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Israel-Hamas War Megathread, November 16 to November 26
I was going to post these every week but I forgot, so let's just say they're occasional. Here is the previous topic.
I was going to post these every week but I forgot, so let's just say they're occasional. Here is the previous topic.
This gets into the question of who is in Israeli prisons and how they got there. What do we know about the Israeli justice system? How is it that at least 120 Palestinian women and children are in prison? I don't know and it would be interesting to read about. I assume there is some kind of trial. I would guess that maybe Hamas is not entirely men and that maybe they don't always wait until they're 18 to join the cause? (Technically a 17-year-old militant would be a child soldier.)
I'd also guess the average reporter doesn't want to get into evaluating a justice system as an aside while writing a story about a current event. It's understood that the Israelis have a justice system, however bad it is. So they go with "prisoner." Understanding who these prisoners are would be a story in itself, and showing that that the Israeli justice system is corrupt and they are actually innocent hostages would be important news.
But we know that the people taken October 7 were not tried and not considered to be convicted of any crime. Everyone agrees that's not what Hamas did. Hence, hostages.
So, thanks for sharing the links, it's an interesting observation about choice of language, but it seems like you're doing a very superficial analysis for evidence that the media is biased. Thinking about it a little more, they're not equivalent and using the same language would probably get it wrong. (And it seems like you could have thought it through a little more?)
Maybe a deeper understanding would show that they're more similar than they appear. Do Israelis put people in prison as a bargaining chip? But someone would have to actually do the research.
Hamas tunnel found at Gaza's Al Shifa hospital, says Israel; UN aid halted (Reuters)
Has there been any convincing evidence of the hospital’s use as a hamas “nerve center?” Or any recent significant use at all?
Just from casual news reading, apparently there are tunnels that are for something. Certainly, most hospitals don't have hidden tunnels under booby-trapped vehicles. Supposedly Israel found weapons caches. How much do you suppose they've faked?
The Israelis do lots of espionage and claim more evidence, but I haven't seen a good summary of what they shared.
What does "command center" mean anyway? I imagine someone who monitored radio communication might notice a lot of traffic coming from a certain place. Possibly multiple countries might determine something from satellite photos.
The US government must be monitoring the situation pretty closely. As far as I know they've shared very little, but some indirect evidence is that the US has backed Israel's claim.
You might not entirely trust the US claim. After all, they once notoriously made claims about Saddam Hussein that turned out to be bogus. How much motivation is there for US political leadership to distort intelligence results to back Israel? I doubt it's as bad as the Bush administration but I don't know.
I also don't know if there is open source evidence-gathering like in Ukraine, and I wouldn't know which OSINT organizations to trust.
I think the big question is, how many tunnels are there in Gaza to begin with? You say most hospitals probably don't have tunnels under them, but in this particular circumstance I disagree. I wouldn't be surprised if there are tunnels crisscrossing almost everywhere in Gaza at this point due to the nature of this conflict and how long it's been going on for. ISIS did the same in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Viet Cong did the same in Vietnam. Building booby trapped tunnel systems everywhere, especially between vital public buildings and other innocuous ones nearby, is guerilla warfare 101.
But does that make every building with a tunnel leading to it a valid military target, regardless of how many innocent civilians there are at those locations? I should hope not. And until I see more than just some footage from a mostly empty tunnel under the hospital, I am going to have to continue to doubt the IDF when they call it a Hamas "nerve center".
p.s. As for which OSINT sources to trust, the only one I fully trust to not spread misinformation, or jump the gun on drawing conclusions is Bellingcat. https://www.bellingcat.com/tag/palestine/
But because they actually care about presenting facts, and their reputation, they tend to take their time and publish somewhat infrequently. So for minute-by-minute, day-by-day analysis you will have to look elsewhere, and deal with all the problems that style of faster-paced reporting/speculation inevitably leads to.
From what the IDF says,, there are tunnels under most of Gaza, with particular concentrations in Gaza City and Khan Yunis. The systems are believed to be unconnected due to the marshlands south of Gaza City (which are unsuited for tunneling).
Yeah, I figured as much, but thanks for confirming it. If those maps on the BBC are accurate and show the extent of the tunnels (which isn't likely), then basically 1/3 of the buildings in Gaza could potentially be labeled a "nerve center", and therefor a valid target for a similar strike, if that's the only criteria the IDF are going by... which I hope they're not. But AFAIK that's the only concrete evidence they've been able to present so far as the justification for their strike on the hospital, which isn't a good look.
Ohhh, that's interesting. I had wondered how Israel was getting away with just blockading on the surface. I had wondered what kind of high tech they would be using to look for tunnels. There (presumably) not being any makes it easier. I'd guess the IDF knows better than we do whether such a connection exists, relying not just on geological info but also human intelligence sources.
When a lot of people think of a “command center”, they think of big flatscreens on walls, lots of people with headsets talking, and big servers. But for an organization like Hamas, it may be a couple of laptops with Ethernet cables running through the tunnels, or even stacks of paper orders (given how good their OPSEC was prior to October 7th). Those are both really easy to take out prior to retreating, and without those there wouldn’t be much evidence left behind.
No. But clearing and mapping the tunnels takes a ton of time, so it's too early to tell.
Depends on what you mean by recent. There is security footage showing that some of the hostages were taken to the hospital by Hamas fighters and iirc one of the cars used during the attack and kidnapping was parked in front of the hospital. Afaik nothing yet about its use since then.
I don't think it's too unreasonable to assume that IDF intelligence knows more than they tell. Right now they really can't afford to burn any intelligence assets, so whatever info they have, they'll use in ways that don't compromise the source. Which usually means you can't say more than "trust me bro" to the media.
Someone elsewhere here pointed out that maybe the idea is not to provide real evidence or justify their actions, but rather to demonstrate they can act with impunity.
Maybe nobody gets the benefit of the doubt? You don't have to trust either side.
I do think it's fair to say that the plan all along was to occupy the hospitals and shut them down. There's no indication that there was ever a plan to keep them open.
IDF arrests Gaza’s Shifa Hospital head, sends him for questioning as terror suspect (The Times of Israel)
The rest of the article reiterates Israeli claims, and refers to another article:
UK doctor who worked at Shifa confirms Gaza hospital used for ‘non-medical purposes’
...
...
I'm not familiar with this newspaper, but presumably someone could track down the France24 interview?
This was supposed to be a nerve center of Hamas operations, so you would expect to see more than a few weapons (in a war zone) and a tunnel. Could Hamas fighters have been using said tunnel? Absolutely. Does the current evidence at all justify the collateral damage sustained by the Gazan population as a result of Israel’s taking of this hospital? In my opinion, absolutely not. At this point (if not already), people should not uncritically accept the Israeli government’s statements in this regard.
I hope the rumored hostage deal doesn’t fall apart because a ceasefire is desperately needed now.
I have questions about how this operation worked.
I imagine the police showing up at a hospital: "Nothing to see here, officers, but you can take a look around if you like."
It's a different situation since these are occupying military troops, not police. Still. What else could a civilian staff do? If there was no resistance, it should have been over within hours, without any violence. (Only the threat of violence.)
It would be different if there were an active shooter on the premises. Presumably, there was resistance of some sort, but I have little idea what it was. Who was there? What did they try to do? Why did it take so long for Israeli troops to occupy this hospital once they decided to do it?
(I doubt this story has been told and don't expect any answers. But maybe I missed something?)
Like you've pointed out there are not clear details as to what happened, but I don't think it's difficult to understand why it took so long. If you're evacuating an entire hospital with injured and dying patients it's going to take a very long time, even under ideal conditions.
This isn't a smoothly running hospital, this was one of the few places taking folks in during the heavy shelling. They are trying to handle the waves of injured as best they can, but internally it has to be a mess. Add in that it was already a heavily underfunded facility without all the modern requirements we have domestically (patient maximums, egress requirements, etc).
Now add in that the IDF troops aren't just aggressive/hostile, but entering the hospital under the premises that it is "the nerve center of Hamas". They are engaging expecting combat. Even if folks inside aren't putting up a resistance, they will likely be treated as if they are. Expand that over an entire, over-crowded hospital, it's no wonder it took so long.
Edit: The quote further down the page provide more context as well:
The thing I want to know is, now that Israel has taken control of the hospital, will it start operating again? Will they restore power and ask the doctors to come back?
(I don't really expect anyone to have an answer for this.)
A small snippet of detail here. (Rest of the article is unrelated to the hospital):
IDF steps up Gaza airstrikes; 30 premature babies evacuated from Shifa Hospital (Times of Israel)
I think your summary of those articles is overconfident. I don’t see an answer, I see more confusion, conflicting stories. We know people are lying. Which ones? What really happened?
Clearly this is some kind of fucked-up situation, though.
There’s a reason that “fog of war” exists as a term. Warring parties like to control the flow of information in the battlespace, both through suppressing negative information and promoting positive. In addition, communications gets disrupted through military operations, which further limits the flow of information to the rest of the world. But we also must keep in mind that governments have different factions with competing interests at heart. The spokesman and the IDF’s public affairs folks have certain interests at heart, the forces on the ground have their own, the Netanyahu government their own, and even when interests are similar, the nature of bureaucracy means orders aren’t always clear. Ask me how I know.
Maybe trusting medical staff would be reasonable if it were an ordinary hospital? But little about this situation is ordinary. You're taking the word of strangers quoted in a newspaper article in an unusual situation on the other side of the world. We know little about them.
I don't trust the IDF. But I don't trust the other people quoted in the article either, because they're strangers.
People left the hospital, I assume, but it's easy to imagine alternative scenarios.
Here's one: there are a lot of frightened people around. Perhaps some of them aren't patients, but people who took refuge there? Or they were treated, but have nowhere else to go, so they stayed. And now there are scary people with guns, from the opposing side. If they got the chance to go, maybe they would go?
A more paranoid scenario: consider who Hamas would put in charge of a hospital. We are given simple identifiers like "a doctor" and we imagine a doctor, perhaps like someone we know. But people can serve multiple roles. People are complicated. Now that the Israelis are in charge, perhaps they would try to sabotage their efforts? They might consider it the patriotic thing to do.
I don't really expect anyone to buy either of those scenarios, for which I've given zero evidence. I'd be surprised if I guessed right. An imagination is good for coming up with alternative scenarios, but not for ruling them out.
Proof by lack of imagination doesn't work. We also can't imagine our way into creating new facts. We'll need to wait for further reports.
This is the exact same logic that Israel has repeatedly used to justify their "there are no non-combatants" policy of indiscriminately targeting civilians. I know you say yourself that you don't really buy it and have given zero evidence deliberately, but it's extremely dangerous to use the same rhetoric that is being used to justify the murder of innocents even as an example imo.
Which is why I didn’t make that argument. Of course there are non-combatants. Most Palestinians aren’t Hamas. But sometimes non-combatants can find ways to participate in a war. Why pretend otherwise?
And it’s not dangerous because we are only observers, reading and discussing terrible things happening thousands of miles away. We read about people dying, but that doesn’t mean our conversations have life-and-death consequences. They have minimal consequences because we have no power over what happens in Gaza. All we can do is read sketchy news reports.
So it doesn’t matter, really, but being skeptical about what you read on the Internet is generally a good idea. Being able to imagine alternative scenarios, even if they’re rather dark, is good practice for not getting stuck on one interpretation.
When reading a story you should be able to imagine yourself in the role of any of the participants. Yes, from a Palestinian point of view, but also from an Israeli soldier’s point of view.
Why should I be forced to "imagine myself in the role" of a participant in a conflict whom I fundamentally disagree with and believe is perpetrating an ethnic cleansing? I am not obligated to give the same weight to both sides of any conflict, much less this one.
I’m not forcing anyone - how would I do that? I’m recommending it because I think it’s a good idea for better understanding what’s going on in the world. People usually don’t consider themselves to be the villains.
For example, when reading about Ukraine, I do take the side of the Ukrainians, but I don’t think assuming the Russians are idiots is a good idea. If I were there rather than merely an observer, assuming the Russians are idiots would be a good way to get yourself killed. To understand what might happen you need to think about the opponent with some respect.
For us, we’re just the audience and the stakes are really low, but I still think partisan thinking has its downsides and I try to avoid it.
This is not the conclusion reached by the BBC in the video you posted. Some guns didn't "precisely match" between two separately-shot videos (Israel said more weapons were found in between), and there is a cut in the video. Another video was posted, removed, and re-posted without a segment about a certain Israeli soldier.
IDF publishes footage of what it says is Hamas tunnel at al-Shifa hospital (The Guardian)
…
I've not been following this very much, but is this the same hospital that was bombed shortly after the original attack? The hospital where it wasn't clear who bombed it? Is there a consensus yet on whose missiles were involved? I feel very out of this whole thing...
It seems like a lot of words to say that nobody knows what the Israeli government is planning, or if they even have any plans? Politicians say alarming things, but the connection between that and policy is murky.
Israel formed a unity government on October 12. I haven't read anything about internal negotiations by coalition members.
Man, it feels like you are popping in all over the thread downplaying the severity of the situation and the response from elected members of the Israeli government - particularly the majority government.
What individual US senators had to say during the invasion of Iraq was absolutely relevant to understanding the political climate domestically when we invaded, it is no less relevant here. These folks are representatives of their constituents and speaking as such.
The policies Israel has deployed throughout the Israeli state and Palestinian ones have consistently coincided with extremist views and I see no deviation from the statements here.
Since I don’t normally follow Israeli politics, I’m not all that familiar with the internal politics of the Israeli government, though I understand it’s very complicated due to there being proportional representation, many small parties (that I’m not familiar with), and a lot of coalition-building. I don’t know the names of most of the leaders, what formal roles they play, or what that informally means in practice. I suspect making analogies to US politics doesn’t go very far?
So, when there are reports about Israeli politicians saying alarming things, I simply don’t have the context to know if that changes anything. I also suspect that a lot of reporters who write about Israel don’t really know that stuff either. Maybe they don’t know the significance of whatever they quoted?
So I’m skeptical. Maybe there’s more in-depth reporting in Hebrew, but I don’t know Hebrew and I wouldn’t know which reporters to trust anyway.
I do think this is a very severe situation, though.
Since you understand it, is there some reading you can recommend about how it works?
That's fair. I bristled because it has felt like your commentary is coming in with a fairly "we can't trust anyone so why do anything or make any real decisions one way or another". And often when topic is focused on critique of Israel rather than Hamas. I agree we should not making decisions or accusations bruskly, but it often feels obstructionist to end every discussion with "well we just don't know". In the grand scheme of things, particularly with this conflict, we know quite a lot. The historic actions of the actors involved and the impacts to both communities.
You aren't wrong, learning any new political institution/system is a bit of a feat and so this is likely going to be an unsatisfying answer for you. Learn about the current coalition government. Read up on Likud and the Orthodox parties they are currently working with. Learn about the demands and priorities of each party. Some are actively Zionist and support settler movements, some are more secular. I think even a cursory spin around wikipedia should give you enough history on the parties, both their policy goals and racial/religious perspectives, to get a pretty good handle on what is happening. Unlike a lot of the world, many folks in Israel politics say the quiet part out loud - not unlike US politics. I'm not even talking about fringy members of the Knesset, I'm talking about the leaders of the coalition parties.
I've been really lucky to get to work in Israel on and off in extended stays over the last decade. As an American I went in thinking that Israel was the center of democracy in the region but that notion was eroded trip after trip after trip. I was able to work with both Jewish Israeli and Palestinian collaborators and It allowed me to get very diverse views on the policies Likud led governments have put into place (as they have been the majority leader for the vast majority of my tenure following Israeli politics).
That's a great point, a lot of what is reported is propaganda. And if you're going to be reading reporting in hebrew it's important to balance it with reporting in Arabic. A lot of which will also be propaganda. Through all of our interaction on Tildes I know you're quite skeptical and I'm confident propaganda will stick out, particularly if you're getting it from both sides. My only note here is that extremist propaganda from Hamas is often recognized as such, while extremist propaganda from militant zionist groups is not.
I know it's not a satisfying answer but getting a better handle on the politics of the individual members of the coalition government as well as Likud is a great start. If you're looking for some balance from US reporting I would suggest "On Palestine" by Ilan Pappe and Noam Chomsky. I know Chomsky's addition may be less palatable for you, but they give an interesting history Israeli military operations in Palestine, be it with a Chomsky slant.
Thanks!
Honestly, I'm somewhat torn between thinking "to really understand this would require an in-depth investigation" and "do I really have to? I seem to be giving myself homework. Why am I spending time on this?"
How in-depth you can go is limited because some point you need language skills. (Also true of reading history; you can read what historians have to say, but at some point you have to trust them when the primary sources are in other languages.)
And it's not just this issue; it's something of a theme for me. Advocates who feel strongly about some issue tend to want people to pay attention to it, implying that you should feel guilty if you don't agree. Maybe giving people permission to not pay attention is also important?
That's actually reversed from my way of thinking, which is that, if you're not in the position to make any decisions, doing enough research to have an informed opinion on a complicated issue seems optional? Particularly, having an informed opinion in real time, as it's happening.
Although I do know the historical reasons why, sometimes I wonder whether it makes sense to pay more attention to Israel and Palestine than to, say, children dying in Yemen.
Despite it all, I do tend to get obsessed with following some news stories. (As is probably obvious to long-time Tildes members.) I don't consider this a particularly rational thing to do, though, and I like to make it clear that other people don't have to.
I'm with you on almost all of this. With any representation of an event or history there is some level you turn over the wheel. At some point all second hand knowledge is trusting interpretation. I go down the rabbit holes too and end up finding myself researching things that have no bearing on my life as if I'm getting paid to do it.
That statement can not be truer. I often feel so burnt out reading the comments in these threads I'll take days or weeks off of Tildes. Then I pop into them, get worked up again and begin the cycle a new. I'm mostly been trying to avoid them but found myself drawn in here today.
I'm totally with you, you don't need to pay attention and the guilt tripping people are doing is out of line. It can be frustrating when people bury their heads in the sand, but also we all have so much going on in our lives. It's too much to expect someone to have the bandwidth at any given point to engage with seriously heavy topics. I will point out though when you're active in a thread you are no longer a passive observer and that's when folks, myself included, may get a bit snippy.
That's true to an extent, I don't think anyone here is an expert on the conflict. But it's different to come into a thread saying you don't trust a statement or that something seems wrong because you haven't done research about it and then say that you don't really want to do research about it. It's totally ok and optional to not have an informed position on a topic, but it'll be frustrating to have an online discussion with someone who does that. Fully acknowledging that can be me sometimes ;)
Man, this is a whole can of worms that I've wrestled with for years. For a long time I worked doing cultural conservation work in conflict zones. Syria and Iraq during the expansion of ISIS. Yemen during the initial bombardment of Sana'a. Somalia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan at various points due to their version of Al Shabab or the Taliban. I think most people miss out on how conflict is just kind of raging in the background at all times. Sudan is still a shit show, so is Libya, so is Burkina Faso or Mali. You need to pick and choose what gets you riled up at any given time and honestly it's much easier to check out mentally.
I think what sets this period of conflict apart for me is the scale and rate of deaths and injuries. There have been more kids killed in a month during this conflict than in 5 years of the conflict in Syria, that's a pretty staggering statistic. Even for me working in Syria directly with teams based in Aleppo, Homs, Damascus; I only had one collaborator die in the 3 years I worked there. In the last month I've lost 2 folks that I had collaborated with in the past. Honestly the scale of destruction isn't something I've experienced in my work and I think that is what has me so riled up.
I just read the news and participate in forums. You have direct experience and it would be interesting to hear your stories.
The difficulty is what to say when others seem to be misrepresenting things in very confident terms, without necessarily having enough knowledge to say for sure. A direct response requires research. There’s a temptation to take shortcuts. This sort of discussion is no fun for anyone involved.
Somehow I’d like to discourage people from pretending they know it all when they don’t have the background to back it up, which is totally normal when talking about stuff in the news - we aren’t experts in most things we discuss. Instead, couldn’t we be like beginning students comparing notes and sharing what we learned?
Of course there is in an infinite supply of people being wrong on the Internet. I have friends who post wrongheaded stuff frequently. There’s no point in arguing. They are otherwise decent people, but I had to unsubscribe. But for whatever reason I still sometimes engage on Tildes.
I’m not sure how to think about scale. To make a shallow comparison, the US invasion of Iraq was of course a much larger-scale disaster overall (a nation of 27 million at the time). Sadr City alone is apparently about a million people, about half the population of the Gaza Strip. At the time of the first battle of Fallujah, it was about 250,000.
I mean, even the subtitle of the article says Among the sites provided to the Israeli government are medical facilities, including Al-Shifa hospital, which Israeli forces raided last week.
Israel already released at least three videos of two different tunnels that go under Shifa hospital (see IDF twitter), screenshots of security videos showing hostages being brought in the hospital and other evidence of long-term Hamas use.
Hospitals lose their protection when they are being used for military purposes, and in fact using them in such way is what's against international law.
Considering this, and the fact that this is what Hamas does, that they publicly said they don't care about protecting civilians, bragged about building hundreds of kms of tunnels for 15 years etc., I don't think it's in any way implausible that the sites that Israel attacked were also intentionally used for military purposes.
In that case, whether you agree with it morally or not, the only one committing war crimes would be Hamas.
There is no real calm way for me to respond to this comment, especially at this current juncture, so I’ll keep it very brief and simply say that the IDF is one of the absolute last sources I would expect to provide trustworthy information. This includes their videos.
Because that is the one case where despite fog of war we already have enough proof to say that the hospital was used for military purposes, which is a was crime by Hamas, and it was not a war crime to raid it. And that (plus a ton of indirect evidence) is proof that at least in some cases claims in this vein by Israel are true.
I'm not changing the subject, I'm saying that it's obvious that Hamas uses at least some of the buildings mentioned in the article as shields. I'm pretty sure that we will get more information about that as Israel clears out more tunnels. But at this moment it is not possible to confirm either way for each of those buildings, and claiming that they are legally protected in a conflict where one side is known to have used similar buildings for military purposes on purpose, which cancels the protection, is therefore not reasonable.
Well, if they deny Hamas war crimes, that means they're not very credible. But to be clear, I am entirely open to the option that Israel is committing war crimes as well. I think it's likely we will learn about some, with evidence, in time. What I'm saying is that the claim that raiding a hospital or any kind of similar facility is evidence of a war crime by Israel happening makes no sense in this conflict, and I stand by that.
I think that given that Hamas launched the Oct 7 attack knowing and hoping that it would provoke an Israeli response that’d lead to Palestinian deaths because it wanted to disrupt the normalization of diplomatic relationships of Israel with its Middle Eastern neighbors,
I think it’s very plausible and likely that Hamas uses humanitarian facilities. Thinking purely strategically, using civilians in hospitals and shelters as shields is the only asymmetric military advantage they have over Israel. While I do not condone it, it is militarily rational to do so, and Hamas has revealed its strategic calculus.
I think it’s an intractable issue. Hamas knows that Israel as a democracy mandated by its voters to respond — its Oct 7 attacks were designed for such.
It seems unlikely that UN would allow its facilities to be used for bellicose purposes.
They'd prefer not, but any right of refusal within Gaza, as anywhere, would have to be enforced and upheld by the sovereign power, which in this case is the party making the demands.