The following is what I can glean from Al Jazeera and other on-line media. The IDF was uninvolved in any immediate response to the border break out. The border remained open most of the day. The IDF was either incompetent, uninterested or part of a conspiracy. Take your pick.
Oct 7 was a coordinated attack by 5 elements of Gazan society:
Hamas
Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine
Gazans, opportunists and criminals
Rocket barrage at 6:30AM
Attack began with breach of border fence at 7:40
First IDF response was a 9:40 air attack on Gaza
Response to dispersed attack was by local police and off duty IDF
Many security casualties were at 3 military installations where there was actual combat
There was two way traffic across the border from 7:40 AM into the afternoon
Captured and looted items were paraded in Gaza by returning attackers
The fence was closed by evening
372 security personnel including police and on duty military were killed by Gazan and friendly fire
766 civilians were killed by Gazan and friendly fire
Friendly fire figures were probably typical. For the US it’s around 40%. That would leave about 500 civilians killed by Gazan forces. About 200 of those are IDF reservists hiding among civilians. Which means maybe 300 civilians killed by Gazan action.
The military claim that all of the attackers were killed is absurd - did the hostages walk to Gaza unattended? The 240 hostages included captured IDF who would have to be guarded and elderly, sick and children who would have to be assisted. Most of these people would have been attempting to escape. It would have required hundreds to transport that number of hostages into shelters in Gaza.
The IDF claims they recovered 1500 bodies. That could be 1100 Israelis and 400 attackers and that sounds reasonable.
A horrible event, but not justification for incinerating tens of thousands of Gazan civilians. And, at every step a grinding embarrassment for the IDF.
So, what could have been done other than devastation of Gaza?
If the goal is really defense of Israel, then launch a massive investigation and restructuring of the IDF. Why was such a tastey target as a music festival allowed right next to the border at a location the IDF knew was a Hamas target? Why was there no added security? Why was there no force dedicated to interdiction if the electronic systems detected the border had been breached? What did the 9:40 AM air attack have to do with the battles going on at internal military installations? WTF was the IDF doing that had anything to do with the border breach and internal security.
The IDF is a monolith that decides how funds are distributed. There are no services that compete for funds and mission responsibility like border security. It needs to be broken up so funds are distributed to meet mission responsibility needs rather than what some elites think is in their best interest.
Ok, that’s reasonable. I’d just day in the chaos of war it’s inevitable that some soldiers are going to do inexcusable things. They should be prosecuted, but it’s going to happen.
With that, I’m regretting joining this thread. I’ve made my point and will probably withdraw.
For pure self-interest, there’s still Iran as a threat, which Israel is an excellent bulwark against.
Arabs who are citizens of Israel have full equal rights. Arabs who are not citizens of Israel shouldn’t expect to have rights in the Israeli legal system that a citizen has.
That’s simply not true. The radical Islamic groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS and the government of Iran are against the Western world in general, and if Israel hadn’t existed, America and other western countries would still have been involved in wars against them.
The recent killings of the hostages by IDF soldiers, plus the killing of the Israeli hero Castleman a couple of weeks ago, makes me strongly suspect that there is a significant element of the Israeli far-right within the IDF. Both of those incidents appeared to consist of IDF soldiers executing obviously defenseless people who they thought were Hamas terrorists (or possibly even just ordinary Gazans). Sure, hindsight and all, but it seems clear that many Israelis think it’s fine to kill enemy combatants who present no threat, and thus it shouldn’t be terribly surprising that some IDF members think this as well.
If this is so, this element will need to be removed from the IDF and other security services – we can add this to the big pile of things, which includes removing Hamas, replacing Netanyahu, and making some clear and coherent path to a 2 state solution, without which Israel will never have long-term security.
Al Jazeera had a video of a stolen (captured) troop carrier that might have carried hostages, but even that requires a driver and guards. So, it’s at least one to one.
I would be terrified going into action in Gaza, knowing that a bunch of guys hiding in tunnels would like nothing better to jump out and lop off my head.
That may be true, but can you agree that the Israel/Palestine situation is an excellent PR recruiting tool for them? It may be a sham, and they don’t really care about Palestinians, but it’s a great way to fire people up and join them in their fight against the West. Not sure how successful they would have been without this.
I don’t agree. These groups are driven not by Palestinian vs Israel rhetoric but by moralistic Islam vs western decadence rhetoric. They tend to tack the Palestinian issue on after they kill a lot of people and hope that it will win over some hearts and minds.
…I just want to make it clear what the two options that you have presented here are.
Do nothing.
Do war crimes
My question to you is…why do you think that these are the only two choices here? Why would you think it would be impossible to wage a war that didn’t involve the forced displacement of 1.9 out of 2.3 million people? The deliberate shutting down of 22 out of 31 hospitals? Starvation as a weapon of war?
This is an unreasonable demand.
For starters, it’s trivially easy to present a third option to either doing nothing, or to do war-crimes. That third option is to “do something without committing the war-crimes.”
And its okay for Human Rights Watch to say “yes, you have the right to conduct your war, but stop using starvation as a weapon.”:
Its okay for the World Health Organization to say “yes, you have the right to conduct your war, but stop shutting down hospitals, stop destroying ambulances, stop killing medical staff, allow safe corridors for medical supplies, food and water.”
Its okay for UNRWA to say “yes, you have the right to conduct your war, but stop blowing up our schools that are sheltering thousands of people.”
They don’t need to be specific. The parameters on how to conduct a war without committing warcrimes are right there. The IDF can google them. It takes less than a few seconds.
And there is nothing wrong with pointing them out. “You can have your war, just stop committing warcrimes” is a perfectly valid position to hold.
From Martin Griffiths, UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs:
People aren’t calling for a ceasefire because they have " Gandhi like morality."
Its because the experts are suggesting that the death toll from bombing is likely twice what the official numbers are because of what is still buried under the rubble. That disease and hunger will soon eclipse the death toll from the bombing. We are beyond the crisis point. If this war continues as is, we are looking at potentially hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.
You do understand that Palestinians living outside of Gaza have been basically watching live-streams of their friends and relatives being murdered in brutal fashion over the last seventy days? Do you not think they count?
This is Loay Elbasyouni. He was an engineer for the first unmanned flight on Mars for NASA. He posted this yesterday:
Are you aware of the trauma that is being collectively shared by Palestinians outside of Gaza right now? If they speak out, they risk their jobs. Waking up every morning checking their social feeds to see if their family are still alive. Hearing the stories of how many of them are now starving to death. And there is nothing they can do.
Is this the only way to conduct this war? Do you really believe that there was no other way? That this is inevitable? That his parents should be condemned to die in this horrible, lonely way?
This was supposed to be a war on Hamas. Yet no one can tell you how many Hamas soldiers have been killed, how many Hamas bases have been captured.
Instead we’ve seen forced relocations to the south. Rafah is the most densely populated place in Gaza right now. Hospitals in the north have been taken out of action. Centuries-old-churches and Mosques destroyed. Universities destroyed. Historical records destroyed. A siege that has lasted over seventy days.
Why have they targeted hospitals? The claims that these were Hamas bases haven’t held up. So why isolate hospitals in the first place? Why not just continue to let them operate? Let people get surgery. Let mothers give birth to babies in relative safety. Let people get cancer care. What strategic value is there in not allowing this? How does this target Hamas?
I’m sorry you are tired, but I’m not going to stop. Because I was quite clear at the start of this thread that this was where this was heading. That this was the inevitable consequences of the tactics and the strategy that Israel had adopted. When you cut off food, electricity, water, medical supplies, when you target hospitals, this is where you are going to end up.
I was shouted down at the start of this thread. And now the new version of “shouting down” is the “laws of war don’t really exist”, or “I’m tired of people saying ‘this is horrible’ and stopping there.”
I’m telling you “its horrible” now because as horrible as it is now, its going to get worse. If the siege continues (and there is no sign of the siege being let up any time soon) you are going to get mass death from famine and disease. You are going to get attempted break-outs over the border into Egypt that will create a whole new set of problems.
This didn’t start on October 7th. You can’t ignore the brutality Palestinians have suffered under occupation for decades. That doesn’t excuse October 7th. I condemn Hamas for what they did on that day. It was indisputably evil. Everybody agrees that Israel had a right to respond. But Israel has decided to respond in a way that has displaced 1.9 million people, destroyed essential infrastructure and historical buildings and records, effectively broken the healthcare system, and are now starving millions of innocent civilians. That isn’t what I would call “brutal urban warfare.” It’s something else entirely.
If they have to take over a hospital the could actually take over the hospital - that is, send in medical personal to take care of the remaining patients, those who were unable to evacuate, and to take care of the civilians who will gravitate towards the hospital because where else do you go for care and shelter. Instead, they wreck the place and then walk out, leaving people to die.
There’s a difference between being “besieged” and “bombed into rubble”. Reports are that the IDF doesn’t just enter a hospital, they deliberately wreck everything inside of it - truly question the necessity of that. And after they’ve bombed and wrecked things they simply walk away and abandon it which is all kinds of wrong.
It’s a norm among the West that in war wounded enemy are also cared for. If Israel decides not to do that the West is going to criticize them harshly.
You don’t have to qualify that - I’m Jewish and I’m not interested in that, either. Our tax dollars should not be support apartheid and genocide.
^ That, right there, is why I am not a supporter of the current Israeli government and power structure. Not to mention that under Netanyahu Israel is sliding towards dictatorship and repression. I’m becoming more and more convinced that no person should run a nation for longer than 10 years and Netanyahu is approaching 20.
Sure… and in the US Black citizens have had full equal rights since the end of the Civil War… on paper. In actual reality they did not and are still not treated equally by all. Same for Arab-Israelis who are, let’s face it, Palestianians with Israeli citizenship. Lots of Israelis still see them as the enemy even when they aren’t. Arab citizens and Jewish citizens live in separate neighborhoods and seldom to never interact. Yes, there are exceptions but they’re notable precisely because they are exceptions.
Far right types are always attracted to the military.
You’ve noted several instances of the IDF murdering (because that’s what it is) people who are defenseless and/or surrendering. One, sure, shit happens in war but this is becoming a pattern.
Any time soldiers go into combat they’re facing “a bunch of guys” who want to kill them, often in horrifying ways. How is that different than “a bunch of guys” in trenches, or sniping from buildings, or dropping bombs from above, or advancing in tanks, or minefields, or… yeah, war sucks and it’s scary and terrifying. Hamas aren’t comic books villains with superpowers, they ordinary humans facing off against ordinary humans.