Weekly Israel-Hamas war megathread - week of January 29

Gen Z Is Listening to What Netanyahu Is Saying. Is Biden? (NY Times, by Ezra Klein, gift link)

This is crude, but I think there are, roughly, three generations in terms of American sentiment toward Israel. There are older Americans who knew Israel when it was young. They remember the impossibility and wonder of its creation. They remember the wars its neighbors launched to eradicate it and the seeming miracle of its survival and of all that it then built. This generation still feels Israel’s vulnerability. They still feel its possibility. This is Joe Biden’s generation. It is a great gift for Israel that it still, improbably, controls American politics.

Then there’s what I think of as the straddle generation. This is my generation. We only ever knew Israel as the strongest military power in the region. A nuclear Israel. An Israel that occupied Palestinian territories, sometimes brutally. But we also knew an Israel that seemed to be trying to find its way toward peace and coexistence. We knew the Israel of Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. We saw that the collapse of the 2000 Camp David summit was met by the second intifada, by years of suicide bombers rather than years of counteroffers. We also watched Israel build settlements across the West Bank, creating a one-state reality even as it spoke of a two-state solution. Polling shows, predictably, that our views of Israel are more mixed.

Then there’s younger Americans. They know only Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel. He has, after all, been prime minister almost continuously since 2009. They know an Israel that is the strongest country in the region, by far. They know an Israel where messianic ethnonationalists serve in the cabinet. They know an Israel that controls Palestinian life and land and intends to keep it that way. They see this as simpler: a country that oppresses and a people that is oppressed. They are not entirely right — too little agency is offered to Palestinians in this telling — but they are not entirely wrong.

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Which is one reason I think the response to the protests on campus has been misguided. This is not a problem you can solve by firing college presidents or blackballing student radicals. Israel is losing the support of a generation, not a few student groups. And it is losing it because of what it does, not what it is.

3 US troops dead and more injured after drone strike on base in Jordan. Apparently the strike came after a mix-up confusing the enemy drone for a returning friendly one. The group to launch the attack has not been identified yet but is thought to be one of the Iran-backed militias in the area. The US has promised to retaliate already.

Wasn't sure whether to post this here, in its own thread, or in the politics thread. This seemed most apt, despite not being directly tied to hostilities in Gaza.

Undercover Israeli troops dressed as medical staff kill three militants in West Bank hospital raid, officials say (CNN)

Israeli special forces, dressed as civilians and medical staff, infiltrated the Ibn Sina hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin on Tuesday and killed three Palestinian men, according to Israeli and Palestinian officials.

CCTV footage shared on social media appeared to show around a dozen commandos disguised as nurses, women in hijabs, and others, with one pushing a wheelchair and another carrying a baby car seat, as they stormed a hospital corridor carrying assault weapons.

Hamas said the men were Jenin Brigades fighters, an umbrella group of armed Palestinian factions in the West Bank city. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they were terrorists linked to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and an Israeli government minister praised the operation.

At least half of Gaza's buildings damaged or destroyed, new analysis shows (BBC)

Now, satellite data analysis obtained by the BBC shows the true extent of the destruction. The analysis suggests between 144,000 and 175,000 buildings across the whole Gaza Strip have been damaged or destroyed. That's between 50% and 61% of Gaza's buildings.

The analysis, carried out by Corey Scher of City University of New York and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University, compares images to reveal sudden changes in the height or structure of buildings which indicate damage.

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The southern city of Khan Younis has been particularly badly hit in recent weeks, with more than 38,000 (or more than 46%) of buildings now destroyed or damaged, according to the analysis. Over the past fortnight, more than 1,500 buildings have been destroyed or damaged there.

Al-Farra Tower - a 16-storey residential block in the centre of the city, the tallest building in the area - was flattened on 9 January as can be seen in before-and-after images of the city's skyline. Much of the neighbourhood in which it sits has been levelled by Israeli attacks since late December

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Mr Scher, one of the academics who worked on the Gaza damage assessment, said it stands out compared with other war zones he's analysed.

"We've done work over Ukraine, we've also looked at Aleppo and other cities, but the extent and the pace of damage is remarkable. I've never seen this much damage appear so quickly."

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Further analysis, carried out by BBC Verify, shows large areas of previously cultivated land across Gaza have been extensively damaged.

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Although Gaza was heavily dependent on imports before the start of the war, a lot of its food came from farming and food production inside the strip. Aid agencies say half of Gaza's population is now facing starvation.