In the north of the Hamas-ruled Palestinian enclave, Israel said its forces were still present at Gaza’s biggest hospital, Al Shifa, but gave no further details of their operations since the previous day when they entered the facility culminating a days-long siege.
Reuters was unable to verify the situation at Shifa on Thursday morning, having lost contact with doctors inside it since Wednesday.
Leaflets dropped overnight from aircraft told civilians to leave the towns of Bani Shuhaila, Khuzaa, Abassan and Qarara, on the eastern edge of Khan Younis, the main southern city. The towns, collectively home to more than 100,000 people in peacetime, are now sheltering tens of thousands more who fled other areas.
I mean, yeah, he’s gonna need to take the whole thing, literally the whole place, if he wants to accomplish his stated objective. So it’s essentially a version of that puzzle where you’re unscrambling an image by sliding tiles one by one, with one empty space to work with. Except instead of unscrambling an image, it’s shuffling around civilians to be under the 5 bombs/day locations instead of the 50 bombs/day locations.
Only other even remotely possible options are evacuating them out of Gaza or arresting every single last one of them, to conduct an investigation.
The dude said “destroy HAMAS” though. I don’t think he’s lying about that specific part, so he will take every last square foot of Gazan soil. He has no other alternative that will result in the potential destruction of his declared enemy, since they have the whole place. If he leaves any part of Gaza undestroyed, then that’s where HAMAS will go.
This is cold military calculation. The goal is to accomplish the objective. It is the civilian govt’s job to rein in the military, if they can.
There is another way to see this, where the IDF moves Palestinians into a smaller and smaller area until 1 bomb would kill them all.
Genocide is as genocide does.
That would be a little silly, because it’d look really obvious. If you’re going to do something heinous, you’re usually going to try to hide it. Even the Nazis tried to cover their tracks during WW2.
The important part though, is he says “destroy HAMAS”. Regardless of how true/false it is, it’s the excuse he’s using. So the behaviors will be in-line with it, he picked it because it works for him.
He’s not going to change his mind and suddenly go “y’know, some of those HAMAS guys can live, that’s okay now.” That’s just not realistic, since he has actual supporters, and they would hate that.
So, there’s human shields in the way. Does he actually care? Of course not. He’s not a particularly good guy. But he has to stick to his guns, he’s a conservative, it’s what they do.
But it is obvious at this point. And Netanyahu doesn’t gaf because he’s trying to prove he’s in control of the situation to make up for his failure to stop Oct 7 from happening.
How about we wait until they clear more than a single tiny building in the largest hospital complex in Gaza?
They’re not clearing the hospital. They’re interviewing every patient and medical personal and searching the hospital.
And if all they’ve found so far is 15 guns and a couple of flack jackets, that hardly justifies the level of violence they’ve aimed against an institution that is strictly there to save lives.
That’s about as dumb a take as it gets. If they wanted to maximize civilian deaths their casualty to bomb ratio would be astronomically higher.
They don’t want to maximize civilian deaths. They just want Palestinians out. If that’s by killing them or just making them refugees, they don’t really care. And if doing it over a few weeks, instead of just outright killing them all instantly, means less international criticism, they’ll do it that way.
They need to maintain the cover that they’re following international law (even though everyone with two braincells, including the UN knows they’re not).