IIRC, genocide against the Jewish people is punishable by death under Israeli law.
Let me also clarify that I agree with this. My statement regarding tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths was meant to say a short term shut off wasn’t going to convince Hamas to release the hostages, and that the only way it would reach the point where Hamas sees the toll as too high, is way beyond the point at which it became an obvious war crime (and probably result in Hamas killing the hostages in retaliation anyway) so that such a tactic was doomed from the start.
I’m not sure what level of water supply Gaza has but, as said, death by dehydration isn’t a “weeks” deal.
If Netanyahu has wrongly estimated the water stores of Gaza, it’s going to go real bad real quick and enough so that it’s not worth playing around with. If I was Biden or Macron, I’d be sending a water tanker and have a message ready for Bibi telling him to back off and let supplies be delivered.
You realize that the Hamas terrorists would be the ones taking any supplies? That is how they maintain power and are able to produce the weapons and fortifications used to terrorize the populace of Israel and then retreat to with their victims. This is now a war in which willful myopia is being discarded. It is a war between two incompatible sets of base principles. A siege cutting off supplies in order to weaken the political and military structure of the adversary is part of war.
When the US fights do you think we are shipping in a tanker of water to our adversaries in Fallujah for example? It is the responsibility of Hamas to make a distinction between civilian and military. They are deliberately doing the opposite. That’s on Hamas.
What do you imagine they are going to do with food and water? Make the IDF overweight? Drown them?
Somehow, I don’t trust your understanding of the laws and customs of war on land.
You sure that’s the example you want to use? The battle where
The military used leaflets and broadcasts to encourage civilians to leave the city before the assault.
U.S. military officials estimated that 70–90% of the 300,000 civilians in the city fled before the attack, leaving 30,000 to 90,000 civilians still in the city.
There are some glaringly obvious differences between that and the current situation in Gaza.
Yes. And the supplies won’t nicely dry out equally across the region. There will be certain access points that can be taken and monopolized by the strong.
Hunger is, perhaps, a weapon that you can use to smoke out Hamas. Water, if misjudged, is going to almost purely kill the innocent. For much of that, Hamas will be partially complicit but that isn’t going to make the people of Israel feel any better about what happens.
Israeli deaths in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War/War of Independence were 6,373, about 4,000 military and 2,400 civilians, but your point is well made. I was quite surprised at the number of Israeli military deaths when reports started coming out, initially being 169 IIRC and the current number apparently being 247. Military deaths that high at the hands of what is a paramilitary terrorist group speak to just how massive of an intelligence failure and fuck up this was and could kill any political future for Netanyahu after the crisis has passed and irrevocably tarnish his legacy.
How are they supposed to do that? They can’t charge their phones!
Now this is just fucked up, and does no favors to Israel’s cause:
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s military told some 1 million Palestinians on Friday to evacuate northern Gaza and head to the southern part of the besieged territory, an unprecedented order applying to almost half the population ahead of an expected ground invasion against the ruling Hamas militant group.
The U.N. warned that so many people fleeing en masse — with just a 24-hour deadline — would be calamitous.
Telling the 50% of the population in the north of Gaza they have 24 hours to evacuate to the southern half of one of the most densely populated locations on the planet is both a logistical impossibility and would cause a humanitarian nightmare. It’s as if Israel is determined to lose what should be the easy win, the propaganda war on the international stage.
It seems to me that Netanyahu and the IDF leaders believe that the attack has wiped away all standards of warfare, that the only way to fight terrorists is through genocidal actions.
Inasmuch as war crimes are part of war, absolutely.
I don’t think Israel gives a rat’s ass about anything other than safety of their citizens right now. Any price any action is justified to the vast majority across the political spectrum.
It is understandable. Wrong. Shortsighted. But understandable.
FWIW.
Don’t suppose you have a guest link, or can summarize the article?
Huh. I get it for free just on Apple News as a sample.
Here is a bit of it.
I had the same thought. I fear that in the end Israel will be more isolated than before. Learn from the US- 9/11 drew us into 20 years of mistakes.
I don’t have a subscription…does the author offer Israel any viable alternative to storming Gaza with a ground assault?
It sounds like one of those “Option XYZ is bad” articles (but without offering any alternative, kind of like someone saying that chemotherapy is bad for the body…in a situation where the cancer can only be treated by chemo)
So long as the fascists run Israel, they will only kill off Palestinians as much as possible, and push them into the arms of Hamas. Hamas is the mirror image of Likud, and the creature of Likud. We have to stop normalizing Likud.
Bombing is a form of killing, maiming, and property destruction.
And it’s a bold claim indeed to say that IDF forces don’t engage in other forms of mayhem, that they don’t parade their brutality, or that they never rape anyone.
What we saw from Hamas is what’s called “payback.” Israelis can dish it out all day, but they get back a fraction of what they dish out and suddenly they want us to think they’re the poor innocent victims.
Do not fall for this.
“Right-wing” (fascist) Israeli governments decided to pull Jewish residents from Gaza, to isolate Gaza, to leave Gaza in the hands of Hamas for a generation. They could have re-entered. They chose bombs and bombs and more bombs instead. And these are the kind of Israeli leaders who explicitly hold that Arabs are subhuman. The lives lost on both sides are on their heads as much as on Hamas.
No. Payback is when you hit the people who hit you. Murder is what it’s called when you hit children and other innocent victims. It’s mass murder, terrorism, atrocity.
Nothing Israel’s government could possibly do would ever justify murdering children–just as nothing Hamas could possibly do would ever justify murdering children. That’s a bright fucking line.
Hamas is lucky to have such staunch allies in the West, who will make excuses for the cold blooded butchery of children.