Israel announced its worst combat losses for more than a month on Wednesday after an ambush in the ruins of Gaza City, and faced growing diplomatic isolation as civilian deaths mounted and a humanitarian catastrophe worsened.

Intense fighting was under way both north and south Gaza, a day after the United Nations demanded an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. U.S. President Joe Biden said Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing of civilians was costing international support.

Warplanes again bombed the length of Gaza and aid officials said the arrival of winter rain worsened conditions for hundreds of thousands sleeping rough in makeshift tents. The vast majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been made homeless.

Israel had global sympathy when it launched a campaign to annihilate the Hamas militant group that controls Gaza after fighters stormed across the border fence on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, and seizing 240 hostages.

But since then, Israel has besieged the enclave and laid much of it to waste. Gaza’s health ministry said on Wednesday at least 18,608 people have been killed and 50,594 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since Oct. 7. Many thousands more are feared lost in the rubble or beyond the reach of ambulances.

In Rafah, in Gaza’s south where hundreds of thousands of people have sought shelter, the bodies of a family killed in an overnight air strike were being laid out in the rain in bloodied white shrouds, including several small children. One, the size of a newborn, was wrapped in a pink blanket.

  • @cm0002
    3•1 year ago

    It costs almost nothing to serve a webpage,

    Wut? To one person maybe, but once you’re scaling to delivering that same webpage to hundreds of thousands to millions that cost rises dramatically lmao do you even know how powerful a system needs to be to serve a million requests for the same webpage at the same time?

    Even a text only webpage is going to need some good power behind it just to handle the protocol overhead and that’s not even covering the infrastructure costs

    • knightly the Sneptaur
      1•1 year ago

      I manage a system for work that handles tens of thousands of interactions per second during peak season, so yeah I’m intimately aware that the cost per visit scales down near zero with volume (a google search used to cost less than 1/1000 of a cent before they started feeding everything into LLMs).

      Plus, ads are responsible for about 2/3rds the cost of serving a page, not to mention the liability when malicious content gets injected into your site by an ad network.

      The ad-funded internet was a mistake that enabled the domination of Big Tech. Other financing models like subscriptions or donations are the safe and ethical alternative.