiation might result in someone getting home alive, rather than getting parts of a body.
I don't know how they justified such an absurd ratio in the Shalit prisoner exchange (more than 1000 for 1). Apparently 79% of Israelis were in favour of the exchange, so there must be more context that I've skimmed over. How could it not incentivize the further taking of Israeli prisoners? Heck, it was only 10 years ago. There's a not insignificant possibility that freed Hamas prisoners took part in the recent raids.
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