I’m popping into the thread to wish all the best to @Alessan and all those concerned with the conflict.
I haven’t been on until now because my paternal aunt and her family relocated to Israel when I was a baby. My three cousins all have dual citizenship, and 2 live in the states, while one and his family live in Israel. I just got updated, and all are currently sheltering in place, except for two of my second cousins, one who is active duty (and is the godson of my father) and one who was just called up from the reserves.
So, since I don’t think I can sufficiently police myself in a breaking news thread on the subject, I’m going to follow silently, and hope that it ends quickly, and that … nope, there I go again (had to delete half a paragraph). Not going to say more, just hope that it ends quickly, and that any here who have family in the area get nothing but good news.
I have no relatives, but many friends, former colleagues and students, and acquaintances. I’ve been able to check on some, but not others. I also don’t want to get in the way of their more urgent communications out of my anxiety for their wellbeing.
I’m surprised as to why Hamas chose to massacre several hundred Israelis rather than take them hostage. One would think a live Israeli is worth a dozen dead ones.
My (uninformed) suspicion is that Hamas was envisioning this attack somewhat like John Brown’s abolitionists’ aspirations for the Harper’s Ferry raid: i.e., as the flashpoint of a nationwide insurrection on behalf of subjugated people.
And (predictably), as at Harper’s Ferry, how it’s actually playing out instead is a chaotic mix of hostage-taking and murder, immediately followed up by heavy retaliation and rapid total defeat of the insurrection attempt.
Actually, she did not issue an unqualified message. She issued a very limited and qualified message.
She doesnt say a word about Israel’s right to exist and defend itself, and she doesnt say a word about Hamas itself.
She only condemns this specific attack by Hamas. Everything else Hamas does is apparently okay. She likes the terrorists, but thinks they just made a little mistake this time in their tactics.
Compare her statement with Biden’s.Biden understands the difference between good and evil.
(Note to mods: I put this post here in a breaking news thread because both Omar and biden hsve issued breaking-news-style statements in the past few hours).
Posting what they say is breaking news.
Arguing about how American politicians reacted to other acts in the past is not breaking news. It’s political, and doesn’t belong in this thread.
Please drop the topic, and please no one reply to @chappachula 's post in this thread. Take it to another thread if your want to discuss anything along those lines.
What happened yesterday wasn’t a military attack. It wasn’t a terrorist attack, either. It was armed men entering Jewish towns and slaughtering their residents at will. What happened yesterday was a pogrom.
This was exactly the thing that the Jewish State was designed to prevent. If Israel allows this kind of thing to occur, it cannot justify its continued existence as a sovereign nation. This must never, NEVER, happen again. Nothing is more important than that.
There’s still a huge amount of fog of war, but from what I understand, the division protecting the Gaza region was severely understaffed, with most of its fighting formations redeployed to the West Bank for political reasons. Furthermore, one of the first places Hamas attacked was Division HQ, taking it out and possibly killing or taking its command staff captive, leading to a complete breakdown of command and control in the region, with not enough troops, no clear line of command and nobody knowing what was happening. It other words, a total clusterfuck, both operationally and politically. There will be a reckoning after all this is over.
How many of the 5,000 rockets did Iron Dome stop? If there are more rockets than interceptors, does the system just prioritize by which ones it thinks are more important?
It does. The system can calculate where the rocket will fall, and prioritizes its interceptions accordingly. Rockets that will fall in open terrain, for instance, it doesn’t try to intercept.
Well, nobody popped a nuke overnight. Thank God for small favors.
I am gobsmacked by the poor coverage of all this. The news services were also caught by surprise. Yesterday CBS was airing their restaurant segment. Some other network had coverage from their guy in London. Even the Reddit sub is moved to private as it is overwhelmed.
In the Information Age information is sometimes hard to come by.
I’m going to guess “anger” is a factor. I’m not going to wade into whether or not that anger is justified, I’m just noting it exists. It’s not just that people have been shot, which is bad enough, but apparently there are instances of people being kicked/beaten to death and claims of torture which is a lot more personal (even if the victim isn’t personally known to the perpetrator) and visceral.
I don’t think Hamas is expecting the average Israeli to rise up on behalf of the oppressed Palestinians and I disagree with your comparison. There are some superficial parallels but the intended goals are very different.
Hamas’ 2017 charter explicitly calls for the elimination of the state of Israel. If anyone is interested in that update of their original 1988 charter then click here for an English version.
Honestly, I think it was too organized and well supplied for a pogrom, but let’s not quibble too much about definitions. I’d characterize it as a military operation although admittedly the line is fuzzy at times. I do think this was a sort of “9/11” event for Israel.
I have more I’d like to say but it’s not appropriate for this thread. I’ll go check and see if there’s a more appropriate one already started.
So were the Israelis and apparently the US government with all its spy services (maybe they were all focused on Ukraine/Russia?). The Hamas attacks weren’t just a few hot-heads, the organized a large operation that had to take some time and they managed a lot of people keeping it secret while they were doing it.
^ This.
CNN has reported Hezbollah (for those unclear - Hezbollah and Hamas are two different organizations, but despite some similarities they are in opposition. I gather they both want to be in charge.) has lobbed several rockets into Israel from Lebanon into the Shebaa Farm region. Israel and Lebanon don’t get along, but they’ve had a truce since 2006 that has largely held despite occasionally trading missiles across the border. At this point that’s all Hezbollah have done - I hope it’s a matter of them just taking advantage of the situation and that does not escalate. Israel is returning artillery fire so… well, that’s the sort of day it’s been.
CNN also reports that China is calling for an end to hostilities and the implementation of a two-state solution.
No, I didn’t mean to suggest that they were. (Nor, for that matter, was John Brown expecting the average (white) American to suddenly take up arms against slavery, AFAICT; what he was trying to generate at Harper’s Ferry was the start of a large-scale rebellion of enslaved persons.)
What Hamas seem to have been expecting or at least exhorting, according to the statement of Hamas military commander Muhammad Deif, was for Palestinians en masse in occupied territories to “expel the occupiers”. I have no idea if they thought at the time that that was a realistic expectation, but I doubt that any reasonable observer would have.
It looked like a hybrid attack. There were organized military elements, but there was also the breaching of the Israel-Gaza border fence, which allowed unarmed mobs to pass through. So there looked to be a range of actions from military-style attacks against military targets, to armed paramilitaries roaming round killing civilians, and inter-communal mob violence by crowds of people armed only with fists and feet.
What Hamas hoped (hopes) for, according to this Al Jazeera article is:
"We want the international community to stop atrocities in Gaza, against the Palestinian people, our holy sites like al Aqsa… "
They had garnered statements of support from Iran and Qatar, as of that article’s publication. I think Saudi Arabia has since taken their side (the article has been updated, but originally quoted a Saudi official calling for both sides to cease hostilities, without explicitly blaming either side.) That must be a more lukewarm response than they hoped for.