Gaza-Israel Conflict | October 2023

[RescueRanger]

More Airstrikes:

 

[epebble]

It's all planned, a good general fights when the battlefield suits him.

Good general cares about winning, not adhering to schedule.

 

[RescueRanger]

More Airstrikes:
View attachment 961974

And more:

 

[PK784]

The catastrophic blunders that could sink Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu

Six days after her daughter vanished when terrorists attacked a music festival, Galit Georgy’s desperation erupted into incredulity. “They took so many hostages

www.thetimes.co.uk

The catastrophic blunders that could sink Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu​

Distraught Israelis are accusing the deeply divided government of taking its eye off security​

A week after the attack, Israel’s rulers, far from projecting strength and unity, are conspicuous by their absence.

Aside from a short video briefing on the night of the attack, it took Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, almost three days to address his grieving nation. He still has not spoken to the families of hostages, unlike President Biden. Nor had he visited the sites of the massacres until yesterday. At a photo op with soldiers on Thursday, some of them shouted for him to go away.
Before the assault the country was already unstable and divided, torn by Netanyahu’s proposed overhaul of the Supreme Court, which pro-democracy activists say would destroy the judiciary and which has prompted weekly mass protests since the beginning of the year.

But the attack by Hamas shattered the illusion of security that has for so long been the other pillar of the country’s founding vision: a democracy where Jewish people can be safe.
It showed the limits of the armed forces and the intelligence services. And it exposed the rotten core of the state: where government critics say cronyism and far-right extremism have combined to hollow out the country’s institutions.

At the centre stands one man: Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. Supporters of “Bibi” Netanyahu, who has dominated the country’s politics for almost three decades, used to call him “Mr Security”. Now the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust has taken place on his watch and he is being held responsible. Critics say he lost focus on Israel’s security in his relentless quest to cling to power, diverting resources from the armed forces and towards the interests of the far-right and ultra-Orthodox coalition partners that allowed him to rule.

Now he has established an emergency coalition with Benny Gantz, a former Israel Defence Forces (IDF) chief of staff, who leads a centre-right party. Yair Lapid, of the centrist opposition, has refused to take part, saying he will not sit in a government alongside “extremists” whom he accuses of “unpardonable failure”.

The consensus at nearly all levels of the political establishment is that “there’s no way back for Bibi from this”. That after the worst security calamity in Israel’s history he will have to resign the moment the war is over. On every level, that is, except that of the tiny circle around Netanyahu himself.

“It may be obvious to everyone that the prime minister has to take responsibility for something like this, but it isn’t obvious to Bibi,” said one minister who has served under him. “He is still under the illusion that he can pin the blame for the failures solely on the army and then can lead Israel to a glorious war in Gaza and take all the credit.”

From the first day of the war, there was a clamour in Israel to broaden the cabinet and bring in more experienced and level-headed ministers from the opposition parties to balance out the extremist figures of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition. But it took four days of talks until he agreed on terms for Gantz to join an “emergency war cabinet.” Gantz had not set any conditions.

Members of Netanyahu’s inner circle, including his close family, had tried to prevent the move, arguing in the prime minister’s ear that bringing in Gantz and other opposition figures would deny him sole ownership of “the victory picture”.

Netanyahu returned to power in December in a remarkable comeback after he was ousted in 2021 by an opposition coalition. The new government — his sixth in all — was cobbled together only with the support of politicians viewed as fringe ideologues by many Israelis.

The man in charge of Israeli police is Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right activist who has himself been the subject of dozens of police investigations and indictments over the years. Ben-Gvir has sidelined senior officers, including the respected chief of police in Tel Aviv, forced the national commissioner to take early retirement and promoted yes-men. Ben-Gvir last week spoke out about the need for the public to prepare for rioting by Arab-Israeli citizens, an inflammatory statement at a time when many Arab citizens were among the dead and others are working in the emergency services.

Another far-right leader, Bezalel Smotrich, is in charge of Israel’s finances. Last week, instead of working on how to prop up tottering businesses, his office was working on pushing funding for special-interest religious communities.
One seasoned economist who was in line for a key role at the ministry said: “How can anyone serious go and work in this government where all the decisions are politically motivated and tailored to fit an extremist agenda?”

This environment, say government critics, weakened the state and left it woefully underprepared for attack. Oren Shvil, 52, who used to be a battalion commander in the Israeli special forces, took a leading part in the anti-government protests that one in five Israelis have attended since the beginning of this year. He and others stopped volunteer reserve duty in protest at what they called the government’s democratic backsliding.

After the attack, he urged them all to volunteer nonetheless. He was called up a few hours later.
Today, he and other reservists say they are risking their lives for a country they love even when it is run by people they despise. “It’s a complete failure of the army, and it’s a complete failure of the government for many, many years,” Shvil said. “Every day we discover more and more things that could have been done in order to prevent it.”

He is furious at the man who he believes is accountable. “Netanyahu was warned thousands of times in the last nine months that he is tearing Israeli society. And of course the strength and the power of the society affects the army,” he said. “There is one man in charge for the last 15 years. It’s Netanyahu. He’s the boss . . . He chose the chief of staff, he chose the minister of defence for the last 15 years. Who can you blame?”

One retired high-level commander, who spent decades in the defence forces, said that after the attack everything crashed “from the top down”.

“The top was what was happening with the present government in Israel, that was translated by Iran and its partners to be the main weakness of Israel,” he said. “The government was breaking the unity of the country, and they observed it very well. It’s not only a problem with Bibi Netanyahu or Gantz or Lapid. It’s a problem inside, between people.”

The military, he said, was under enormous pressure due to the political turmoil. Protesting reservists had stopped volunteering for duty. Commanders were subsumed by dealing with politics — as when Orit Strock, a minister who lives in Hebron, far into the occupied West Bank, compared the heads of the Shin Bet, the security forces, who had spoken out against Jewish settler violence, to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the mutinous head of the Wagner mercenary forces who was killed in August.

Fundamentally, the Israeli security establishment was not sufficiently focused on Gaza. The emphasis was on other potential tension spots, particularly on the northern border with Lebanon and on the West Bank where tensions between Palestinians and settlers were growing increasingly deadly. A record number of Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces this year, even before the attack, according to the UN.

The military had as many as 26 battalions deployed in the West Bank in an attempt to maintain order. Senior officers were tight-lipped on the question of whether the level of deployment in the West Bank had taken away units that were needed around Gaza.

In the armed forces, there is still shock at the massive failure of Israeli intelligence to see this coming. “I’m still trying to work out what happened here and we urgently need to rebuild our network,” said one intelligence officer who was stationed in a base on the border and was on leave abroad when the attack happened.

Rushing back to Israel, he was faced with a base that was nearly destroyed by Hamas attackers, dozens of funerals of soldiers and others missing, presumed captured. Most of the array of dozens of cameras and electronic sensors his unit had relied on to monitor the border was gone. In the first stage of the attack, Hamas launched drones and quadcopters carrying explosives that landed on the observation towers and knocked them out. Cameras were targeted using high-powered sniper rifles. Within minutes, one of the most advanced surveillance networks in the world was blind.

Not that there were not earlier warnings. Three days before the attack, Egyptian intelligence passed on a vague warning that Hamas was working on something.

On the Friday night Israeli observation posts saw higher levels of activity and noted the presence of Hamas operatives near the border. The higher-ups were notified, both in the military intelligence branch and in the Shin Bet. The officers decided to hold another assessment in the morning, but did not feel there was any reason to put the sector on high alert. It was not just the weekend. It was also Simchat Torah, the last Jewish festival in the three-week High Holidays period that begins with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. Most of the officers of Southern Command were on holiday up north. The commander of military intelligence is rumoured to have been on holiday in the Red Sea resort of Eilat in the south.

The assessment was never held and many of the mainly female soldiers who had seen the Hamas operatives on their screens the night before were either dead, wounded or captured by the morning.
The blindness, however, had set in before the first shot was fired. In the weeks before the attack, according to a report in the newspaper Haaretz, three of the surveillance balloons used to monitor Gaza had malfunctioned and gone out of use. It is still unclear whether they were sabotaged, but the army did not rush to fix or replace them. The general intelligence assessment was that Hamas was not planning an attack.

Israeli intelligence knew that they were training for one. They had monitored members of Hamas’s “Nukhba” special forces unit training in Gaza using models of Israeli bases and kibbutzim. That had been going on for more than a year. But similar plans to launch an attack had been detected by intelligence sources — and prevented. They were sure that they would detect actual attack plans again.

For the Israelis whose villages were attacked by Hamas, the state’s failure was paid in blood. In Kfar Aza, a kibbutz where more than 100 people were massacred, the killing continued for at least ten hours.

Guy Yaacobi, 27, a former IDF officer from Kfar Aza who was on holiday in Sri Lanka at the time of the attack, said he could not understand what had happened. A combined assault from land, sea and air from Gaza: that was the exact scenario that he had trained for. The first rule of response: get in there and neutralise the threat, to save civilian lives. How had the IDF crumbled?
“I have a lot of questions,” he said. “Everyone here has a lot of questions.”

In a Dead Sea resort, survivors milled around in five-star hotels emptied for the purpose. Children rode the lifts, up and down. A father of four held onto his assault rifle like he was never going to put it down again. An Orthodox woman half-whispered, so her children could not hear, “the terrorists had time. So much time. They didn’t even know what to do. They were surprised”.

People begged us to write about them, to tell their stories. Again and again, the same question: why? Why did the army come so late? What went wrong?

Limor Havdala, 47, told us about how relieved she had felt when the IDF arrived at her house in Kibbutz Kissufim ten hours after the shooting began. They left, telling Havdala, her husband and her three children that they would be back in an hour or two to help them. They did not come.

 

[FuturePAF]

It won't matter much really they did the same in 2008 but the thing is the Gazans will fight and if this turns into a prolonged war it is not good for Israel's economy turism has decline plus dried up and all their citiies being hit will become normal. Ppl leaving Israel in thousands and I don't mean only tourists but all Israelis wiht double citizenship leaving.. If they engage Hamas conventionally it is gonna take years if they want realistically results and living to lose their entire army and keep recruiting it's civilians at the end

All their financial loses could be compensated for with some level of foreign aid, but an atmosphere of instability and insecurity after a large scale massacre could create a third intifada, that could last for years, especially if the people feel hopeless and abandoned and the PLO is discredited for not saving Palestinian lives and being generally ineffective at making peace and being seen as just corrupt. It would go on until a poltical solution will have to be found eventually anyway.

 

[Saho]

Finally about time @Get Ya Wig Split is banned.

Such an annoying troll.

 

[RescueRanger]

They did not come.

Great share, and this is my point... Israeli's hold their military in great esteem, and Bibi was meant to be the strong man of Israel. This is why its a battle for his political survival, he's finished whatever happens in this war.

 

[Falcon29]

Israel Plans Gaza Invasion to Avenge Hamas Atrocities​

The Israeli military is preparing to invade the Gaza Strip in the coming days with tens of thousands of soldiers ordered to capture Gaza City and destroy the enclave’s current leadership, according to three senior Israeli military officers who outlined unclassified details about the plan.

The military has announced that its ultimate goal is to wipe out the top political and military hierarchy of Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls Gaza and led last week’s terrorist attacks in Israel that killed 1,300 people.

The assault is expected to be Israel’s biggest ground operation since it invaded Lebanon in 2006. It would also be the first in which Israel has attempted to capture land and at least briefly hold onto it since its invasion of Gaza in 2008, according to the three senior officers.

The operation risks locking Israel into months of bloody urban combat, both above ground and in a warren of tunnels — a fraught offensive that Israel has long avoided because it involves fighting in a narrow and tightly packed sliver of land populated by more than 2 million people. Israeli officials have warned that Hamas could kill Israeli hostages, use Palestinian noncombatants as human shields, and have strewn the territory with booby traps aimed at slowing the Israeli advance.

It remains uncertain what Israel will do with Gaza City, Hamas’s stronghold and the enclave’s largest urban center, if it captures it, or what exactly Israeli officials mean when they describe the destruction of Hamas’s leadership. Hamas, considered a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union, is a large social movement as well as a militia that is deeply embedded within Gazan society.

It is also unclear whether Hezbollah, the larger, Iran-backed Lebanese militia that is allied with Hamas and possesses a vast array of precision-guided missiles and ground forces, might respond to an invasion of Gaza by opening up a second front with Israel along the Lebanese border.

The military has not yet formally announced that it will invade Gaza, though it has confirmed that reconnaissance teams briefly entered the strip on Friday and that Israeli troops were increasing their “readiness” for a ground war.

Tens of thousands of Hamas gunmen are thought to have entrenched themselves inside hundreds of miles of underground tunnels and bunkers beneath Gaza City and the surrounding parts of northern Gaza. Israeli military leaders expect that Hamas will attempt to impede their progress by blowing up some of those tunnels as Israelis advance above them, and by exploding roadside bombs and booby-trapping buildings.

Hamas also plans to ambush Israeli forces from behind by emerging suddenly from hidden tunnel openings dotted across northern Gaza, according to a Hamas officer who was not authorized to speak to the news media.

To make it easier to operate, the Israeli military’s rules of engagement have been loosened to allow soldiers to make fewer checks before shooting at suspected enemies, the three Israeli officers said, without giving further details.

Because of the widespread damage to Gaza City caused by recent Israeli airstrikes, commandos have been given additional training in recent days to help them fight in ruined urban environments, according to a fourth officer, Col. Golan Vach.

The invasion was initially planned for the weekend, but was delayed by a few days at least in part because of cloudy conditions that would have made it harder for Israeli pilots and drone operators to provide ground forces with air cover, the officers said.

In addition to infantry, the Israeli strike force will include tanks, sappers and commandos, the officers added. The ground troops will be given cover by war planes, helicopter gunships, aerial drones and artillery fired from land and sea.

Their goal will be “the rout of Hamas and the elimination of its leaders after the slaughter they perpetrated,” Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the chief spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, said on Saturday.

“This organization will not rule Gaza military and politically,” Admiral Hagari added.

A second military spokesman said that the army was particularly focused on killing Yahya Sinwar, the top Hamas official whose offices, like those of the Hamas government, are in Gaza City. Israel holds Mr. Sinwar responsible for the atrocities against Israelis last Saturday.

Hamas terrorists and their allies massacred civilians in their homes; shot and killed hundreds of others in the street and at a dance music festival; and kidnapped at least 150 other people.

Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, said the attack was the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust.

“That man is in our sights,” said Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, another military spokesman, referring to Mr. Sinwar.

“He’s a dead man walking, and we will get to that man,” Colonel Hecht added.

Many Palestinians say they fear the invasion will mean a humanitarian crisis and potentially exile.

The Israeli military has said it is seeking to prevent civilian deaths as far as possible. It has warned Palestinians in Gaza City to head to the south of the territory, which is not expected to be the focus of the opening phase of the invasion; hundreds of thousands have heeded that call, but others — encouraged by Hamas — have remained in their homes.

The complexity of the invasion is heightened by the fact that Hamas is thought to be holding many of the Israeli hostages with them in their underground bunkers and tunnels.

Israeli military analysts say they fear that Hamas will use the hostages as human shields, creating a moral and operational dilemma for Israel.

“The only way to get to the hostages is through a ground operation,” said Miri Eisen, a former senior military officer and the director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University in Israel.

But if such an operation goes ahead, Ms. Eisen said, “The terrorists are going to take those booby-trapped babies and Holocaust survivors and explode them to show us as being cruel.”

Both Israel and Hamas are adept at psychological warfare and may be engaging in it with both threats and leaks for advantage, especially as the hostage situation remains unresolved.

Mr. Netanyahu’s government has not yet decided whether to retake southern Gaza in addition to Gaza City, according to one of the senior military officers.

But if southern Gaza stays outside of Israeli control, some Hamas leaders could still remain at large.

Some military and political leaders want Israeli soldiers to undertake 18 months of door-to-door arrest operations, said Nimrod Novik, a former senior Israeli diplomat and security adviser to the Israeli government.

“Others, I think, are far more sober and not talking about demolishing Hamas — but rather depriving Hamas of their ability to threaten us,” Mr. Novik added.


That might involve removing its rocket launchers, tunnels and other military hardware, but essentially allowing it to continue as a social movement, Mr. Novik added.

The question of who would run Gaza after Hamas is also fraught, analysts said.
Israel could reassert direct control over the territory, as it did from 1967 until 2005, but that would entail governing a large, hostile population.

One plan now discussed widely by diplomats, officials and analysts involves allowing the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank, to retake control of Gaza, after it was forced out by Hamas in 2007.

But that would risk making the authority look like Israel’s puppet, said Ibrahim Dalalsha, a Palestinian analyst based in Ramallah, West Bank.

“They’d be coming in on an Israeli tank, in the aftermath of Hamas being eradicated,” Mr. Dalalsha said.

Israeli Invasion Plans Target Gaza City and Hamas Leadership

The goal, according to three senior officers, is to wipe out the top political and military hierarchy of Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls Gaza.

www.nytimes.com

Jew York Times garbage. Jewish Nazi state will be exterminated.

 

[TheSolution]

Will Hamas kill hostages when IDF starts its ground offensive ? I am skeptical.

I was hearing reports that the hostages were placed in different buildings to try and dissuade Israelis from the air raid campaign

 

[RescueRanger]

I feel so sorry for Palestinians, all you can hear in the background of every report from Gaza is the constant buzzing of low flying drones.

 

[Falcon29]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1713346069713576379

 

[epebble]

If you look at it from the perspective that an Attack like the one last weekend has never happened in Israel, it has shocked them to the core, this time its different. And to prove this point:
Look more Airstrike just now:
View attachment 961973

If you see the lack of hesitancy in tactics and decision making by IDF, they won't be caring as much for hostages this time as they will be singularly focused on annihilating Hamas. Everything else is collateral damage.

 

[HAIDER]

Freedom fighters? Freedom fighters don't attack civilians out of revenge and they don't kidnap little kids and old women. These are terrorist tactics. And even if Hamas freed Palestine,they wouldn't let any other party have power,they wouldn't proclaim elections. They want to be the ones in power and make Palestine a hardcore Sunni country.

Yes, a nation been under attack and occupied for more then 50 years and people preaching them peace ...a peace Israelis call a peace of shtiz ..... ok you are more then welcome to preach peace to zionist,,,who are teaching their kids , Muslim can live as a slave and exactly that's how they treating them every border crossing .... ...

 

[RescueRanger]

If you see the lack of hesitancy in tactics and decision making by IDF, they won't be caring as much for hostages this time as they will be singularly focused on annihilating Hamas. Everything else is collateral damage.

Yes 100% this is my assessment, I have been reading a lot of Israeli media, I think some members here could benefit from doing that, gives you a better understanding on the psyche of the other side (if you will).

 

[TheSolution]

Shocking how long its taking IDF to mobilize for a ground war:

Israelis can't stomach a lot of losses, they are used to unchallenged aerial bombardments, they don't want to enter prematurely and get slaughtered. It will cause panic.

They should consider using Pajeets as meat shields of unlimited supply of soldiers, they are already asking to join and they'll be able to minimise personal casualties.