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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1742 thread views

Transnational Thursday for January 11, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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What are Israel's goals in Gaza at this point, and what have they achieved towards them at this point? I've sort of lost track and would like to catch up.

The official goal is dismantling Hamas infrastructure and destroying their military capacity. The second official goal is freeing the hostages, though nobody actually knows how to achieve that. The former though is simpler - just divide Gaza into squares, go square by square, find anything that looks like it belongs to Hamas, destroy it, find anybody who is holding weapons, destroy them if they don't drop the weapons quickly enough, otherwise rope them in as prisoner. The north of Gaza is pretty much captured and being cleaned up, the middle is pretty much captured too, the south is still in progress. There's a lot of stuff to be done there, so it'll likely take time. Nobody really knows what to do after IDF will establish military control over the whole Gaza - which will likely happen soon, finds all Hamas caches they could find (which will also happen soon) and captures or kills all Hamas members that are stupid enough to keep actively resisting. Since it's probably still months away, the official position is "we'll think of something by then".

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