Israel-Gaza War (and Iranian Distractions)

[Yazata]

Speaking of funding terrorism and interconnections we can't see, there's video of West Bank Palestinians celebrating what their Gaza brethren were doing. The rifles they were waving around crazily were American M-4 carbines. These are standard US Army weapons, so how did Palestinian militants get them?

Well, the US did supply the Afghan army with tens of thousands of them. So one possible source might be the Afghan Taliban government.

And both the Russians and Hamas are saying that corrupt Ukrainians sold their US supplied arms to the Palestinians for big wads of cash. My opinion is that's possible, but it's more likely that story is Russian shit-stirring.

I think that it's appalling that US civilians are legally forbidden by their federal government from possessing M-4 carbines, but that same government happily supplies them to somebody overseas who passes them on to terrorists.

[stryder]

Speaking of funding terrorism and interconnections we can't see, there's video of West Bank Palestinians celebrating what their Gaza brethren were doing. The rifles they were waving around crazily were American M-4 carbines. These are standard US Army weapons, so how did Palestinian militants get them?

Well, the US did supply the Afghan army with tens of thousands of them. So one possible source might be the Afghan Taliban government.

And both the Russians and Hamas are saying that corrupt Ukrainians sold their US supplied arms to the Palestinians for big wads of cash. My opinion is that's possible, but it's more likely that story is Russian shit-stirring.

I think that it's appalling that US civilians are legally forbidden by their federal government from possessing M-4 carbines, but that same government happily supplies them to somebody overseas who passes them on to terrorists.

Who's to say they were made in the US? Were their serial numbers? (Serials would identify where they were sent to or stored originally, or if they were captured.)
They could be knock-offs (Perhaps a Russian or other "Axis" country creating weapons to further distabilise the world and blame it on the West/US).

To be honest the worlds going to be going through some shit from the increase in global temperatures and Russia pulling its grandstanding (and manipulating the oil market) while riling up all the other "Axis" countries. I really hope our governments start planning for the inevitable and likely quite avoidable war that's going to be thrust on everyone.

[Syne]

Again, Biden left behind so many military weapons and vehicles in the botched Afghanistan pullout. The Taliban would be most likely to sell arms to Hamas.

Russia has an obviously ulterior motive in trying to drive a wedge between Ukraine and Western support.

Democrats would really love a population that couldn't mount a counter-offensive against their tyranny.

[C C]

Why Hamas attacked—and why Israel was taken by surprise
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/middle-ea...n-surprise

EXCERPTS: Why would Hamas choose to carry out this particular kind of attack right now? What was the strategic logic?

[...] I think you have to consider the context at this moment. The Arab world is coming to terms with Israel. Saudi Arabia is talking about normalizing relations with Israel. As part of that potential deal, the United States is pressing Israel to make concessions to the Palestinian Authority—Hamas’s enemy. So this was an opportunity for Hamas and its Iranian backers to disrupt the whole process, which I think in retrospect was deeply threatening to both of them.

I don’t think that Hamas follows dictation from Iran, but I do think they act in coordination, and they had a common interest in disrupting the progress that was underway and that was gaining a lot of support among Arab populations. The idea was to embarrass those Arab leaders who have made peace with Israel, or who might do so, and to prove that Hamas and Iran are the ones who are able to inflict military defeat on Israel.

There are talks going on regarding a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and conversations about U.S. security guarantees for Saudi Arabia. In all likelihood, a primary motivation for Hamas and Iran was a desire to disrupt that deal, because it threatened to isolate them. And this was a very good way to destroy its prospects, at least in the near term.

Once the Palestinian issue returns to front and center, and Arabs around the Middle East are watching American weapons in Israeli hands killing large numbers of Palestinians, that will ignite a very strong reaction. And leaders such as [Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince] Mohammad bin Salman will be very reluctant to stand up to that kind of opposition. Doing so would require him to stand up and tell his people, “This is not the way. My way will get the Palestinians much more than the way of Hamas, which only brings misery.” That kind of courage is, I think, too much to expect of any Arab leader in this kind of crisis...

[...] A number of observers have remarked that today’s events have had an impact on Israelis similar to the effect the 9/11 attacks had on Americans. But Israelis have endured a great deal of violence in recent decades—as, of course, have Palestinians. What sets this apart?

This was a total system failure on Israel’s part. The Israelis are accustomed to being able to know exactly what the Palestinians are doing, in detail, from their sophisticated means of spying. They built a very expensive wall between Gaza and the communities on the Israeli side of the border. They had been confident that Hamas was deterred from launching a major attack

[...] And the Israelis believed that Hamas was in a different mode now: focused on a long-term cease-fire in which each side benefited from a live-and-let-live arrangement. Some 19,000 Palestinian workers were going into Israel every day from Gaza, and that was benefiting the economy and was generating tax revenues.

But it turns out that was all a massive deception...

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The significance of why Hamas chose to attack Israel now
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/national...w/4749150/

EXCERPT: Former U.S. intelligence and military officers said they believed the timing of the Hamas attack was primarily aimed at disrupting negotiations between Israel and Saudi Arabia as Riyadh appeared on the verge of a historic step to normalize relations with Israel.

---

Why did Hamas attack Israel?
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/7...at-to-know

• Hamas spokesperson Khaled Qadomi has told Al Jazeera that the group’s military operation is in response to all the atrocities the Palestinians have faced over the decades.
  
  
• “We want the international community to stop atrocities in Gaza, against Palestinian people, our holy sites like Al-Aqsa. All these things are the reason behind starting this battle,” he said.
  
  
• “This is the day of the greatest battle to end the last occupation on Earth,” Mohammed Deif, the Hamas military commander said, adding that 5,000 rockets were launched.
  
  
• “Everyone who has a gun should take it out. The time has come,” Deif said, according to reports.
  
  
• Hamas called on “the resistance fighters in the West Bank” as well as “our Arab and Islamic nations” to join the battle, in a statement posted on Telegram.
  

[Yazata]

Hamas is firing large numbers of rockets into Israel as I write this. They seem to be targeting Tel Aviv's international airport and the coastal cities south of Tel Aviv. Several airlines have cancelled all flights in and out of Israel. Large numbers of Iron Dome interceptor missiles are being launched, perhaps into the hundreds. While they appear generally effective, Israel will run out of them if they keep firing them at this rate.

Israeli ground forces have retaken much of the land Hamas took the last couple of days. Pockets of Hamas fighters still remain in a number of Israeli towns though, and fighting continues.

Hamas is claiming that they hold upwards of a hundred hostages, many of them Western nationals from the US, Canada and Europe, who were captured at a music concert being held in Israel near Gaza when this started.

Pro-Palestianian demonstrations are being held in many US, European and Canadian cities, by people of migrant ethnicity.

The US is moving American naval vessels into the southeast Mediterranean in a show of force. There's widespread skepticism about this, since nobody believes that Biden would order airstrikes on Gaza. The forces are probably there to deter adventures by Iran/Hezbollah. There's talk about an evacuation operation for US citizens, but I don't see much need for it at this time. There's no way that Hamas can overwhelm Israel. Things might get more desperate if Israel is attacked from all sides, but there's no sign of that yet.

---

I agree with CC that the most likely reason for this attack is to make an Israel/Saudi peace treaty impossible.
Hamas (and/or their Iranian supporters) are probably hoping that a strong punitive Israeli reply against Gaza with great destruction and large scale loss of life will create so much anti-Israel public opinion in the Arab world that any peace agreement becomes impossible.

[Yazata]

It looks like the biggest movement on the map Sunday PM was renewed Hamas attacks in the direction of Sderot.

Here's War_Mapper's latest map:

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[Yazata]

Today, 72 hours after the initial attacks, the Israelis say they have regained control of all areas inside Israel briefly held by Hamas fighters. They are still going building by building in some of these areas to make sure they are clear. And in so doing, they continue to find more dead Israelis. The death toll is now over 1,000. And not just Israelis, at one kibbutz they found a housing unit that had been occupied by farm workers from Thailand, all dead or taken hostage.

Meanwhile, Israel has cut off electricity, food and water to Gaza, which has as many as 2 million inhabitants. Activists are denouncing this as a "war crime", but when in the history of warfare has a combatant nation been required to supply its enemies with food and utilities during the war?

The Israeli air force is launching hundreds of air strikes on Gaza city, hitting anything that appears to have military or Hamas government importance. Artillery is also in operation, though the Israeli army seems to be moving most of its artillery north to the Lebanese border, where Iranian funded, trained and supplied Hezbollah operates as a state within a state in southern Lebanon.

Long columns of US-made M109 self-propelled howitzers and ammunition trucks have been observed heading north in Galilee. The Israeli population in northern Galilee has been advised to shelter in place. There are reports that Hezbollah is mobilizing its fighters in southern Lebanon and moving towards the border. So a second and even bigger front in this war might open up soon. The Israelis are definitely preparing for the possibility.

One of the reasons Hamas can operate so freely in Gaza without the Israelis knowing or being able to stop them is the extensive network of concrete tunnels they have built beneath the city. They are bomb shelter command bunkers and underground supply warehouses. I believe that the factories they use to make rockets are down there too. Apparently the Israelis know where many of the tunnels are, but not precisely what is happening in them.

So today, many of the Israeli air force air strikes appear to have thrown huge geysers of dirt into the air. That suggests to me that they are using penetrator ("bunker buster") warheads (perhaps supplied by the US). An unavoidable side effect of trying to collapse the tunnels is that anything above them is blown up as well. There are reports that several Gaza office buildings, including one that housed the local Arabic service office of Sky news, were destroyed. Reports say that Gaza's Islamic University has been obliterated.

And while these big air assaults are happening, a large Israeli force of tens of thousands of soldiers is gathering outside Gaza and everyone expects them to go in, in the next few days. (Edit It might have already started. The Israeli army says the operation has begun.)

Many foreign countries are evacuating their citizens from Israel. Two Polish air force transports are carrying Poles to Crete. An Italian air force transport has just left returning to Italy. A Mexican air force 737 is enroute to Israel after a refueling stop in Gander. Brazil is sending aircraft. And a USAF C-17 landed at Tel Aviv and may be removing non-essential embassy personnel. (There are many thousands of US citizens in Israel, many of them dual-national Jews.)

[Yazata]

Very early and very incomplete list of International Casualties From The War

USA - 9, more missing
Great Britain - 10+, more missing
France - 1, more missing
Canada - 1, 2 missing
Germany - 1+
Russia - 1
Ukraine - 2
Thailand - 12, 11 missing
Nepal - 10
Cambodia - 1
Brazil - 3 injured
Paraguay - 2
Mexico - 2 hostages
Ireland - 1 injured
Tanzania - 2 injured

[Yazata]

As of now, the Israeli army doesn't appear to have entered Gaza.

The numbers of foreign dead, wounded and captured in the post above have gone up, sometimes dramatically. The US says officially that more than 20 US citizens are hostages, but they aren't sure how many.

The US has supplied Israel with additional Iron Dome interceptor rockets. These missiles are Israeli made, but the US bought a large number of them. Most of those remained forward deployed in Israel in US storage, in case they were needed by US forces elsewhere in the Middle East. So the US is just giving them back to Israel which can be done very quickly. Additional military materiel of unknown type has been arriving in Israel today in US Air Force C-17 transport planes.

Israel continues to strike Gaza from the air. Large parts of the city are ruined and food, water and electricity from Israel are cut off. There's one Palestinian power plant in Gaza but it can't supply the whole place and is said to be running out of fuel. Most of the city is already in the dark.

Domestic political fallout in the US is fascinating. Left-wing pro-Hamas demonstrations are popping up all over, often staged by the same people who staged the BLM riots in 2020. But this time the reaction is different. Instead of praising the demonstrations and announcing their solidarity, many democrats are voicing support for Israel. So the democratic party is splitting down the middle between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli factions. It will be interesting to see what the traditionally left-wing but militantly pro-Israel Jewish community in places like New York City does.

Meanwhile the Republicans are near 100% for Israel. There are some divisions in their ranks though, between hawkish "neocons" on one side, and "America first" populists on the other. They all support Israel, but disagree about how involved the US should become in the war. The former faction, exemplified by Lindsay Graham and perhaps Nikki Haley, would like to see the US send military forces to fight alongside Israel and perhaps even go to war with Iran. The latter say that while we should help Israel, the US should be more concerned with defending its own borders than those of foreign countries. Israel is the Israelis' responsibility, not ours. The former faction condemn that view as "weakness".

Another interesting domestic political effect of the Israel-Gaza war concerns our own borders. Public opinion had already been turning against Biden's open-borders policy, when tens of thousands of migrants turned up in New York City and Chicago. And now suddenly people are wondering who all those young military age men are who are crossing our border. There's been literally millions of them and nobody knows who they are or where they went in the US. It's not hard to imagine that some of them are terrorist sleeper cells and that when activated they can do to the US what we've just seen in Israel. All of which suggests that the border will be a much bigger election issue in 2024 than the democrats anticipated.

[Yazata]

Today there was a huge aircraft-penetration alert over northern Israel. Indications were that hundreds of drones had crossed the border from out of Lebanon. Israelis as far south as Haifa were told to shelter in place.

For a while it looked like Hezbollah had entered the war. But several hours later the Israelis announced that the alert had been issued in error and there were no drones. (So far, at least.)

Today seems to be fake news Wednesday. There were reports that Israeli air force jets were heading north over the Mediterranean west of Lebanon... they turned out to be civilian airliners that had left Israel. There were reports that Hezbollah had officially announced their entrance into the war... they haven't (so far). There were reports that the US embassy in Beirut Lebanon had been hastily evacuated... the embassy reports they are fine and everything is operating normally there.

It looks like alerts in Israel go out to cellphones in both Hebrew and English. Here's what the English version looked like:

(Panic-rooms seem to be a thing in Israel.)

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