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naraburns  nihil supernum  6mo ago (text post)   29918 thread views

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.

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A Gazan hospital has been hit, allegedly by a missile, allegedly by an Israeli missile: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/least-500-victims-israeli-air-strike-hospital-gaza-health-ministry-2023-10-17/

Here is why this seems incredibly unlikely to me:

  • Israel gains nothing from this.

  • Israel loses a lot from this.

  • Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, etc. whatever amalgamation of actors here are opposing Israel have demonstrated that they are willing to strike their own people.

  • Hamas etc. gain a lot from this (politically).

The narrative around this is already forming and I suspect that we will never be free of knowing that Israel for sure bombed a hospital (maybe they did).

This will be a major inflection point in this war. Causalities are approaching 1000 people (started at 500, now at 800)

Edit: here’s also why I’m so suspicious of this. If it’s true that Israel bombed this hospital, it basically evaporates any amount of good will I had for them. The 10/7 Hamas attacks were terrible. This is just as bad. Pull our aircraft carriers back, no aid, nothing. Still send in some bad hombres to get our citizens out, but other than that Israel is on its own, and I don’t want to hear any ridiculous moralizing from any us politician ever again.

Edit2: There are allegedly demonstrations happening in several countries now. Extremely dynamic news environment. Nobody knows wtf is going on. Israel is starting to get their narrative together about the cause of this, but it's way too late for them to get ahold of it.

Edit3: allegedly a video of both the initial rocket launch, as well as the explosion: https://twitter.com/TheInsiderPaper/status/1714379242983846126

This matches up with the very first video of the rocket hitting the hospital, and answers why the guy filming was filming (because there were a bunch of rockets going overhead)

https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1714525590873575600

Photograph of the aftermath in the daytime.

Yeah this basically confirms the Israeli story.

There was a lot of videos floating around supposedly of the aftermath. Really makes it feel like this was an actual, coordinated effort to rile up the Muslim world, and that it worked. Damn.

It's rather amazing that the entire world was ultra eager to believe an unvalidated report from a Palestinian spokesperson that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza and 500+ people died.

With priors like these, Israel's at a significant disadvantage in the information war here.

American media organizations shamed themselves uncritically repeating an unverified claim as fact. Which is indeed bad news for Israel.

Tentatively, I can maybe chalk it up to "If it bleeds, it leads." A hospital blowing up and killing 500 people is a hell of a story regardless of which side caused it, you get a lot of clicks/eyeballs publishing that.

And my priors are that Israel's weaponry is MUCH more likely to cause that sort of devastation than Palestine's.

In fact, I remember thinking "it's pretty freaking implausible that a rocket just happens to blow up a hospital and kill hundreds RIGHT when Hamas needs a massive PR win."

But I also couldn't imagine a Hamas rocket leveling a building even with a direct hit.

Turns out the simple explanation was the true one: It didn't.

But I also couldn't imagine a Hamas rocket leveling a building even with a direct hit.

Perhaps a result of my own ignorance with respect to explosives and my observation of 9/11, I find this surprising. I would have thought that it wouldn't take much to take down a building, even one as big as a hospital, as long as it hit the load-bearing parts, and I figured that hitting those load-bearing parts wasn't particularly unlikely in the crapshoot of battle. I suppose buildings, possibly especially in Gaza, must be hardier structures than I'd initially thought.

(Properly constructed) Buildings don't want to fall down; the bigger they are the less they want to fall.

It takes a truly stupendous explosion to actually level a building. The thing that really fucks up a structure is water or fire damaging the footings/weakening enough of the steel that it starts to get wobbly; then the buildings own weight.

That's why bursting/firebombing mix is the trad way to destroy a city: The bursting bombs blow open lots of shit and spread burnable material; the firebombs set everything off and start a firestorm that kills lots of people and makes buildings unsafe after the fact.

That's why houses get totalled by even medium fires, actually.

Another comparison. >2500 lbs of explosives basically scooped 1/3 of the building away, but the rest stayed up.

Structural steel is amazingly strong stuff. I’d expect skyscrapers like the WTC to be the upper end of vulnerability, if only because of the lower cross-section.

Oh yes, I remember being in grade school when that happened. I suppose 9/11 must have left a bigger impression on me (which is probably unsurprising), because I recall being impressed that the building was still standing and seemed mostly fine except for that 1/3 that was obliterated.

IIRC the 9/11 impacts would not have brought down the towers without the subsequent fires (from lots of aviation fuel) weakening the building frame.

My priors are based on the fact that I've never heard of a rocket fired by Palestine doing any significant damage to a structure upon impact.

And the whole problem is that a rocket without a decent guidance system is probably not going to hit the loadbearing structural elements by chance.

I'm going to try to find a source on the lack of destruction from the rockets but uh, googling "Palestine Rocket" won't be helpful right now for obvious reasons.

Edit: Here's a source from 2009. Capabilities could have changed since then but I doubt it.

https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/08/06/rockets-gaza/harm-civilians-palestinian-armed-groups-rocket-attacks

Hamas has done some development over the last decade, both with newer and heavier variants of the homemade Qassam, and with more imports with much larger payloads. I don't know enough on the matter to say whether the larger payloads of a Fajir5 or M302 could take down a building without being a golden bb, but they're large enough to start hitting the 'evacuate nearby barricaded structures' part of the ATF bingo card.

My priors are based on the fact that I've never heard of a rocket fired by Palestine doing any significant damage to a structure upon impact.

Thanks for the link, and this is also a very good point. If buildings were as fragile as I'd believed, I would expect to hear about buildings being leveled all the time both by terrorists and by armies. The fact that such events are notable rather than banal was a sign that I could have noticed.

The best way to level a building, short of a nuke, is to fill it with an explosive mixture and ignite it. But that's hard to do with a missile, a bit more practical for a terrorist, and eminently achievable for someone working on natural gas lines without knowing what they're f---ing doing (usually trying to steal gas).

Even ‘reputable’ News sources like the BBC were leading with ‘Israeli strike on hospital kills 500’, kind of wild. Maybe there will be an internal inquiry there.

One would hope. Both this and the Ukraine conflict have been an absolute embarrassment of just uncritically rereporting straight up propaganda, not only from whoever is considered on "our" side but on any side. MSM has been little better than internet sewer of social media, probably because thats where the journalists hang out and get their information and the only thing that matters is producing more "content" and being first.

I wonder how it feels to work at these places? Are people not ashamed?

Are people not ashamed?

If anyone in a mainstream media organisation was capable of being ashamed their coverage of the Trump years would have led them to resign already anyway.

Okay yeah, I believe the IDF now. I wouldn’t put it past them to hit a hospital if they thought it was an important target, but I don’t think they’d bomb a parking lot full of civilians.

Also looks small, as others have noticed. This looks like an explosion that killed 20 people, not 200.

Fires and especially fuel fires can be more deadly than they look at first glance, particularly in crowded areas or if people were sleeping in the cars, or if people were trampled trying to escape.

But yeah, even if I'd put higher than twenty in the realm of the possible -- if people were actively sheltering in the cars, I could see mid-fifties at the higher end of the plausible -- there's no way this was anywhere near the sort of humanitarian disaster that was getting publicized the previous night. Still bad, but duplex-fire rather than Grenfell. I'd expect Hamas to exaggerate casualty counts, but this isn't even the sort of thing you could squint at and pretend it sounds legit.

This is... actually less ground impact than I expected just given the videos of the initial impact. More evidence in favor of a rocket breakup, I guess, along with either a 'golden bb' hitting some fuel storage (though it's not in the impact crater?) or a lot of unused rocket fuel being left.

Whatever the casualty count was (and it could still be pretty bad - the parking lot was reportedly packed), the initial claim from Hamas was very obviously bullshit simply from how quickly it came out.

Yeah, and Hamas has a tendency to make pretty dubious claims for casualty counts even when they've had enough time to count bodies.

(along with a tendency to conflate military, combatant, and noncombatant injuries and fatalities)

This is bizarrely blatant even compared to the typical stuff, though. Similar in scale to the Jenin "massacre" (West Bank, rather than Gaza), but Jenin took some effort to disprove and a lot of the formal structure for reporting didn't have any way to check. Some media groups are going to provide cover anyway, I guess?

Is there any confirmation of the casualty numbers?

From whom? There is no possible trustworthy source here. No pictures (I'm aware of) show anything like the scale claimed though.

I dunno, video footage of a couple hundred bodies? Red Crescent Society? I'm perfectly happy to accept dubious evidence as useful.

There's a photo of some burned cars in a parking lot. Which is rather unrelated to any claims of a bombed hospital with 500 dead. There certainly weren't hundreds of bodies piled onto the burned part of that parking lot.

There's a photo of some burned cars in a parking lot. Which is rather unrelated to any claims of a bombed hospital with 500 dead.

The main buildings of the supposedly bombed hospital are visible in that photo.

Also, there is no meaningful crater, not all windows are blown out of nearby buildings or cars, etc... I have a really hard time seeing this being the aftermath of a targeted missile strike, this looks like the aftermath of what was mostly a fire.

As a comparison, pictures from car bomb in Mogadishu, October 2022, which killed around 100: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/29/1132604501/somalia-mogadishu-car-bombs-civilian-casualties

July 2016 bombing in Iraq, ~300 dead + 300 injured: https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/07/middleeast/iraq-baghdad-bomb-toll-rises/index.html

Compared to these two, the Gaza photo looks way less severe.

This looks... very minor. Was it just a fuel fire?? Were the videos fake?

Wouldn't be the first time videos from some entirely different incident were (re)used for propaganda purposes.

This doesn’t seem to correspond to the claimed body-count nor the explosion videos, which seemed massive. So Hamas was lying about the deaths, that makes sense, but the videos seemed real enough - so what gives? I’m honestly confused now.

Twitter speculation is that these rockets were fuel-heavy since they were supposed to hit very distant targets.

Also makes sense given how much was damaged by fire versus wrecked by the blast.

Real explosions don't look like movie explosions. The layman perception of what big explosions look like comes largely from fuel fires for special effects.

Oh, wow. That’s very informative, thank you.

But then, there were other videos which supposedly showed JDAM explosions that looked quite cinematic.

(It’s also my understanding that JDAM is a conversion kit rather than an actual weapon’s name, so I’m taking it with a huge dose of skepticism)

The larger munitions (MK84s have 2000 lbs warheads) do have a certain cinematic sense to them in real-time. They're not really bright in the way movie explosions, are, though, and to the extent that there are flashes at all they're vastly outweighed by the dust kicked up. A number of videos with slow-motion cameras (MK82s have 500-pound warheads) from test fires do look more cinematic, but it's important to keep in mind that those blasts are over in tenths of a second, and at real-time unless they drop at a shallow angle you're going to catch them primarily by the dust clouds.

((I'll skip over some weirder configurations, like inert bombs or naval mines.))

The trick's that the fire and heat, barring some very specialized cases like explosions in an enclosed area or secondary explosives, are generally not the main source of damage for detonations. What kills and destroys is the pressure wave. The fire and heat is usually remnants of remaining explosive material that didn't burn off before the pressure wave overtook them.

FEMA has a good document (cw: probably will get you Put On a List) on this from a Blue Team perspective trying to reduce harm, and also what sort of buildings are more or less vulnerable to explosives. Chart 4-11 gives a (very approximate) point for where concrete columns fail. Unfortunately, it's harder to predict for buildings as a class; most modern buildings are designed to require near-complete failure of all main supports to collapse rather than merely being unsafe, but sometimes you'll find a dumb decision come in that lets sections peal off from relatively minor hits. Older US residential buildings are often more vulnerable due to the frame structure leaving the building vulnerable to hits on one or two major supports, while contrast Australia, where cinderblock and concrete everything means buildings often will stay up. I dunno Israeli architecture but I'd expect it tends to the latter side.

Thank you so much for this! I’ve been around guns for a while, but never had any experience with anything explody.

So now it does make sense to me that most of the spectacle in the videos was fuel being dispersed and lit up.

By the way, Israeli and Arab architecture really is much more heavy on the cinderblocks and concrete- wood isn’t used that often at all.

By the way, Israeli and Arab architecture really is much more heavy on the cinderblocks and concrete- wood isn’t used that often at all.

Well, their area is fairly short on wood and forests.

Though Europe is also using wood on much lower scale for home construction than USA, as far as I know. Mostly for different reasons.

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