It’s roughly the span of time since Israel was established?
Here is why Hamas did not accept that Generous deal offered-
Negotiators have consistently struggled to reconcile Hamas’s demand for a lasting ceasefire which would allow the organisation to claim a victory with the apparent determination of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to force Hamas from power, kill or capture its leadership and destroy all its military capabilities.
Okay, so Hamas is happy to let it’s people die and suffer-until they can claim they 'won"?? And, yeah-Netanyahu is an asshole.
But maybe good breaking news??
Report: Hamas Accepts Gaza Cease-fire Deal; Israeli Officials Reject Prospect of War Ending
According to the report, Hamas was guaranteed by the U.S. for a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and that Israeli forces will not continue fighting once the hostages are released ■ An Israeli official told Haaretz that ‘Israel will, under no circumstances, agree to end the war as part of a deal’ and is determined to enter Rafah
If Hamas is now willing and it is asshole Netanyahu standing in the way, I now agree- The USA has to take some steps to put severe pressure on Netanyahu. Stopping the aid maybe- which Biden can’t do unilaterally, but Biden might be able to slow it down until Congress reacts.
Yes. (And thanks for posting the news).
Absolutely.
If people haven’t seen this three-minute classic piece of commentary, I hope they’ll give it a try:
I had not seen that. Really clever.
I agree. I’d also say that the point that campus protesters want to make is discredited by their silence about October 7 and the current hostages. AND by their silence about clear injustices happening in places other than Israel (To name a few: Ukraine. Sudan. Myanmar.)
With the great and sincere sympathy for non-combatant Gazan Palestinians that I do have, I find the utter and complete lack of student interest in situations not involving a Jewish state …troubling.
If the dividing point is supposed to be US military aid–students are concerned when the US is giving such aid but unconcerned when the US is NOT giving aid–then they should still be protesting injustice in most of the world’s hotspots.
US military aid to Somalia is substantial–in 2022 that government was the ninth-highest recipient of US military aid. The Somali government falls somewhere short of sainthood. Why aren’t students protesting that situation?
Yes. Rather haunting, really. (I first saw it years ago and have remained impressed by the simplicity-compounded-by-complexity.)
Maybe because Somalia didn’t run a commercial during the Super Bowl, and hundreds of other places, talking about how wonderful they are. Pro tip: if you don’t want the rest of the world noticing that you are slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent people, don’t take out advertising about it.
Yep, that’s a concise history of the Middle East.
So is there some kind of head count or flow chart documenting which leaders of Hamas have been taken out so far?
Or is it just a bunch of pictures of dead and/or starving kids?
This seems like an awfully rosy portrayal. Here’s another point of view:
That sounds like pretty weak progress to me. And the cost has been astronomical, obviously for Gazan civilians, but also to Israel’s reputation.
These Brigades are nit just individual people. They are alsp infrastructure and equipment. Each of these brigades had their own headquarters with dozens of tunnels weaving under civilian infrastructure, and equipment smuggled in from Iran, beyond the sorts of things that can be improvised in Gaza.
That’s what I have been saying all along. Yes, I agree, a punitive expedition into Gaza is not gonna be beneficial in the long term. Gaza needs to be administrated by someone other than Hamas when all is said and done.
I’m not over here saying “Progress is great, this war is easy peezy, and there’s no problem with civilian casualties”. Of course this war has been an absolute brutal slog, with high civilian casualties.
Any war that requires going into a densely populated urban area that’s been directly controlled by a terrorist group that’s happy to spend civilian lives for PR cred is going to be an absolute brutal slog, with incredibly high civilian casualties.
I am yet to see any plan for effectively combatting Hamas that wouldn’t be a brutal urban warfare slog.
I’m saying that this IDF is incapable of this victory, at least not without hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. And that wouldn’t be a real victory.
This is what Israel should have done:
So what should they do now? Stop this war which is weakening Israel and, in the long term, strengthening Israel’s enemies, and start over with the above.
What is the actual concrete proposal there? Stay out of Gaza and hit Hamas with drone strikes and from the air? That’s not “trying something new”, that’s the 2014 Gaza war redux.
In fact Israel did pause, for a few says, and then began a ground invasion of Gaza - which is something completely different. We withdrew in 2007 and since then our policy has been limited engagements from the air as much as possible. This is the opposite of “reacting exactly as always”.
Anyways, the idea that Israel could make it so that “no armed person can walk the streets of Gaza” through air strikes without causing exactly the sort of collateral damage we are seeing now is a fantasy.
There’s this idea being pandered that Israel is indiscriminately bombing Gaza. That’s bullshit. Israel is using as much precision as it can. The problem is that in a real war “as much precision as possible” still often means a whole building goes down, and Hamas intentionally operates out of the same buildings that civilians use.
If there was a magic wand solution that would allow only Hamas operatives to be targeted, Israel would use it. Unfortunately, such a tool simply does not exist.
I find it, frankly, nigh-delusional that anyone could look at the last several months as anything but a catastrophe for Israel. Hamas wanted a total disaster for Gaza civilians. Why is Israel giving it to them?
Because Hamas has made it completely impossible to target Hamas without causing a total disaster for the civilians of Gaza.
Of course this has been a catastrophe. October 7th was a catastrophe. Dealing with Hamas has been a catstrophe. But I simply do not see a better solution. Unfortunately we have been on a catastrophic path since the decisions that allowed Hamas to come to power and then entranch themselves in Gazan society were made.
But the only alternative proposals for how to deal with that catastrophe that I have seen are to either do nothing or to repeat 2014 and bomb the crap out of Hamas for a while and hope they eventually send back the hostages.
The alternative would have been to recognize that Hamas can’t be defeated by the IDF alone without annihilating Gaza (and even then, the seeds of Hamas would remain outside of Gaza). So international support would have been needed – take the time to mourn, and build support (and I think there was actually a window in which Israel had most of the world’s sympathy), and get the hostages back, and gather the world’s support to destroy the ability of Hamas to be funded and organized. Hamas’s real support isn’t in Gaza, it’s in Qatar, Iran, etc. Going after Hamas in Gaza alone helps Hamas in the long run, since it further entrenches Gaza and Palestinians against Israel, and further weakens world support for Israel’s efforts.
The world doesn’t give a shit. Not about us, not about the Palestinians, and not about any of the people who are actuallly being genocided every day without any of us in the West hearing about it.
Israel exists precisely so that when someone starts massacaring us, we can do something about it; we don’t need to wait for the world to decide that actually, destroying the Nazis is in their own self-interest.
And I forgot to mention a crucial part of a real, positive plan that may have had a chance to work – commit in advance to two-states, with an international commitment for support, following the real defeat of Hamas. Work to get Gazans and Palestinians on Israel’s side.
None of this would be easy, of course – probably very, very hard. But at least it would have been Israel putting real effort to a real plan for the defeat of Hamas and real peace. What’s happening right now is essentially the opposite.
Easy to say this, except Netanyahu and his right wing allies are doing everything they can, and have been for years, to ensure that the world never sees Israel as actually working towards peace. Right now, Israeli leadership is de-facto an ally of Hamas in trying to ensure world opinion forever continues to condemn Israel. Netanyahu and his allies are as much to blame for this situation as Hamas.