I heard about that on the radio the other day.
And Netanyahu knows full well that no other country will take them, so it amounts to a permanent refugee camp. I’m getting a strange sense of irony wash over me…
It will be the biggest, bestest concentration camp ever!
…no.
Jabalia was what amounted to a “permanent refugee camp.” Khan Yunis Camp. Rafah Camp. Al-Shati. Nuseirat. Bureij. Maghazi. Deir al-Balah. There isn’t much left of them any more.
The most appropriate word to be using here IMHO is concentration camp. Its a prison. Once you are in, you won’t be allowed out. And if you are outside of the camp, you will be treated as a terrorist.
Israel are already refusing to allow in fuel, water, tents, shelter, baby formula, medical supplies, feminine hygiene products. They are only allowing in a tiny fraction of the amount of food needed. I can’t imagine conditions in this “camp” being much better.
It’s a holding pattern while they wait for other countries to agree to take the Palestinians in. Its just that…I don’t think anyone will take them. Perhaps if America offers up a big enough bribe.
But this is the endgame. They’ve run out of ideas. They will kill at least 100 people a day, as they have been doing for the last year and a half, as they try and herd people into this camp. And things aren’t looking much better over on the West Bank.
Reports on the ground tonight that the tanks are moving in on Nasser Hospital. Getting news out of Gaza right now that they’ve had to stop admitting patients. As bad as people imagine things are in Gaza, the are orders of magnitude worse. And it’s entirely man-made. It can stop right now. Humanitarian aid is lined up by the truckload ready to come in. Israel just has to let it.
The latest Flash Update from three days ago:
More, as always, at the link.
Don’t worry, it’s under review by the IDF! I’m sure they’ll get to the bottom of it, and not just sweep it under a rug like every other incidence of completely unnecessary civilian deaths at their hands…
Whoa there hoss! War is armed conflict between matched enemies. Both sides do war stuff like shoot at each other. The goal being of one side to destroy the will and economy of the other to fight. Like the US and Japan on Guam in 1944. In three weeks the US inflicted 25000 Japanese deaths and removed all aspects of it’s economy - food, munitions, transportation, resupply etc. The US incurred 1600 conflict deaths. The area was occupied by the US and some Japanese continued a scattered resistance. That was war on a similar size region.
Israel controlled the economy of Gaza at the beginning of the conflict and still does. Gaza never came close to Israel in weaponry. There was no opportunity for war. IDF attrition over 22 months averages 1-2 per day. A little above the highway death rate.
Whatever the IDF is doing in Gaza cannot be labeled war. Perhaps occupation, terrorism, oppression, cleansing or genocide, but not war.
Actually the highway death rate is higher, 1.2 per day.
The IDF death rate is running closer to .9 per day.
I don’t think there’s really any requirement for them to be “matched”, whatever that would mean. If you have two governments that are fighting, that’s a war.
Considering the vast gulf between the number of daily highway users and soldiers deployed to Gaza, what exactly is that number supposed to mean?
Good point. But unbalanced conflict is not considered war, especially without an official declaration of war.
Perhaps you have a better term.
What? Since when? Was the Vietnam War a “balanced conflict”?
I think it’s clearly a war - wars can include ethnic cleansing and even worse, as this war clearly does. The IDF is waging war against Gaza as a whole, and considering how Palestinians in the West Bank are treated, Palestinians as a whole. Nearly everything in Gaza is being destroyed and the population concentrated, and through a combination of corrupt, incompetent, and malevolent management of aid distribution, being forced into squid-game-like circumstances to try and get food that inevitably ends with the killings of unarmed civilians, over and over again.
Pretty much, yes. As evidenced by the US getting its ass handed to it.
I mean, it was two lots of professional armies going at each other. Seems like exactly what Crane meant.
War is conflict between the armed forces of states. What Israel is doing in Gaza is a criminal act and should not be dignified as war.
The US invasion of Grenada was subjugation, not war. During WW2 Germany did not declare war on Belgium, Netherlands or Czechoslovakia. North Korea and Viet Nam were US interventions in local civil wars. Troop losses were the result of armed conflict.
Based on daily reports, Most IDF losses in Gaza are not caused by enemy arms. Outside of friendly fire most losses are due to explosions during demolition or by a few IEDs.
If we accept that a state of war exists between Israel and Gaza then the Oct 7 raid was a minor act of war with no special significance other than, in a war, Gaza has the right to defend itself.
…bolding mine, from the latest flash update.
The area in which Palestinians are allowed to live is getting increasingly smaller. Gaza was already tiny. Before the “war” it was already one of the densest populations on earth. But this is completely unconscionable.
The areas that people are being squeezed into aren’t “safe-zones.” The area is regularly bombed and people shot at by snipers, tanks and drones. And they aren’t even close to the food distribution areas which are in militarised zones in Rafah and Gaza City.
Palestinians are not allowed to swim. The people are starving, and they aren’t even allowed to fish.
I challenge anyone in this thread to defend this. I’ve seen some pretty convoluted defences of IDF actions before. But I can’t see how anyone can defend this.
Among the thousands that have been killed over the last few months, 851 of them were trying to access food. The efforts of the IDF and the GHF will probably go down in history as one of the most incompetent, pathetic attempts at humanitarian aid. Imagine killing hundreds of people every single week that you are allegedly “trying to help.”
But I won’t be charitable here because I don’t think this is a genuine attempt to help the Palestinian people. They aren’t being incompetent. This is all by design.
The last couple of weeks, as we have seen throughout this “war”, we have seen more deliberate targeted assassinations of surgeons, aid workers and journalists.
These aren’t accidents. They aren’t targeting Hamas. When a tent is hit killing a journalist, his wife and children, they were deliberately targeted.
Much much more at the link. It covers the increasingly desperate food situation, the fuel crisis that has already shut down many facilities, the ability for first aid to respond, and impacted healthcare.
It talks about mundane things, like how 10,000 newborns haven’t been registered, and the long-term implications of this. There are so many things that even if the war ended tomorrow, Gaza won’t ever be able to recover. (if it is allowed to continue to exist, which I doubt) Like how 10 children per day are losing a limb. Or how malnutrition will have lasting effects beyond however long the IDF keep up the siege. Or how doctors and surgeons and journalists and academics have been deliberately targeted and eliminated.
Well, I guess I’d say that…
Huh, you beat me to it. I mean, I’d hoped to make a case that Israel is acting in its own best interests, but I’m not sure I could put it as succinctly as you just did.
In today’s news, another oopsie:
…I’m sorry, but can you be a little bit less cryptic?
We are talking about banning Palestinians in Gaza from swimming in the ocean.
And if they do swim in the ocean, they risk getting murdered.
Are you arguing murdering Palestinians for nothing more than swimming in the ocean is in Israels best interest?
Because if you are, then can you elaborate?
And if you aren’t, can you explain exactly what it is that you mean?
What I mean is what you mean; you wrote that: “There are so many things that even if the war ended tomorrow, Gaza won’t ever be able to recover. (if it is allowed to continue to exist, which I doubt)” — and I took that to mean that Israel is winning the war. I took it to mean that the next time someone thinks about trying something like unto the 10/7 attack, they’ll remember that, oh, right, that’s how Israel hits back after something like unto a 10/7 attack.
If a ban on [checks notes] swimming in the ocean helps that along, then — yeah?
…no I want to focus on the swimming in the ocean part. Because the “if allowed to exist” refers not to “Israel winning the war”, but to the probable ethnic cleansing of Gaza. I’m gonna assume that you don’t support that.
Again: please elaborate. How does a ban on swimming in the ocean help that along? Be specific.
It sounded to me [ETA: and TOWP’s subsequent post seems to confirm it] like TOWP was implying that what’s “in Israel’s own best interests” is the projected impossibility of Gaza’s ever being able to recover, or even continue to exist.
Which… yuck? As a foreign-policy pragmatist, and also as a Jew, I tend to be unsympathetic to arguments that the existence of Israel as a nation-state is just intrinsically a bad idea. I mean, we’ve got the world that we’ve got, and demanding a mulligan on any national enterprise is mostly neither feasible nor fair to the vast majority of people involved in it.
But if somebody’s seriously claiming that Israel’s “own best interests” require the destruction of Gaza and/or the Palestinian people in general… yeesh. If I really believed that that were true, I think it would be a lot harder to argue against the hardcore anti-Zionists.
Uh, no. Genocide and ethnic cleansing of an entire people, especially a people that has just as much intrinsic right to live in its own historic homeland in Israel/Palestine as Israelis do, is not an acceptable or justifiable response even to terrorist attacks.
Nor is it justifiable as a putative means of deterrence against future terrorist attacks. (Oppressive acts against chronically oppressed populations in the name of deterring violent opposition never turn out to be as reliable as the deterrence hawks claim they will be, anyway.)