Obvious - what one would conclude from Israeli actions and published information like the link above and perhaps this one.
Back to logic 101. Does your post posit that all Gazans are shielding Hamas and therefore can be killed.
It should have been obvious long ago that a link to a search engine is terrible evidence for anything. If someone used that to back up their claim the sky was blue, I’d go outside and check.
…from last night:
I think it’s time to put to rest the idea that the high level of civilian casualties is because Hamas are using them as “human shields.”
This is an algorithmic lead industrial level bombing campaign 12,000 targets have been identified by the target administration division. The “Gospel” allows the IDF to produce targets at a fast pace.
We are beyond the point of pretending that this system is only targeting Hamas. Not at the scale of death and destruction we have seen. Not at the complete lack of transparency on how many Hamas soldiers have been killed. The number ranges from 2000 to 10,000 depending on what anonymous IDF spokesperson says on any particular day. But they don’t really know. Because they aren’t keeping track.
Just like “Hamas have set up bases in the hospitals”, I think “Hamas are using human shields” can also now be safely ignored. We’ve seen no evidence of this. Not after 70 days of siege and indiscriminate bombing.
On another tack: the official count from the CPJ of how many journalists have been killed during this war as of the 23rd of December is 68. The unofficial count, which includes people that might include social media influencers, has just hit 100.
…another Washington Post investigative report. Apparently this link is a guest link, and should be accessible by all:
Parallel thread on Twitter by one of the co-authors of the article for anyone that can’t access the article:
Quoting from the Twitter summary:
My goof. I didn’t test the link after I posted. Probably was here (tested).
Granted, Hamas are soulless bastards. Up-thread (sorry I can’t find it) you stated that the notion of killing everyone in Gaza was absurd. Do you have an idea on how the IDF could eliminate Hamas without causing an absurd number of civilian casualties? References to similar activities against Germany and Japan 80 years ago aren’t useful in that we should be doing better in this day and age, particularly now that we have a better understanding that strategic bombing doesn’t actually win wars, short of going nuclear which aside from any humanitarian reasons Israel isn’t going to do on its doorstep.
Is it the “going nuclear” part that would be the relevant comparison, or would killing a comparable number of people by conventional means be a relevant comparison?
Hamas is not going to be defeated by bombing, or indirect shelling alone. If Israel really means to eliminate Hamas, the IDF is going to have to get off their precious little butts, and engage in direct urban warfare. Which will mean a lot more Israeli casualties, but that is part of the cost of eliminating Hamas.
At some point, the bombing and the indirect shelling no longer have either strategic or tactical value to the effort to eliminate Hamas. It is only killing civilians, which in turn is only breeding the next generations of Palestinian terrorists. Yes, Hamas is hiding amongst civilians, which makes their elimination difficult and dangerous. But if Israel really wants to eliminate Hamas, and at the same time not kill everyone in Gaza, they need to try something different than the same tactics they have been using. Otherwise, all they are doing is a punitive attack, beating the rebellion back underground for a few years until the next attack.
That’s been happening for weeks. In modern militaries, ground assaults are accompanied by aeriel and artillery bombardment; it’s called “combined arms warfare”.
This is why this kind of criticism rings so hollow, and why I’ve mostly given up on responding to this thread. It’s completely unconnected to reality.
You mean, by entering and taking control of territory, unlike in past wars such as 2014? As in, exactly what the IDF is doing this time around?
…the way you’ve just glossed over the fact that they’ve now just issued an evacuation order for Central Gaza is just…you understand that this is another significant escalation, right?
There were hundreds of thousands of people that couldn’t escape from Northern Gaza. Can you tell me what their status is? The healthcare system has collapsed in the north. There are no functional hospitals there at all. How many neighbourhoods are still intact? What about food? Water? What is the status of the people who couldn’t escape from the north?
And is this the fate for Central Gaza? And after Central Gaza has been taken, what happens next? Many of the hospitals in Central Gaza have already been taken by the IDF and been taken out of action. Is the plan to take the rest of them out?
And where are the people in Central Gaza supposed to go? You know that 1.9 million out of 2.3 million people are already displayed, right? That thousands of Gazans in Central Gaza had escaped from the north? That many had already been displaced multiple times?
They are being herded south to the border. You can’t deny this any more. I’ve quoted United Nations officials who say that half of everyone that has been displaced are now in Rafah. Just under a million people.
They aren’t just “entering and controlling territory.” They are evacuating areas of people, forcing them on a dangerous journey to god-knows-where. Then they are bulldozing and razing much of whats left.
News article from AJ yesterday on this:
Issued the order through his social media platforms. Un-fucking-believable.
I just had a quick search for Deir el-Balah.
From a few weeks ago:
From a couple of days ago:
From a few hours ago:
Its like some cruel, sadistic game. Nowhere is safe.
Actually, they’re both Yahoo search links. But now that I follow them, I see they redirect to the Haaretz article. I saw the Yahoo search URL, and figured I knew what the result was.
So, it’s really my mistake for thinking I knew where the URL led from reading it. The article doesn’t really back up the idea that Israelis are trying to send the Gazans to concentration camps.
…in the post you responded to, nobody claimed that " Israelis are trying to send the Gazans to concentration camps."
It was in reference to this.
…and at the moment, according to UN spokespeople, just under a million people have been forced into Rafah that is now overcrowded, no food, no water, no shelter, not enough medical care. And Rafah, just like everywhere else in Gaza, is getting regularly bombed.
…the latest update from Tedros and WHO:
From yesterday, an article on AJ about the hunger crisis:
So Gaza has about a month before famine.
…I’ve been following MoTaz on Twitter since the start of the war. He’s a Palestinian journalist who has built a large social-media following. He’s just posted this latest update:
This is so fucking terrifying. And so very, very dystopian.
Fuck Netanyahu and the IDF.
…major airstrikes tonight on Al Nuseirat, Al Bureij and Al Maghazi tonight. All in the Deir al-Balah district, the area that the new evacuation order for central Gaza people were told to go.
Its like its one big sick joke. All on Christmas Eve.
…we got our first insight into how the IDF are holding Palestinians they have detained in Gaza. The exact source of the footage is unknown, but the description here describes it as “reportedly edited together by an Israeli photographer currently embedded with an IDF unit in the northern Gaza Strip.” The video shows what appears to be a sports stadium that looks like it has been repurposed as a detention centre. Adult men (and in some frames, we can see children) have been stripped to their underwear, and forced to kneel en masse in the middle of the field. In other frames, groups of women and children are photographed.
I’m not going to link to this one because the photos are just so horrific. But a Palestinian journalist a couple of hours ago has made it into Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza. The IDF reportedly withdrew from the city on the 24th. Beit Hanoun is practically rubble. The hospital destroyed. The graveyard destroyed. At the entrance to the city he shows fully decomposed bodies, just lying in the middle of the street, skulls, rib cages.