Israel-Gaza war

[GeneralMacArthur]

Was hoping for updates when I opened this thread in the morning.  Shouldn't have been surprised that I got just a ton of jaichind pro-Russia spam as well as a few dickhead users trying to justify indiscriminate mass murder of civilians by terrorists.

Maybe it's because it's night over there, but things seem to have quieted down a little bit.  I'm sure Israel will strike back at Gaza soon.  I've heard rumors of photo/video footage of Palestinian atrocities -- in particular people keep mentioning some video of a dead Israeli woman stripped naked and paraded through the streets of Gaza for abuse -- but the internet being what it is, even if they do exist, those videos are all being deleted if they even exist.  Heaven forbid we actually get primary documentation of an ongoing conflict because it might be "disturbing" or "violate the TOS."  It could all just be fake rumors, we have no way of knowing.

This highlights a problem with social media becoming the main source for news.  The NYT is useless right now, just a live feed of speculation from the same idiot pundits who are always wrong about everything.  And cable news is even worse.  Fox and MSNBC are both looking at this through a political lens -- what does this mean for Biden.  Only CNN is actually doing their job, but even they are just reposting statements and videos without providing anything useful like maps or breakdowns.

Obviously this is a tremendous failure of the Netanyahu Administration.  His entire M.O. was supposed to be protecting Israel at all costs.  And now he's failed to protect Israel.  On the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War -- you'd think this would be a red letter day on the IDF's calendar.  His deal with Saudi Arabia is going to fall apart now as well.  Israel is lucky that Jordan, Syria and Lebanon haven't made any effort to join this latest invasion, because Israeli intelligence and defense looks weaker than it has in years.

I would be shocked if Hamas as an organization survives this.  Israel could launch a full-scale invasion of Gaza to rip out Hamas root-and-stem, expel their leadership from Gaza and force Palestine to hold new elections, or simply run it themselves under martial law.  And I wouldn't blame them at all.

This invasion perfectly illustrates how ridiculous the status quo was.  Gaza was a hostile state sitting on Israel's doorstep, led by a democratically-elected terrorist group whose sole mission was the genocide of the Jews, a group that regularly launched cross-border attacks on Israeli civilians.  No other nation would accept this situation.  If Mexico elected the head of MS-13 as their president, changed their constitution to say that Mexico was a state dedicated to the annihilation of America, and started launching terrorist attacks across the Mexican border, would we just chill out and take it for decades?  No, we would invade Mexico almost immediately, kill their president, crush their army and take over their government.  And we'd be totally justified in doing so.  But everyone always expects Israel to refrain from violence and seek peace no matter the cost, even as Hamas gets to perpetrate violence on a daily basis and has zero interest in any sort of path to peace.

[GeneralMacArthur]

This thread is such a disaster and some of you are just unfathomably stupid.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Hamas => invades Israeli territory to indiscriminately massacre civilians, parades their victims through the streets in celebration of how many civilians they killed as crowds cheer them on.

Israel => responds by using military force against Hamas territory, which like all military actions throughout history, results in unavoidable civilian casualties despite Israeli efforts to minimize them.

The most blisteringly stupid people on the god damn planet:  Both of these are bad, both sides are at fault, I weep for the civilians killed in the violence.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Seen a lot of smoke about Lebanon entering the war, not much confirmation but wouldn't surprise me.  Have to imagine there's zero element of surprise and Israel will annihilate them quickly.  Stupid move that will only lead to more death (which of course will be all Israel's fault) but when you're the bad guys you do stupid things.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The best thing Palestine could do would be to fully divorce the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

They haven't shared political leadership in nearly two decades.
Their standards of living and needs are completely different.
The problems they face are completely different.
Their end goals are completely different.
The way they're treated by Israel is completely different.
The way they're treated by their neighbors is completely different.

West Bank is run by Fatah which is relatively reasonable, has not made much effort to attack Israel over the last couple decades, and has shown a willingness to work with Israel towards a two-state solution and to maintain peace.  They've also demonstrated a basic level of competence in building and maintaining infrastructure, agriculture, and a civil society.

Gaza is run by Hamas, a terrorist organization whose sole occupation is maximizing the number of Jews it kills (or Jewish women it kidnaps for gang rape).  It has zero interest in building any sort of infrastructure or agriculture.  It actively works against any sort of civil society.  Gaza is entirely dependent on aid from Israel to survive, even as it openly advocates for genocide against Israel on a daily basis.  Egypt hates Gaza and has it walled in like a rat trap.  Gaza hasn't shown any willingness to change its ways and seems destined to continue being an impoverished, starving, failed state that only exists to continue attacking its Israeli host.

So why continue the farce of treating these two completely distinct states like they're the same thing?  They're not even the same people.  The West Bank is full of Jordanians.  It was annexed by Jordan in 1950 and held until the Six Days War.  Jordan continued to claim the West Bank as part of its territory until 1988.  Only after that did it become the "Palestinian state" combined with Gaza.  This entire time, Arabs from the east side of the Jordan river (Jordanians) and Arabs from the west side of the Jordan river (Palestinians) were freely intermixing and moving between the two areas.  Which makes sense because they're the same people and have family on both sides of the river.  If the West Bank wants to be an independent state called Palestine, fine.  But it's just Jordan.

Gaza?  Has little to nothing to do with Jordan.  It's Egypt.  It was part of Egypt for many, many periods of time over the last few centuries -- they regularly battled the Ottomans for control of it.  The result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war was that Egypt controlled Gaza.  Since 1967 it's been controlled by Israel but Egypt has also had a big hand in how Gaza is run and what life there looks like.


The West Bank should separate off and make a separate deal with Israel to have a two-state solution.  Then either become independent Palestine, or join with Jordan.

Gaza should be UN-administered with input from Egypt, Israel and whatever becomes of the West Bank.  Just like other failed states.  It should be rebuilt into a functioning state while also militarily occupied by an international coalition to suppress Hamas and other terrorist organizations.

[GeneralMacArthur]

How many pages of this thread now have been dedicated to bikeshedding an expression of sympathy for the victims because it emphasized the many female victims?

Hamas has been killing Jewish civilian men for decades to the point where people in the West are used to it, take it for granted, assume it's just one of those things you have to get used to, that every year a few men in Israel are going to be brutally killed by the poor innocent helpless oppressed Palestinians.

But what they're doing now, kidnapping hundreds of Israeli woman to take back to Gaza for what will presumably be a short life of rape and sexual torture before they're killed and have their mutilated bodies paraded through the streets to the cheering crowds, is entirely new and shocking to the people who are too young to remember Palestine in the era before the IDF obtained dominance in the conflict.

So it's natural to be more horrified by what's happening to the women than what's happening to the men.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The Gaza Strip has no future as a political entity.

Its people, regrettably, will need to be evacuated to Egypt and the city of Gaza likely destroyed. If not, the scenes unfolded over the past week will continue for another thousand years.

Israel is not absent of blame of course, indeed they deserve a lot of it, but what has transpired since the partition cannot be changed. We can only look ahead now.

This is genocidal rhetoric. I understand that tempers are running high now, and I truly do understand why, but can we please draw a line somewhere? The median age in Gaza is 18. If you endorse this you are endorsing the forcible expulsion or more likely death of mostly children.

This is not genocidal rhetoric.

The problem with Gaza is that it's too close to Israel.  It's a thorn penetrating up into Israel's territory.  Israel's racist, genocidal, Nazi enemies use it as a salient from which they have repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly launched attacks on Israeli civilians to try and conquer the country and wipe its citizens off the earth.

This is simply a strategic liability for Israel.  Gaza at this point isn't a proper city.  It's a military fort administered by terrorists.  It's the equivalent of saying Cuba should expel the Americans from Guantanamo.  Imagine if North Korea had a military base in the San Juan Islands that they used to constantly launch rockets and attacks on Seattle.  Would it be genocidal to say that the North Koreans should be expelled and the base destroyed?

Gaza is a completely failed city.  It's a sprawling morass of cheap concrete and rebar.  It's not like it's Jerusalem or some city that it's critically culturally important for an ethnic group to have access to.  It is not cultural genocide by any stretch to push the Arabs out of Gaza.

Frankly it would be better in the long run since under Israeli administration it could actually be built into a modern, humane, decent city, with the Islamic cultural heritage (a handful of mosques and gravesites) not only kept intact but preserved and made safe and available for pilgrimage and tourism.  Right now those mosques are used as safe hiding spots for Hamas terrorists, they know Israel won't bomb them because the international condemnation for destroying a cultural site would be too great.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Can you explain to me, please, how it is possible that a "military fort" has a population of 2 million and is, as noted above, about 75% women and children?

Why does it matter what the population is?  It's completely irrelevant to the analogy.  Also Gaza's population has sextupled over the last 50 years since Israel took it over from Egypt.  Used to be not that many people lived there.  Now it's become incredibly densely populated but it's not like it's the ancestral home to millions of people or anything.

And even if it was... what a home.  A completely failed state, a maze of worthless buildings and broken, unmaintained infrastructure, completely devoid of natural resources.  What a great loss it would be for people to move!

Please realize, I don't actually care if the Palestinian civilians leave, that is not the objective.  If it were possible for them to stay there and live in peace with the Israelis, I'd be happy with that.  I'd even be fine if no Jews were allowed to live in Gaza and it was a Muslim-only city like Mecca.  The problem is that it doesn't seem possible that this can happen, because the people there love Hamas and as long as they're there, they're going to harbor Hamas, and Gaza will continue to be essentially a terrorist military base within Israel.  It seems to me that the only way to stop the violence against Jews coming out of Hamas would be for most of the people currently there to be moved to Egypt.

If you have an alternative proposal, I'm happy to hear it.  But I think a mass population transfer out of Gaza would be far more humane than continuing the status quo of Hamas operating a salient within the state of Israel that they use as a military base for terrorist attacks, with the full support of the population.

[GeneralMacArthur]

But onto my primary point. Sorry, if you think it's okay to suggest that 2 million people should pick up and leave their homes, be driven elsewhere, that is deranged. You are not a serious person, you're either very ignorant or you're a dangerous fiend who thankfully isn't in a position of real power (unfortunately there are people like you who are).

You are suggesting the IDF conquer Gaza, then go house to house and round up the Arabs (on what legal basis? how do you decide who goes?) and then force them into trucks, and if they resist? What if they don't go? Do you feel comfortable detaining them in overcrowded jails or camps, what about summarily shooting them (Ben-Gvir I think would approve)? What will it take? You then want to invade Egypt, and plop 2 million people into the Sinai.

That is deranged, thousands would die. It is not only ethnic cleansing, it is indeed borderline genocidal. It's true that Hamas has taken Gaza hostage for their antisemitic death mission, but if this is your solution, you are completely, utterly mad. You are deranged.

Egypt can manage the logistics.  Or the international community can do it.  The United States currently pays Egypt over a billion dollars a year to maintain the peace.  The Egyptian population has absolutely exploded over the last couple decades and increases by over 2 million every single year.  Which they have had to build new cities and infrastructure to support, relying heavily on international aid to do so.  Accommodating two million more people -- in particular, people who are culturally and ethnically homogenous within Egyptian society -- is not as difficult of a challenge as it sounds.  I'm sure Israel itself would be happy to pay $20 billion or whatever it would cost to help Egypt build a new home for the people of Gaza.

There's a suburb of Egypt named 10th of Ramadan City.  It's a four-hour drive from Gaza.  It's named after the start of the Yom Kippur War.  It has expanded every year with tens of thousands of new homes.

Egypt can just build a new city.  They can call it "October 6, 2023 City" in honor of the most recent genocidal attack on the Jews.  Get the Chinese to show you how to build those ghost cities that have hundreds of thousands of vacant housing units, with modern infrastructure, waiting for people to move in.  Are you really telling me it would be inhumane for the people of Gaza to move to such a place?  I'm not advocating for a giant refugee camp or anything like that.  Just move them to somewhere that has a near-identical culture and lifestyle to their current situation, except far more humane and modern.  And not governed by a terrorist group.

There are plenty of people in this thread who have happily advocated for years that the Jewish settlers be expelled from the settlements in the West Bank.  Presumably those people don't want to leave so what would your proposed logistics be?  How would that not be a "genocidal" "forced population transfer" by the same logic?

[GeneralMacArthur]

But onto my primary point. Sorry, if you think it's okay to suggest that 2 million people should pick up and leave their homes, be driven elsewhere, that is deranged. You are not a serious person, you're either very ignorant or you're a dangerous fiend who thankfully isn't in a position of real power (unfortunately there are people like you who are).

You are suggesting the IDF conquer Gaza, then go house to house and round up the Arabs (on what legal basis? how do you decide who goes?) and then force them into trucks, and if they resist? What if they don't go? Do you feel comfortable detaining them in overcrowded jails or camps, what about summarily shooting them (Ben-Gvir I think would approve)? What will it take? You then want to invade Egypt, and plop 2 million people into the Sinai.

That is deranged, thousands would die. It is not only ethnic cleansing, it is indeed borderline genocidal. It's true that Hamas has taken Gaza hostage for their antisemitic death mission, but if this is your solution, you are completely, utterly mad. You are deranged.

Egypt can manage the logistics.  Or the international community can do it.  The United States currently pays Egypt over a billion dollars a year to maintain the peace.  The Egyptian population has absolutely exploded over the last couple decades and increases by over 2 million every single year.  Which they have had to build new cities and infrastructure to support, relying heavily on international aid to do so.  Accommodating two million more people -- in particular, people who are culturally and ethnically homogenous within Egyptian society -- is not as difficult of a challenge as it sounds.  I'm sure Israel itself would be happy to pay $20 billion or whatever it would cost to help Egypt build a new home for the people of Gaza.

There's a suburb of Egypt named 10th of Ramadan City.  It's a four-hour drive from Gaza.  It's named after the start of the Yom Kippur War.  It has expanded every year with tens of thousands of new homes.

Egypt can just build a new city.  They can call it "October 6, 2023 City" in honor of the most recent genocidal attack on the Jews.  Get the Chinese to show you how to build those ghost cities that have hundreds of thousands of vacant housing units, with modern infrastructure, waiting for people to move in.  Are you really telling me it would be inhumane for the people of Gaza to move to such a place?  I'm not advocating for a giant refugee camp or anything like that.  Just move them to somewhere that has a near-identical culture and lifestyle to their current situation, except far more humane and modern.  And not governed by a terrorist group.

There are plenty of people in this thread who have happily advocated for years that the Jewish settlers be expelled from the settlements in the West Bank.  Presumably those people don't want to leave so what would your proposed logistics be?  How would that not be a "genocidal" "forced population transfer" by the same logic?

Egypt is never going to agree to that, period. I'm sorry you wasted all that time typing.

Egypt's GDP is 2% of the United States.  I'm sure they'd agree to it for the right price.  They agreed to demilitarize the Sinai, diplomatically recognize Israel and make peace for far less.

Look, even if Egypt demanded $100B -- $50,000 per person -- would that not be worth it?  Worth it for the United States to make a huge move towards peace?  Worth it for Israel to get rid of by far their biggest security problem?

[GeneralMacArthur]

Egypt's GDP is 2% of the United States.  I'm sure they'd agree to it for the right price.  They agreed to demilitarize the Sinai, diplomatically recognize Israel and make peace for far less.

Look, even if Egypt demanded $100B -- $50,000 per person -- would that not be worth it?  Worth it for the United States to make a huge move towards peace?  Worth it for Israel to get rid of by far their biggest security problem?

Why are you advocating forced deportation and expulsion.

Because it's more humane than letting Hamas continue to rape and slaughter people and I don't see any practical middle ground.  Letting them continue to live in Gaza while Israel builds a giant wall of defenses hasn't worked.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Egypt's GDP is 2% of the United States.  I'm sure they'd agree to it for the right price.  They agreed to demilitarize the Sinai, diplomatically recognize Israel and make peace for far less.

Look, even if Egypt demanded $100B -- $50,000 per person -- would that not be worth it?  Worth it for the United States to make a huge move towards peace?  Worth it for Israel to get rid of by far their biggest security problem?

Why are you advocating forced deportation and expulsion.

Because it's more humane than letting Hamas continue to rape and slaughter people and I don't see any practical middle ground.  Letting them continue to live in Gaza while Israel builds a giant wall of defenses hasn't worked.

If this is what you consider "humane", i don't want to know what you consider inhumane.

There's isn't really a humane option here.  Unfortunately you have to pick the lesser of many available evils.  It's very easy to sit in the peanut gallery and just say "how dare you, how inhumane" to any proposed solution.  Very easy and cowardly.  It's much more difficult, of course, to actually try to figure out how to save lives.

[GeneralMacArthur]

You want to mass deport the Palestinians even though they were there before Israel was even a country.

That is what the Russians did with the Crimea Tartar.

The two situations are not remotely comparable and you know why.

[GeneralMacArthur]

If the people of Israel want to live in peace, they need to leave illegally occupied territories.

Israel left Gaza in 2005.  That's how Hamas came to be allowed to fester.

The West Bank is pretty much irrelevant in this discussion.  Anyone who thinks this Hamas attack was caused by Israeli settlements in the West Bank is an idiot.

Egypt's GDP is 2% of the United States.  I'm sure they'd agree to it for the right price.  They agreed to demilitarize the Sinai, diplomatically recognize Israel and make peace for far less.

Look, even if Egypt demanded $100B -- $50,000 per person -- would that not be worth it?  Worth it for the United States to make a huge move towards peace?  Worth it for Israel to get rid of by far their biggest security problem?

And why would the United States pay? What's in it for the United States?

The United States has been trying to resolve the Israel/Palestine conflict for fifty years and we've expended tons of resources on it.  Israel is one of our biggest allies, protecting them from Palestine is obviously in our interests, and also frees up their military/intelligence apparatus to focus more on the Iranian threat.

It used to be that ending this conflict was also in our interests because Palestinian terrorists launched attacks against the west and within the United States.  In fact on 9/11 a lot of people initially thought it was Palestinian terrorists who had done the attacks, because they had hijacked multiple flights in the previous decades.  This hasn't been a problem so much recently due to how seriously the USA has taken the terror threat and how successful Israel has been at weakening Palestine.  Which of course is part of why so many young people have a much more sympathetic view of Palestine these days.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I have yet to hear anyone propose a serious solution to stop Hamas attacks into Palestine.

As I've said before, it's extremely easy to sit in the peanut gallery and say "oh how dare you, oh how inhumane" to any proposed solution.  But the status quo is appallingly inhumane.  Unless you have an actual proposal for how to fix the status quo, you are advocating for its continuation.  So you are the one advocating for something appallingly inhumane.

The really sickening truth is that many people in this thread are OK with the status quo because they see it as acceptable that these Jews are getting killed.  They think they deserve it, or "it's the natural consequence of decolonization", or "this is what fighting your oppressors looks like", or whatever other idiotic excuse for being OK with genocide you can concoct.  Think I'm exaggerating?  Look at the warning posted at the top of the thread.  I've seen the deleted posts.  I've also seen many of the posts that haven't yet been deleted.

But there are also a lot of useful idiots who are willing to go along with the status quo simply because they're too cowardly to actually propose a real, practical, workable solution to the problem.  Should the Jews continue to suffer and die because of your cowardice?

Yes, I'd rather see a whole lot of people have to move across the border than see a whole lot of people get raped, murdered and killed.  If you're a decent person, you would as well.  So if you think this is a false choice, tell me about it.  If you think there's an alternative solution, tell me about it.  Because this attack is a paradigm shift.  Previously it was plausible to think Israel could continue the status quo of just keeping Hamas bottled up and crushed under foot, using the Iron Dome to shoot down all their rockets, using the IDF to beat back all their attacks, and no lives would be lost.  But that's clearly no longer true.  Hamas must go.  One way or another, Hamas must go.

[GeneralMacArthur]

This war will be the end of Hamas. We do not know HOW Hamas will be defeated, but we can be pretty confident it will be; it has not received very much international support, and Hamas is outnumbered over 5:1. HAMAS IS TOAST! When Hamas is defeated, peace will become much more likely.

People keep posting things like this but as long as the Palestinians remain in Gaza, there will always be Hamas on Israel's doorstep.  The United States of America, the most powerful army in the world, couldn't even root al-Qaeda out of Mogadishu, a city half the size of Gaza and one where the United States had a lot of popular support.  Yet we expect Israel, a far weaker country than America and one that has far more demands on its military, to successfully go into Gaza, a city twice as big and one where the entire population wants to see them die, and root out Hamas, a huge terrorist network with the backing of multiple powerful nations in the region?

It's an impossible demand.  Urban warfare is extremely difficult even under the best of circumstances.  It's just a fantasy proposed by people who think there's a solution here where Gaza can be normalized by ripping out the cancer of Hamas.  It's simply not possible.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Have Egypt annex Gaza, And Jordan annex the West Bank. Or use it as a threat against Hamas.


Hamas is tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, which the curreny Egyptian Government hates. They will certainly stamp out any Hamas influence of course.

I have also advocated for this in the past, but I do not think Egypt is willing to annex Gaza.  They built multiple big walls between their border and Gaza.  I also don't think they want to share the Gaza border with Israel.  That would be a huge headache for them to deal with from now until eternity as they would from then on be responsible for everything Hamas does, be responsible for suppressing the Hamas activity.

Much easier from Egypt's perspective to bring the Gazans into Egypt where they will have a much more difficult time attacking Israel.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Long term there needs to be a peace deal. The Arabs attacked Israel in 1973 and even though Israel won the war, they realized that they weren't invulnerable and made peace with Egypt and Jordan in 1978.

OK so tell me about this peace deal that Hamas is going to accept.  It's not going to happen.  Hamas is not a rational actor, it is a terrorist group whose singular purpose is the extermination of all Jews and the conquest of Israel.  To veto any other solutions because you're still holding out delusional hope that Hamas and Israel can come to some sort of peace deal is just childish thinking.  Of course, we all know you don't actually believe this is possible.

[GeneralMacArthur]

To start, at least in the short term, Israel will need to invade and occupy Gaza, respecting the property rights of the innocent civilians you seem to take such pleasure in butchering as much as is realistically possible.

Mods, please delete this.  I have never said anything of the sort, nor have I ever given any indication of anything of the sort.  It's astoundingly inappropriate for someone to write something like this.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Still waiting for literally any hint of a workable solution to stop the killings from the people self-righteously insisting to me that I'm advocating for mass murder for wanting people to move a few hours west.  Since apparently it's obvious that this would result in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

You guys are ok with the status quo, where the terrorist group that runs Gaza gets to massacre tons of Jews and Israel isn't allowed to go anything about it.  How dare you accuse me of being the inhumane one.  Your unwillingness to consider any alternative to the status quo just indicates that you're OK with it.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I've already tossed out enough unpopular opinions, but I'll toss out one more and say that if Gaza doesn't return 100% of the American captives they currently hold, we'd be entirely within our rights to put American boots on the ground in Gaza, and the same is true for any other country whose people are currently held hostage by Palestine.

Of course it wouldn't look good, and we may be better off collaborating with the Israelis and having their army do the work.  But we shouldn't hold back when it comes to getting our people out.

[GeneralMacArthur]

A full siege of Gaza is unacceptable. We are in the fog of war, but the response needs to both consider civilian lives and be proportionate to any military objective. Even in these conditions, civilians should get humanitarian aid. Fighting against 'human animals' (inappropriate language imo) does not mean all morality and restraint goes out the window.

Then how do you propose Israel respond, exactly? Hamas needs to be removed from power one way or another.

Actually he is making a good point in this sense -Hamas will likely go underground upon any invasion, so Israel will need to go on a 'hearts and minds' campaign to root them out.  So being cognizant of the welfare of Gazan civilians is in Israel's immediate interests, and will help them militarily.  Also, it will put to the test the claim made by some here that they are themselves hostages of Hamas (and other terrorist groups). 

Total wishful thinking.  0% chance of success with this approach.  And Israel knows it, they're not going to waste their time.  It's bombs away.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Oh hey, what's up?  Did I miss anything?

One opinion I'd like to throw out there is that it's absolute military malpractice that Israel isn't releasing the following video:

Two soldiers are standing next to each other at the entrance to a tunnel.  One enters the tunnel while the other starts walking straight forward.  They walk at the same pace, one guy following the tunnel, the other walking above ground.  Maybe you even have them both display GPS coordinates to show that they are in the same geographic location (guy 1 is just several dozen feet underground below guy 2).

Guy 1 is filming all the military infrastructure Hamas has in the tunnels.  Guy 2 is filming all the civilian infrastructure built above those tunnels.  Ideally the video would end with the dramatic moment of Guy 1 entering an obvious Hamas weapons depot or command center, at the same time Guy 2 arrives at a hospital.

Of course it would be much easier to just show someone walking into a hospital, opening up the secret hatch to the Hamas tunnel, and dropping down.  But to my understanding, contrary to most people's envisioning of what "Hamas base under a hospital" means, that's not actually how it works.  How it works is they have tunnel entrances several blocks away, and the tunnels run entirely underground, leading to the Hamas base built deep under the hospital, but with no direct access from the hospital itself.

Surely this video is already possible to make since there are areas of the city Israel has already secured and sections of the tunnel network they have already cleared?  I realize they are afraid of traps and mines in the tunnels.  But I feel like there are a great number of people who simply do not believe the Israeli claims that Hamas is building their bases under hospitals.

It feels like at least 50% of the Hamas sympathy stories coming out of the conflict have been hospital stories.  Israel cut power to a hospital, or bombed a hospital, or shot at a hospital, or besieged a hospital.  And the IDF will say, there was a Hamas base under that hospital.  And people just won't believe them.  It seems like this is somewhere Israel is really losing the public relations war, and just this one video would be a major weapon in their arsenal in that regard.

Maybe Israel thinks public relations aren't that important (certainly Bibi allowing the most extreme right-wing lunatics in his coalition to go on camera and say words is indicative of this, not to mention turning their nation's Twitter account into the Likud equivalent of @GOPWarRoom) but ultimately Israel will not be able to successfully fight this war if the entire world unites against them, and that is eventually going to happen if overwhelming public pressure builds up.  Even the Biden Administration has gotten wishy-washy and started talking about "timetables" and "lines in the sand" and things like that.

[GeneralMacArthur]

On a related note is there any way that Israel can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hamas is shooting their own people to keep them in dangerous areas to act as human shields?

I mean if you had that, say video footage of Hamas militants firing at Palestinians trying to exit a hospital or something, it would just be overwhelming.  It inarguably proves everything Israel has been saying.  Why else would Hamas shoot their own people except to prevent them from leaving?  Why would Hamas want to prevent people from leaving other than to use them as human shields?  And where were the people trying to leave from... could it be Al-Shifa hospital and other hospitals Hamas uses to cover their command bases?

But the problem is, all we have are vague reports of people being shot at, and cell-phone videos that just have the sound of gunfire and don't have footage of the shooter at all, much less enough detail to prove that the shooter is a Hamas militant.

This lets Hamas turn around and say, look here is a video of the IDF shooting innocent civilians.  And people will believe it.  Maybe Israel really is just a bunch of genocidal maniacs itching to do another My Lai Massacre and shooting at any civilians they can get in their sights.  Or maybe the IDF told those civilians to stay, and when they tried to leave, the IDF shot at them to frighten them back inside.  Either way nobody who is already anti-IDF is going to believe the IDF's story that it's Hamas doing the shooting without solid evidence.

But if they did believe IDF's story, that would surely cause the whole house of cards to tumble?

[GeneralMacArthur]

Both sides are trying to appeal to western 18-35 year olds by adopting LGBTQ symbolism and phrases.

LGBTQ rights is by far the most popular cause among 18-35 year olds, to the point where I've seen plenty of people on social media using the extent to which Israel supports gay rights as the barometer for how good or bad Israel is, or debating whether or not the fact that Hamas has the death penalty for being LGBTQ is a valid knock against the heroic anti-colonial freedom fighters or whether it's actually Israel's fault (or Britain's).

It all seems quite absurd to me.  Yes it's bad that Hamas kills gay people but Hamas is so awful that that's like #19 on the list of bad things about Hamas.  The fact that people are even wasting time arguing about it -- as though Hamas would be good if only they didn't kill gay people -- indicates that those people might not think #1-#18 are actually all that bad.