Gaza-Israel Conflict | October 2023

[waz]

View attachment 963300
Ukrainian Anchor "Palestinian children are NATURALLY BLOOD THIRSTY", "ISRAELI CHILDREN ARE NATURALLY KIND"...

Where and when in history have we seen and heard this rhetoric before?

Disgusting bitch. She forgets sympathy for her cause is going to suffer.

 

[RescueRanger]

 

[PaklovesTurkiye]

So True...

https://twitter.com/x/status/1714736357640175690

 

[Falcon29]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1714726468595388782

 

[Cash GK]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1714076883434848581

 

[RescueRanger]

"If we're going to die, we're going to die with dignity in our homes." Al Jazeera’s @YoumnaElSayed17
filmed her family’s journey back to their home in Gaza City, after heeding Israel’s earlier warning for Palestinians to leave northern Gaza.

https://x.com/AJEnglish/status/1714733600606699549

 

[Falcon29]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1714731336911511831

 

[Awi]

So far there have been 450 failed launches by Hmas-Jihad that fell inside Haza , evidence of that would be shown shortly by the IDF.

That i think is about 10% fail rate , dont know how many rockets ehrtr fired exactly , i would check that.

As Usual , more palestinans die from this rockest than Israelies cause they dont have Iron dom to protect them.

Also , as we have have seen in the hospital , those rockets cause even more damage , because they are fully loaded with fuel , since they only have a short way to fly , and that causes even more damge,

450 rockests that Hamas fired at your own people , are you ok with that policy ?


~

Evidence was a cardboard placard with map of Gaza and red dots on it, you dumb a$$
You say 10% and then say don't know the number of total rockets fired, again total dumb a$$, pulling numbers out of your behind
Ahh you care for Palestinians, you f***tard first you bomb innocent civilians and then say things like this, you are an inhuman creature
No, those are not rockets but Israeli bombs you nazi bi**h, and you are full of sh!t, nothing else
For how long will you be protected by US? for how long? if US removed it's shelter from you, you will decimate by yourself the next moment, you dingo.

 

[RescueRanger]

• Children
• Civilians
• Schools
• Hospitals
• Ambulances
• Journalists
• Homes
• Civilian infrastructure
• Humanitarian workers

ARE NOT A TARGET!

 

[Falcon29]

@Foinikas

https://twitter.com/x/status/1714741600201367878

Hezbollah has killed/injured 40+ Zionist soldiers in the past week and continues to strike into Israel every day. Meanwhile, Arab states can't even expel Zionist ambassadors from their country.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1714712200428843057

Everyone will be held accountable. Hezbollah killed 2 Israelis soldiers and Hezbollah and Israel are mostly exchanging fire on the border against empty targets. There needs to be a big military intervention from everyone. Including from Jordanians and Egyptians.

 

[RescueRanger]

 

[SalarHaqq]

Israel's endgame? No sign of post-war plan for Gaza​

By Samia Nakhoul, Matt Spetalnick a,d Alexander Cornwell

October 18, 20238:53 PM GMT+2
Updated an hour ago

A view shows smoke in the Gaza Strip as seen from Israel's border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel October 18, 2023. REUTERS/Amir Cohen

• Summary
• Israel's invasion has no clear exit strategy - sources
• Arabs fear Gaza conflict could trigger regional war
• Bidens cautions Israelis of U.S. mistakes after 9/11

DUBAI/WASHINGTON, Oct 18 (Reuters) - Israel is vowing to wipe out Hamas in a relentless onslaught on the Gaza Strip but has no obvious endgame in sight, with no clear plan for how to govern the ravaged Palestinian enclave even if it triumphs on the battlefield.

Codenamed "Operation Swords of Iron", the military campaign will be unmatched in its ferocity and unlike anything Israel has carried out in Gaza in the past, according to eight regional and Western officials with knowledge of the conflict who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter.

Israel has called up a record 360,000 reservists and has been bombarding the tiny enclave non-stop following Hamas's assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, which killed about 1,400 people, mostly civilians.

The immediate Israeli strategy, said three regional officials familiar with discussions between the U.S. and Middle Eastern leaders, is to destroy Gaza's infrastructure, even at the cost of high civilian casualties, push the enclave's people towards the Egyptian border and go after Hamas by blowing up the labyrinth of underground tunnels the group has built to conduct its operations.

Israeli officials have said that they don't have a clear idea for what a post-war future might look like, though.

Some of U.S. President Joe Biden's aides are concerned that while Israel may craft an effective plan to inflict lasting damage to Hamas, it has yet to formulate an exit strategy, a source in Washington familiar with the matter said.

Trips to Israel by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin this past week had stressed the need to focus on the post-war plan for Gaza, the source added.

Arab officials are also alarmed that Israel hasn't set out a clear plan for the future of the enclave, ruled by Hamas since 2006 and home to 2.3 million people.

"Israel doesn't have an endgame for Gaza. Their strategy is to drop thousands of bombs, destroy everything and go in, but then what? They have no exit strategy for the day after," said one regional security source.

An Israeli invasion has yet to start, but Gaza authorities say 3,500 Palestinians have already been killed by the aerial bombardment, around a third of them children - a larger death toll than in any previous conflict between Hamas and Israel.

Biden, on a visit to Israel on Wednesday, told Israelis that justice needed to be served to Hamas, though he cautioned that after the 9/11 attacks on New York, the U.S. had made mistakes.

The "vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas", he said. "Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people."

Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Biden's visit would have given him a chance to press Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu to think through issues such as the proportional use of force and the longer-term plans for Gaza before any invasion.

'CITY OF TUNNELS'​

Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, have said they will wipe out Hamas in retribution for the attack, the deadliest in Israel's 75-year-old history.

What will follow is less defined.

"We are of course thinking and dealing with this, and this involves assessments and includes the National Security Council, the military and others about the end situation," Israeli National Security Council director Tzachi Hanegbi told reporters on Tuesday. "We don't know what this will be with certainty."

"But what we do know is what there will not be," he said, referring to Israel's stated aim to eradicate Hamas.

This might be easier said than done.

"It's an underground city of tunnels that make the Vietcong tunnels look like child's play," said the first regional source, referring to the Communist guerrilla force that defied U.S. troops in Vietnam. "They're not going to end Hamas with tanks and firepower."

Two regional military experts told Reuters that Hamas' armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, has mobilised for an invasion, setting up anti-tank mines and booby-trapped explosive devices to ambush troops.

Israel's coming offensive is set to be much bigger than past Gaza operations that Israeli officials had previously referred to as "mowing the grass", degrading Hamas's military capabilities but not eliminating it.

Israel has fought three previous conflicts with Hamas, in 2008-9, 2012 and 2014, and launched limited land invasions during two of those campaigns, but unlike today, Israel's leaders never vowed to destroy Hamas once and for all.

In those three confrontations, just under 4,000 Palestinians and fewer than 100 Israelis died.

There is less optimism in Washington, though, that Israel will be able to completely destroy Hamas and U.S. officials see little chance that Israel will want to hold onto any Gaza territory or re-occupy it, the U.S. source said.

A more likely scenario, the person said, would be for Israeli forces to kill or capture as many Hamas members as they can, blow up tunnels and rocket workshops, then after Israeli casualties mount, look for a way to declare victory and exit.

CLOUDS OF WAR​

The fear across the region is that the war will blow up beyond the confines of Gaza, with Lebanon's Hezbollah and its backer Iran opening major new fronts in support of Hamas.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian warned of a possible "preemptive" action against Israel if it carried out its invasion of Gaza. He said last weekend that Iran would not watch from the sidelines if the U.S. failed to restrain Israel.

Arab leaders have told Blinken, who has been criss-crossing the region this past week, that while they condemn Hamas' attack on Israel, they oppose collective punishment against ordinary Palestinians, which they fear will trigger regional unrest.

Popular anger will ratchet up across the region when the body count rises, they said.

Washington has sent an aircraft carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean and is concerned that Hezbollah might join the battle from Israel's northern border. There has been no sign, however, that the U.S. military would then move from a deterrent posture to direct involvement.

The regional sources said Washington was proposing to re-energise the Palestinian Authority (PA), which lost control of Gaza to Hamas in 2007, although there is huge doubt whether the PA or any other authority would be able to govern the coastal enclave should Hamas be driven out.

Miller, a former U.S. Middle East negotiator, expressed deep skepticism about the potential for establishing a post-Hamas government to rule Gaza.

"I could paint you a picture more appropriate to a galaxy far, far away and not on planet Earth on how you could combine the U.N., the Palestinian Authority, the Saudis, the Egyptians, led by the U.S. marshalling the Europeans, to basically convert Gaza from an open-air prison to something much better," he said.

In the meantime, calls for the creation of humanitarian corridors within Gaza and escape routes for Palestinian civilians has drawn a strong reaction from Arab neighbors.

They fear an Israeli invasion will spark a new permanent mass wave of displacement, a replay of the 1948 Israeli war of independence and 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Millions of Palestinians who were forced to flee then have remained stranded as refugees in the countries that hosted them.

East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in the 1967 war and then annexed, and Israeli settlement expansion across occupied territory are at the core of the conflict with Palestinians. Netanyahu has openly embraced the religious and radical far-right, promising to annex more land to be settled by Jews.

Hundreds of Palestinians have died in the West Bank since the start of the year in repeated clashes with Israeli soldiers and settlers, and there is widespread concern that the violence might engulf the territory as nearby Gaza burns.

"Whatever worst-case scenario you have, it will be worse," a second regional source said about the potential for the conflict to spread beyond Gaza.

Additional reporting by Humeyra Pamuk in Washington, Jonathan Saul in Jerusalem and Andrew Mills; Editing by Crispian Balmer and Pravin Char

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israels-endgame-no-sign-post-war-plan-gaza-2023-10-18/

 

[mangochutney]

UK politicians have got it wrong on the Israel-Hamas war. We must hold them to account​

Owen Jones

Tory and Labour reluctance to criticise the Israeli government could make our leaders complicit in war crimes – the public needs to speak out
Wed 18 Oct 2023 09.58 BST


What value a Palestinian civilian life? For Britain’s political establishment, the answer is precious little. Revulsion at the slaughter of Israeli civilians – partygoers, kibbutzniks, children, elderly people – at the hands of Hamas is a moral imperative. Tragic, then, that the righteous consensus over the sanctity of life ends at Israel’s borders. Both the Conservative government and Labour opposition have become supporters of wanton violations of the Geneva conventions, war crimes and ethnic cleansing.

As Rishi Sunak offers Israel “unequivocal” support, it is worth unpacking what that means. In the last nine days, at least 2,750 Palestinians have perished under Israeli bombs, about a quarter of them children, according to the Gaza health ministry. Not a word of grief or regret from our prime minister: their slaughter, presumably, is subsumed into what he describes as Israel’s “every right to defend itself”. No condemnation of the bombing of ambulances and electricity-deprived hospitals, or of the killing of medics, journalists and UN officials.
Sunak’s only words of caution were to call on Israeli forces to “avoid harming civilians”. A useless gesture: the Israeli state he has declared full support for is hardly being subtle about its intentions. “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy,” say the Israel Defence Forces. Sunak will be aware that the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, proclaimed: “We are fighting human animals” as he ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza with “no electricity, no food, no fuel”, adding that Israel intends to “eliminate everything”.

Now is the time for Sunak to familiarise himself with article 33 of the Geneva conventions, on collective punishment, which decrees that “no protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed”. The consequence of a siege de facto endorsed by our government? Gaza is “running dry”, declares the UN agency for Palestine refugees, and in the schools where many have sought shelter “clean water has actually run out”.
When civilian populations were driven from their homes with the threat of violence in the Balkans in the 1990s, it was termed “ethnic cleansing”, and the west went to war over it. This time, the UK stands “unequivocally” with Israel as it orders people in Gaza to flee their homes en masse, described by the Norwegian Refugee Council as “the war crime of forcible transfer”, while Francesca Albanese, the UN special raporteur on the Palestinian territories, warns of mass ethnic cleansing.

After thousands marched in London against these undisputed war crimes, we heard a counterblast familiar in moments such as this: where are your demonstrations against Hamas’s atrocities? Hamas’s killings have been roundly denounced. And Hamas is not armed or backed by the British state and its allies. Alongside invaluable diplomatic cover, the UK has licensed at least £442m worth of arms to Israel since 2015, while our chief ally, the US, provides about $3bn in military assistance each year. As the Conservative MP Crispin Blunt rightly says of Britain’s support for Israel’s invasions of Gaza: “The fact of being complicit makes you equally guilty to the party carrying out the crime.”
And what of our Labour opposition, led by former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer? After all, in his leadership campaign, pledge number four was “no more illegal wars” and to “put human rights at the heart of foreign policy”. Of all the pledges he has now broken, this is the most unforgivable. On national radio, he declared that Israel “has the right” to cut water and energy from a civilian population, while emphasising his respect for international law. Given his vocation, Starmer is either incompetent or dishonest: such a siege is by definition illegal. Starmer condemned the strike on al-Ahli hospital (for which both sides are blaming the other), saying that the resultant deaths “cannot be justified”. He once again cited international laws that he was happy to bend when it came to the siege.
His attorney general, Emily Thornberry, is similarly a lawyer with no ignorance to plead: yet on national television she refused to condemn the illegality of cutting off food and electricity. The shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, refuses to answer whether he supports Israel’s orders for people in Gaza to leave. A Labour briefing sent to MPs answers the question “What is Labour’s position on reports that Israel has been using white phosphorus?” – an illegal act if used against a civilian population – with “We support Israel’s right to defend itself and rescue hostages”, along with a seemingly contradictory confirmation that international law must be respected. They broadcast their complicity, while silencing any dissenters: this weekend, Labour MPs and councillors werecautioned against attending the marchprotesting at this massacre.
No wonder Labour councillors are resigning across the country, citing their party “effectively endorsing a war crime”. Last week, Young Labour BAME officer Lubaba Khalid resigned. Three days later, she reported that her cousin – a young girl – died in an Israeli strike.

As the horror mounts, Labour leaders issue feeble statements about how “Israel’s defence must be in line with international law”, when they know full well that it isn’t, and that they helped offer a green light for this criminality. For years, these preening so-called moderates issued liberal platitudes about a “rules-based order”. Their right to assert a moral high ground has perished for ever. If they will not speak out against a blockade of Gaza, they will be endorsing what the international criminal court’s founding prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, says “could be considered a crime against humanity and a genocide”.


These war crimes may have the blessing of our political establishment, but expect an ever-growing backlash from a public that hasn’t forgotten previous calamities endorsed by our leaders. It was a Labour government, backed unstintingly by the Tories, that brought us the calamitous military adventures after September 11, justified – like Israel’s attacks – as self-defence.
The consequences? Up to 4.7 million deaths, and for what? Our failure to hold politicians to account is what allows these horrors to endlessly repeat. Don’t let it happen again. There isn’t even the pretence that a Palestinian life has equal worth to an Israeli or British civilian. But their lives do matter, and those who condemn children to perish under rubble should be damned for ever.

• This article was amended on 18 October 2023 because an earlier version referred to David Lammy as the foreign secretary, when he holds that position in the shadow cabinet.

UK politicians have got it wrong on the Israel-Hamas war. We must hold them to account | Owen Jones

Tory and Labour reluctance to criticise the Israeli government could make our leaders complicit in war crimes, writes Guardian columnist Owen Jones

www.theguardian.com

 

[Falcon29]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1714741541929984025

 

[RescueRanger]