I am telling you they did and will invest in a system that will attack Israel again because it’s expedient.

And one of those systems was, and will be some version of, UNRWA.

Everyone has signalled they will not contribute to governing/occupying Gaza. US is like we give you money and you guys go on the ground. Arab League’s like we need peacekeepers in Gaza… and btw we aren’t doing it. Europe’s just like we aren’t going to take Palestinian refugees.

Everyone involved has been telegraphing their lack of appetite for governing Gaza. Besides, international reactions to the numerous crises since Hamas took over had been sending Israel the same message: just take the punches and keep us out of it. If you still believe international actors will occupy/govern Gaza and sustain such efforts, then you just haven’t been listening and I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.

To put differently, they all recognize something needs to be done and they all want someone else to do it.

And if history is any guide, it means nobody does anything beyond sending more money and we know that much of that money inevitably ends up financing the Hamas military machine.

You could argue until you’re blue in the face that we will do better this time but Israel can justifiably say “fool me once… fool me twice… fool me thrice… we’ve had it.”

The question of Israelis wanting a Gaza op to continue until:

-All 120 are returned or rescued
-Hamas is effectively replaced

Isn't a shocking discovery in a post Oct 7 world. Nobody wants the last 8 months to be for nothing. Nobody wants the 120 to stay there. So in some capacity, it's going to go on. Btw with the tunnels they found in Rafah, wonder how many of the 120 are completely out and in totally different countries now.

Thanks for clarifying. How do you think UNRWA directly contributed to Hamas attacking Israel? (I am not trying to suggest that they did not by asking this.)

The UNRWA funding is not going to be on the same level as the rebuilding of Gaza would require. Countries will need to invest far more heavily in order to accomplish that, and I am not convinced that they will just shrug at the bill if they think Hamas or another group is going to commit another terrorist attack resulting in their investments being destroyed.



No one wants to govern Gaza, I agree. I think it's some time off still, it is early in negotiations and USA has a lot more leverage to use for this situation.

Hamas was conducting terrorist operations out in the open for twenty plus years with rocket launches and training camps and everyone knew they were diverting most of the aid to fund their military machinery.

We even allowed their hateful propaganda to proliferate in UNRWA schools. (Which to me is an even bigger problem long term than weapons storage).

A bigger and even more well funded version of UNRWA will still need to collaborate with Hamas or it just won’t be allowed to operate, unless we get boots on the ground to make Hamas cooperate.

Meanwhile Hamas is attacking crossings so Israel can’t send aid in. This is completely on brand. Hamas has consistently said no to aid unless it can distribute the aid itself and take credit for it.

Yeah it's not the 19th century anymore, modern nations are far less interested in running colonial projects.

Everyone knows Hamas had close to complete control of aid distribution in Gaza. Which means they directly stole a lot of stuff (reselling that to finance their military capacity to strike Israel), and directed the rest to loyalists, building a base of support (which helps when you want to organize military strikes).

If you give to a kid in the street which you know has a criminal father who will take all the money from him, after a while you can be considered responsible for directly financing the criminal father, no matter how much you want to help the kid

Grizy: I was under the impression that most of Hamas's military equipment was from Iran.



As you mention in your last sentence, UNRWA's helping Hamas was inevitable under that framework. I believe in changing the framework so its not inevitable. I think countries that will be investing in Gaza will want to change the framework as well or else this is going to become a worse problem requiring even more money to fix.




Luciom: I would not consider that direct aid, I think it's also questionable how much of that was a "collaboration".

Hamas has no friends and Iran isn’t interested in putting its neck on the line for Hamas. I’d be surprised if even a handful is out of Gaza.

Again, everyone recognizes a change is necessary.

They just all want someone else to do it. And historically that means nobody does anything.

I think this is demonstrably untrue. The Northern front persist with daily attacks and thwarted attacks, specifically because of Iran. Same is true of the drone attacks being launched from proxies in the other fronts. These fronts amplified as soon as Oct 7th happened, which certainly implies a level of coordination.

I'm not saying there are hostages in Iran. But a few in Egypt or Sudan? Wouldn't be shocked.

The only thing I know Iran doesn't want, is open direct war with the West. But anything that advances the proxy fronts is exactly what they want. And Khomeini thanking the campus students directly for joining the resistance shows how interconnected all these events are, at a big picture view. At its heart, it's still a war against western ideas.

I think we're aligned. A small handful outside of Gaza is possible but anything beyond that would require high level blessing that I don't think any government is interested in giving.

What is happening in the "northern front" is more kabuki theatre than anything else. Hezbollah has repeatedly telegraphed its unwillingness to escalate and is just making symbolic gestures to appease its hardliners and Iran.

That Israel has been under such constant attack for decades that rocket/mortar fire on its civilians amounts to symbolic gestures is emblematic of much larger problems but is not a sign Hezbollah is actually a friend of Hamas, at least not beyond a "enemy of my enemy" context.

I agree with the wider point that Iran wants to embroider the West and Israel in conflict broadly as long as it doesn't translate into open war with Iran. Where we probably disagree is Iran's risk appetite. I think they have already been telegraphing they want to backdown but are having trouble leashing their dogs in Yemen and Gaza.

After you know perfectly well what the criminal father does, and victims of the criminal father ask you to stop donating to the kid, how is it different from direct aid and why is it no collaboration with the criminal father?

There is a strong coercion aspect to this. If it still classifies as "collaboration" then fine, but it deserves a big asterisk.

I think what you're calling Kabuki theatre is actually a long protracted war of attrition, and one that Israel cannot afford to be in. They can't afford to keep the North evacuated much longer. They can't afford their agricultural sector to stay decimated. And Hezbollah very much can and will drag this out for the death by 1000 cuts approach. Hezbollah is everything that Hamas are not, and in the worst possible ways. Their weapons and training are much more sophisticated, and when that front becomes THE front, Israel will suffer very high loses. And to be clear it's a front because Hezbollah is violating 1701 (for anyone not following that close). https://peacemaker.un.org/israellebanon-resolution1701

Kids have to be back in school by Fall. The army isn't ready for that front yet (or it would have happened). But if they don't get the North open again this summer, it'll be another lost year for those families. That's not theatre, that's real life. And we can skip the "ok but what about Gaza?" posts. We are all we aware of Gaza itt. Nobody is ignoring Gaza. Adults are discussing another topic here because it came up.

This is a big part of why Israel needed a political solution with international backing. Instead of losing so much support they could have galvanised political support. No more attacks on israel could have been a rallying cry for international support.

It's never too late to try but so much harder now.

You said the hostages are free because of IDF will but don’t you mean because of Hamas’ will?

If Hamas wanted the hostages dead then they would’ve killed them. Hamas kept them alive. Hamas’ will kept them alive. Israel rescued them

Big difference


Also they wouldn’t have gotten taken if IDF stopped its 100 year illegal occupation of Palestine

The details of operation Arnon are just hair raising. They were so close from getting out without it boiling over.

They give the greenlight on Thursday. They put a dummy operation close enough by to have military vehicles in pxoximity without them engaging in Nuseirat. The commandos go in with the white moving truck, and have two different homes to take down. They manage extracting all 4 hostages, and make it to the truck without any spill over at all into the civilian population.

There was one angle of fire they didn't anticipate during the weeks of training, and that's the one that takes down Arnon Zamora. With all the hostages and commando units in the truck, they make a break for it. One of their drones spot a guy with an RPG waiting around the corner to take the truck out (there were least 3 more coming), so they stop the truck. It's at this moment the gear box is shot, and the truck is now disabled.

At this point it's no longer an extraction of 4 hostages, it's an extraction of 4 hostages and the commando units with them before Hamas descends on them to lynch them. We're talking Blackhawk Down situation. The call is made to send the 35th in to get them. Once the 35th is involved (which was always just one of many backup plans), it's the 35th against the whole market's defences. They manage to get military vehicles in, everyone trades vehicles, and they're off to the beach for the helicopter extract.

As an aside since we know now, we can clear up this misinformation (which is sort of classic in this conflict):

1) 18 Israeli soldiers died. No. 1 did.
2) American commandos were involved. No that was all Israeli on the ground. They've done this one before to try and discredit the IDF "victory" in the eyes of the population.
3) The American aid pier was for this. No, nobody used the pier, it was a chopper extract on the beach
4) Aid trucks were used. No they were moving trucks, but frankly I'd have been more or less fine using aid ones since Hamas does this on the daily

I will make no comments on the death toll, except to say the people reporting the death tolls are the same ones putting out public press releases on the above.

I wish that gear box never got hit. Might have been a very different day. And by the sounds of things, the IDF knows full well that a mass trade is still needed. They won't have many other shots at operations like this (and aren't using this victory to propose a shift in tactics).

lol, so the pier doesn't deliver aid but it does deliver IDF commandos who are deliberately blurring the lines between civilians and combatants in exactly the same way Hamas is being accused of.

Keep lying with punch-in-the-face outrageous one-liners, directly answering a post saying" no, the pier wasn't used" with this, what's the point of doing what you do ?

Amazing discovery by palestinian scientists

Israel retains a sliver of permanent control around the pier to safeguard it. It only makes sense to land your choppers in the area of control to get your people out. Definitely not great optics but not much choice either.

Some of these people are clearly coerced into doing these things for Hamas and are not full blown fanatics for Hamas. I don't believe in ever celebrating having to kill people, and definitely not. here. This is an awful situation where both sides are very much in the wrong, and both sides also have reasonable motives for fighting.

Wealthy gazean living off pallywood propaganda and working as spokesmen for Hamas aren't coherced by Hamas, they ARE Hamas lol.

The purported "political arm" purportedly distinct from the "military arm" doesn't exist, everyone in the "political arm" is a combatant, is a material supporter of acts of terrors, an enabler of them, and should be killed because of that.

It seems completely clear that some terrorists involved in running the powerless government of what amounts to a mixed refugee camp and imposed ghetto are worse than the terrorist bigoted apartheid state that isolates that refugee camp/ghetto. This is just obvious because the grandchildren of holocaust survivors can't be aggressors because they are victims.