Hamas has called on Palestinians to stay in their homes after Israel issued sweeping evacuation orders for almost half of Gaza’s more than 2.3 million people ahead of an expected ground offensive.
The Hamas authority for refugee affairs today told residents in the north of the territory to “remain steadfast in your homes and to stand firm in the face of this disgusting psychological war waged by the occupation”.
No obviously not all 2.4 million civilians are Hamas. Hamas military might has been estimated at ~40k soldiers.
To control a 40k strong force you need structure. You need offices, training grounds, mess halls, barracks, weapons depots etc. Now Israel could attempt to “just bomb” those installations but, that approach has proven ineffective in the past as Hamas has built a lot of that infrastructure underground. So if you want to cripple Hamas’ military you need to invade and collapse and clear out tunnel networks by hand.
Are legal under the rules of war. They’re commonly used as tracer rounds and targeting rounds. So you might ID a target with a drown, drop a wp munition and let the drone loiter in the area while you try to hit the target with Artillery fire. This is especially effective because modern artillery munitions can course correct in flight based off an infrared (heat) signature and wp burns at like 800 degrees. So if you’re goal is to destroy certain buildings in an urban area without leveling the whole urban area; you must use something like wp rounds.
Traditional artillery would leave the whole city bombed out. Take a look at some of the cities on the front line in the Ukraine War to see the effects of traditional artillery bombardments.
Your first link is behind a paywall. Your second is relatively indefensible. Cops harras people. I don’t have a solution for it en-mass. If it comes out that “harras them journos” was an order that came from the top then I’d be pissed. That’s not right.
I’d argue that they’re clearly not attempting to turn the city into ruins. I did an analysis but with nukes you could turn the whole strip to ruins with just two. And with conventional tomahawks you could cause damage to 90% of the city cores of the three biggest cities with just 20 1kt tomahawks. It’s clear they’re not “firing for effect”. They’ve got a list of targets in terms of buildings and installations and they’re going after them to cripple Hamas’.
It’s worked well for us. There’s no terrorist group in the world that thinks about what it’s going to do and says, “I’m gonna fuck with America.” And quite frankly we need our way around the Middle East and overthrew a number of governments to make sure that message was clear.
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