Latest Israeli-Palestinian Violence Worsening
The latest violence in the never ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at it’s highest pitch in some time, while the world calls for a cease fire that seems far away.
Israel dramatically escalated its assault on the Gaza Strip early Friday with a combined air and artillery barrage aimed at destroying Hamas’s tunnel system, marking the addition of ground forces for the first time in the five-day battle and tipping the conflict closer to all-out war.
The 40-minute midnight assault involved 160 Israeli warplanes and three brigades of ground forces, including tanks, according to a spokesman for the Israeli military.
Although ground forces were involved, they did not enter Gaza, said Lt. Jonathan Conricus, contradicting a statement the night before that a ground assault on the enclave was underway.
Timeline of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Conricus said the operation targeted a sprawling system of tunnels that Hamas has spent years building underneath Gaza’s streets, raising the possibility of significant civilian casualties.
“Unlike our very elaborate efforts to clear civilian areas before we strike high-rises or large buildings inside Gaza, that wasn’t feasible this time,” he said, adding that the operation had targeted Hamas tunnels and infrastructure with “precision-guided munitions.”
Here’s what to know:
Militants in Gaza fired at least 55 rockets overnight, bringing the total to about 1,800, according to the Israeli military.
After initially saying that its troops were on the ground “in Gaza,” Israel issued a “clarification” saying that was not the case.
The death toll in Gaza climbed to 119, including 31 children, with 830 wounded, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported.
Two women died after falling while running for shelter overnight, bringing the number of people killed in Israel to eight civilians and one soldier.Residents of Gaza City said intense, almost continuous airstrikes began to pound the northern Gaza Strip around midnight.
As Israeli warplanes bombed Gaza, two infantry brigades and an armored one approached but did not cross the border, Conricus said. Tanks fired about 50 rounds into the enclave.
“The aim of that joint activity of air and ground forces was to deliver a severe blow to Hamas’s underground tunnel system, which we refer to as the ‘metro,’ which is essentially a city beneath the city of Gaza,” he said. “It is a strategic asset that Hamas has invested many years of effort and time and significant resources to construct.”
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Despite the sweeping operation, Hamas gave no signs of stopping its rocket attacks, one of which struck the coastal Israeli city of Ashkelon, critically injuring one man and wounding two more, according to the Times of Israel.
“We have much more to give,” a Hamas spokesman known as Abu Obaida said in a televised statement Thursday. “The decision to hit Tel Aviv, Dimona and Jerusalem is easier for us than drinking water. Your technology and assassinations don’t scare us.”
As bombs and rockets rained down, clashes continued in mixed Arab-Jewish towns within Israel.
About 100 people were arrested after clashes Thursday night in cities including Wadi Ara, Umm al Fahm, Beersheba, and Netanya, according to police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld.
In Netanya, police arrested nine Jewish Israelis who were “walking around looking … to beat people up,” he said. In Beersheba, 13 local Arab residents were arrested. In Umm al-Fahm, police arrested 11 people who “threw petrol bombs and attacked police officers,” Rosenfeld said. In Tel Aviv, two men carrying iron bars were detained, according to a police statement.
Police also arrested 43 people overnight in Lod, the scene of some of the worst communal violence and riots, for throwing gasoline bombs and rocks and attacking police officers, according to Rosenfeld.
We need to get a handful of celebrities to sing “Imagine”.Report
Good, but not great, news:
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A war that’s in the interests of both sides’ governments is hard to stop.
See Falklands War, 1982.Report
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So stunned, a dollar bill I left on the bench is missing.Report
The administration has commented:
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The safety of journalists should be a priority, but there are parts of the world where the reporters are stationed and places where they’re embedded.Report
True as far as it goes. But how would we react if the Saudis hit a target like this in Yemen? Or the Assad government in part of Syria under rebel control? The NPR sob stories write themselves, as do the deeply concerned statements from the state department.
I mean, I know we make excuses for ourselves in our own conflicts. That’s regrettable but also predictable given the self-interest. But why do it for others?Report
An explanation:
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This entire thread is interesting but the thing that I find most interesting is that the IDF felt the need to make it. They seem to be noticing that they’re not winning on the public perception front.
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mostly because a lot of people are skeptical that the IDF is giving out factual information.Report
Is there anybody out there that we can trust to confirm or deny what the IDF is saying?
I mean, I’ve seen this go around more than once:
Can we trust Tommy Vietor? “I asked around!” is a pretty slim reed, even if we can trust him to not be intentionally lying, after all.Report
Needs to be balanced with:
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AP would know if Hamas was in the building. So would Al-Jazeera. You will notice neither of them is corroborating that story.Report
To the extent that there are a lot of incentives at play, I find this particular argument less persuasive.
There are reasons that the AP would have to not confirm Hamas being in the building in addition to the “well, they weren’t there” reason.Report
I remembered the particular essay that makes this point perfectly:
The news we kept to ourselves
Here’s an excerpt:
The op-ed goes on to explain some of the really bad things that they kept to themselves.
Now, keep in mind, I’m not necessarily *BLAMING* Eason Jordan for making the calls he did. Hey. News is news, right?
But if Hamas remains in power over there for the foreseeable, I have no reason to believe that there ain’t no Eason Jordaning going on.
(But Whatabout! Yes. You should be skeptical about the embedded news covering that government too.)Report
And there it is:
Excerpt:
Is that happening now?
I have no idea.
I have no reasonable expectation to be told that it is happening if it is happening, though.Report
I recall one of the things the American military did during Vietnam was to use loaded phrases in describing their targets.
Like, a hut where a couple Viet Cong would cook rice and reload bullets would become a “munitions factory” and therefore a legitimate target, even if it was adjacent to a school with children.
In truth, guerilla movements thrive on not having large central factories and command and control centers like conventional armies, so in one sense, yes, a hut where bullets are reloaded is in fact a legitimate target.
What was missing, was any sense of how counterinsurgency can and should work, because insurgency/ counterinsurgency is as much a political battle as a military one.
What was the value of this target, in terms of neutralizing Hamas’s ability to operate, versus building worldwide support for the Israeli cause?
Did destroying the building actually end the operations which were being performed in that “office”?
On balance, was this a net victory for Israel?Report
It was message sending. Like most messages there are many application, but only one interpretation.Report
Indeed – and Hamas was not the target of that message.Report
As noted on another thread, grocery stores put out updates about their covid precautions. It’s hard for me to imagine a country that wouldn’t engage in PR these days, so I’m not inclined to think it’s motivated by backlash.Report
Gamergate Part Umpty Million:
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John Oliver destroys Israel:
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And late last week the Congress was notified that the U.S. had sold Israel $735 million in arms. No doubt that sale is a vestige of the last administration. No doubt it was all properly noticed and commented here at home.
And no doubt it sends a signal to Israel that they can do no wrong in the eyes of the US.Report
From Bernie:
Given that:
It is illegal for U.S. aid to support human rights violations.
(insert partisan premises here)
Therefore: Israel did not violate human rights. (And the US did not do anything illegal.)
Q.
E.
D.Report
Everything Augusto Pinochet did to his countrymen was legal under Argentina’s laws. And it was certainly a violation of their human rights. The fact that the US sold arms under its internal legal processes doesn’t mean Israel didn’t then violate Palestinian human rights with those arms, or our aid.
If you want to be the next George Turner around here you need to work a lot harder.Report
Not my goal.
I’d be more interested in exploring the whataboutism that will start popping up the second we take “It is illegal for U.S. aid to support human rights violations” seriously as a premise, though.
How would George tackle this topic? I don’t know… maybe something about how this didn’t happen under Trump’s strength but Biden’s weakness or something.Report
I always wonder what would happen if Tijuana started routinely firing rockets at San Diego (“stolen” from Mexico in part via a battle which occurred right behind where my house is now located). Would the US respond similarly to Israel? How would world opinion differ?Report
I think the same people would complain.Report
Mmm… might be more parallel/accurate if the rockets were being fired from, say, the Cherokee nation or something like that.Report
Bingo.Report
There’s a protest happening in front of the UN.
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Amnesty International weighs in:
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Based on observing social media posts from both sides of the conflict, the problem seems to be that the partisans of both sides both inhabitant different universes and are deeply concerned about theocratic politics from the other side.
When it comes to Israel’s supporters, the entire righteousness of the Jewish State is self-evident because of the world’s failure to protect the Jews during the Holocaust and the fate of Jews in the MENA countries and Communist Bloc states after the Holocaust. People who are sympathetic towards the Palestinians just see Israel as a venture into colonial imperialism, any problems faced by the Jews being totally irrelevant to whether or not Israel should have been created or continue to exist.
The Israeli Jews and their sympathizers do not want to be a minority group in a majoritarian Arab Muslim Palestine where at least a plurality is going to believe that heavy association between Islam and the state is a good idea and wants to form international links with the Muslim majority states that goes beyond normal diplomatic relationships. They will find this experiencing at best alienating and at worse prosecutorial. The reason why Israel’s supporters don’t quite believe in the secular multicultural Palestine line is because nobody has an explanation on how to prevent Political Islamists from operating politically or prevent Palestinian politics from following the course of politics in other Muslim-majority countries.
Palestinians and their supporters find the idea of a Jewish state alienating and persecutorial for the same reasons and have the same questions. Both sides see their argument as self-evidently correct.Report
The debate over who you should cheer for in a fight between David and Goliath has been settled for millennia.
We’re now stuck fighting over who gets to be David and who gets to be Goliath.
You watch enough episodes of Tom and Jerry, you start to notice that Tom loses a lot.Report
both of those are bad analogies. Israel has taken enough territory through wars and illegal settlements that its now definitely David and Goliath. The Palestinians are more probably thought of as the shepherds working with David who had to give him their rocks in case the first one missed.
And Israel is definitely Jerry.Report
These things happen.
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