the Palestinians are not allowed to leave without the Israeli permission.

After the 90 day ceasefire yes but how many civilians could be saved with humanitarian ais during the ceasefire? Yes the reality is that the aid should get through anyways.

The reality is Hamas will never stop killing jews and Palestinians as well

What scares me is the USA is sending troops over to build that floating dock for humanitarian aid and those soldiers will be exposed badly to attacks which will lead the USA more into the conflict which I assume Bibi wants

Israel would turn to Russia for weapons if the US cut them off

You do realize there are massive anti-government protests happening in Israel right now?

Russia is a little bit busy at the moment

not against the war tho

It's not that I disagree with that. It's just very short term. The impact of a real loss of support becomes much more dangerous when we think in decades.

Which is what we should be thinking about given there was no short term serious threat to Israel.

It's a non functional proto state because Israel won't permit the existence of a state. You know this.

Russia does have an alliance of sorts with Syria and Iran, and against ISIS and the west (which may include some 'western-influenced' middle eastern regimes).

The US won't abandon Israel, God willing, notwithstanding all the leftist noise

Nah, the factions therein would be massacring one another if they hadn't Israel as a focus. Hamas killed their political opponents lol of course. You ought to know this.

I'm not sure which part you think is short term. If It's Bibi's reasoning I agree.

I'm saying I believe the long term threats were made and they were either believed not to be credible or the current Israeli government didn't care.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/05/m...ntl/index.html


Two dismissed, Israel isn't allowing outside investigation.

Netanyahu's reasoning is about his future not israels. Monstrous but otherwise sound.

The converstaion stems from a different point so sorry for any confusion. I'm addressing those who justify israel's actions based on ii making israel more secure. That's so dubious (in part because of diminishing usa/etc support) that it can't possibly justify what israel is doing.

just in case you guys forgot what you support

What exactly is the risk to israel in allowing any and all humanitarian aid into rafa? Can they launch rockets or orchestrate an oct 7th from there?

I mean, if you kick the palestinians down the street far enough for safety and other countries are willing to lend the food and medical care, then it sounds like a pretty good deal for you.

The risk is they won't be able to starve them all to death. Which is obviously the intended goal.

The risk is that someone they give food to who would’ve instead died , may kill Israelis in the future. So by not feeding them they eliminate that risk.


Kinda opposite of hearts and minds

They can (and most certainly will) smuggle in weapons to kill Israeli soldiers. I know most people in this thread feel that is an acceptable trade-off; but I hope you can appreciate why the Israeli's think it might not be.

At this point Israel is thinking it needs to defeat Hamas with as little casualties on their side as possible, so they can deal with Hezbollah/Iran to the north/east. You do realize Hezbollah has a giant militia right on the border with Israel (in violation of the last cease fire agreement) firing rockets into Israel to the point Israel has had to abandon whole cities.

Could you imagine if Russia was providing Cuba with rockets to fire at the US, and the US was just forced to accept it and abandon entire cities in Florida? Of course not. It would be completely absurd. This whole situation where Israel has to just accept being surrounded and attacked by foreign funded militias/terrorists is completely absurd. And not something any other 1st world country would put up with for 1 second.

Which I think is something to remember when we ask ourselves why Israel doesn't just accept x,y,z. Ask yourselves "would my country accept x,y,z" and if the answer is no, than you probably have your answer why Israel doesn't either.

I am interested in better understanding the end game to all of this - because holding out for a cried uncle on hostages doesn't look very promising and never did.

While I don't think Israel has currently taken the political hit that others seems to suggest, we are still dealing with about a mil gazans in rafah that are subject to serious illness and death. That certainly would cause a problem for Israel if a large % were to die as a result of that when aid was available.

I understand that Hamas would still have capabilities for another attack barring an entire starvation campaign but that threat was always going to be there.

I would like to know what the plan would be if Israel happened to kill off about a 100k folks and no compromise is reached on a concession. What does Israel do next?

It sounds like you have been mainlining way too much Hamas propaganda that you think this is even a possibility. All indications are there have been relatively few Palestinian casualties since the first few weeks of the war. Coincidentally this is when Hamas started losing the ability to fire rockets, a lot of which were landing in densely populated parts of Gaza.

Minus that single tragedy where a bunch of soldiers were killed by a booby trapped building that exploded too early, the last few months of the war have gone very well for Israel. Hamas organization, morale and capabilities are extremely low, and Israel has been able to flush them out of the tunnels where they mass surrender with little actual fighting. And the more Israel waits, the more Hamas can reorganize and taking them out of Rafah becomes exponentially more difficult, with a lot more casualties for EVERYONE.

endgame (for Gaza and the west bank) is the end of Hamas and any other islamist terrorist organization among Palestinians.

doesn't matter how many Palestinians will die to achieve that.

could be 100, 500, 2m.

anyone who has the slightest intention to use violence against Israel is an enemy combatant and to be treated as such in a war of annihilation against an existential threat.

you want to hurt Israel? you help people who want to hurt Israel? you die and we move on to the next one.

just stop even thinking hurting Israel is an option and you live.

Even if I completely remove all empathy for the situation in Gaza, I would still disagree that starving everyone in Rafah puts an end to Islamic terrorism or even Hamas. Do we go after Iran and suffocate all the Iranians until they promise not to think bad thoughts about Israel?

What is Israel's "mission accomplished" that actually has a chance of happening?

At this point mission accomplished is Israel surviving until the Ayatollahs are removed and Iran secularizes. I think we underestimate how much Iran supporting local Islamist militias is destabilizing the region; and how quickly things could normalize and improve once this stops happening.

And the Palestinian people themselves (as opposed to the Palestinian cause) would probably benefit the most from all the local Islamist militias (most notably Hezbollah and Hamas) being cut off.

Whether the current path ensures Israel's survival versus a more pacifist strategy I dont really know. And I dont think anyone else does either.

Most of the people calling for Israel to unilaterally ceasefire dont actually care if Israel thrives or not, and would probably prefer it didn't. So Israel going back to its borders and allowing itself to be attacked on all sides by Islamists is acceptable to them.

regime change in Iran, complete annihilation of Hezbollah, Hamas, and other smaller groups.

it would help to treat any western allies of those groups as terrorist as well, making basically completely illegal to help them in any direct or indirect way.

so Israel would need a state of war against antisemitism to be in place in the west, with domestic western allies of antisemites being treated as full scale traitors of the west and dealt with. a couple of decades of that and it's mission accomplished

I think we underestimate how much the Iranian revolution and is sequelae really ****ed up the Middle East. And the reality is it could have actually been a lot worse.

For all his many faults, the world probably deserves to give Saddam Hussein some posthumous praise for attacking Iran (including liberal use of chemical warfare) and stopping the revolution from spreading and destabilizing the world any more than it did.