Things Aren’t Peaceful in Palestine - Page 156

On December 12 2023 00:33 JimmiC wrote:
Also, using it is not a war crime spending in use.



From wiki.

Israel’s military has begun pumping seawater into Hamas’s vast complex of tunnels in Gaza, according to U.S. officials briefed on the Israeli military’s operations, part of an intensive effort to destroy the underground infrastructure that has underpinned the group’s operations.

The move to flood the tunnels with water from the Mediterranean, which is in an early stage, is one of several techniques Israel is using to try to clear and destroy the tunnels.

A spokesperson for the Israeli defense minister declined to comment, saying the tunnel operations are classified.

Israeli officials say that Hamas’s underground system has been key to its operations on the battlefield. The tunnel system, they say, is used by Hamas to maneuver fighters across the battlefield and store the group’s rockets and munitions, and enables the group’s leaders to command and control their forces. Israel also believes some hostages are being held inside tunnels.

In reported recordings between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and released hostages and their families leaked last week, Israelis angrily told Netanyahu that they feared flooding the tunnels would kill their loved ones.

During a press conference Tuesday at the White House with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a reporter asked President Biden about Israel’s flooding of the tunnels. The president didn’t address the Israeli approach directly but rather how flooding tunnels could affect the more than 100 hostages still held by Hamas.

Biden said that assertions have been made that “there are no hostages in any of these tunnels…But I don’t know that for a fact.” The president didn’t elaborate.

The utility of using seawater in a vast underground labyrinth that extends for roughly 300 miles and includes thick blast doors is still being evaluated by the Israelis, according to U.S. officials.

Flooding the tunnels, which would likely be a weekslong process, began around the time Israel added two more pumps to the five pumps installed last month and conducted some initial tests, U.S. officials said.

Some Biden administration officials have been concerned that using seawater might not be effective and could endanger Gaza’s freshwater supply. Egypt in 2015 used seawater to flood tunnels operated by smugglers under the Rafah border crossing with Gaza, prompting complaints from nearby farmers about damaged crops.

But other U.S. officials say the technique might help destroy portions of the tunnel network. The Wall Street Journal has previously reported that flooding the tunnels with seawater was under consideration.

Military analysts have assessed that Israel hasn’t destroyed most of this tunnel network and that a variety of techniques will be needed to destroy or damage the underground system. In addition to the seawater, the Israeli military has sought to attack the network with airstrikes and liquid explosives, and by sending in robots, dogs and drones.

Israel’s military said it was intensifying operations underground in northern Gaza and beneath the southern city of Khan Younis, one of Hamas’s last strongholds. The underground labyrinth remains one of Israel’s main challenges to achieving its goal of destroying Hamas’s military capabilities both in areas it controls above ground and those where it so far hasn’t operated. The tunnels under the southern city of Rafah near the Egyptian border for example, analysts say, are used by Hamas to smuggle most of its weapons into Gaza.

Israel’s military has been reluctant to send soldiers underground, where they would lose their tactical firepower advantage and encounter booby-traps.

Speaking from Khan Younis on Monday, Israel’s top general, Herzi Halevi, said, “We are deepening our control over northern Gaza and our penetration into the southern strip, and also deepening activity underground.”

Israel has control of around 40% of the coastal enclave above ground, according to military analysts, who say that Hamas’s tunnels pose the greater obstacle.

“The territorial issue is not the issue, the problem is Hamas is going underground,” said former Israeli military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin.

Even in the areas that Israel has taken, “the subterranean [theater] continues to be the challenge,” said Miri Eisin, a retired colonel in Israel’s military intelligence.

Israel’s forces have encircled Jabalia in northern Gaza and the Shujaiya neighborhood of Gaza City, where it says Hamas keeps some of its fiercest fighters. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Monday evening that northern Gaza was at its “breaking point” and that Hamas was “on the verge of collapse” there.

Israel’s definition of control means having broken Hamas’s formal command structure, Eisin said, including dismantling the militant group’s battalions and reducing its members to operating as individuals at a very local level.

The spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing, Abu Ubaida, said Sunday that the group’s fighters had been able to repel Israeli forces in the strip.

Israeli military analysts say that taking control of Khan Younis would trap Hamas’s remaining aboveground fighters between Israeli positions in northern and southern Gaza as well as between the Khan Younis area and the Egyptian border area. Israel hopes that Hamas’s weak fighting position and the killing of around half of the group’s battalion commanders will spur lower-level fighters to surrender en masse.

Hamas can prevent that outcome, military analysts say, by holding out underneath Gaza until Israel is forced into a cease-fire, either by international pressure or in negotiations to release the hostages still held by Hamas or other groups.

Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said Monday evening that more than 500 militants had surrendered to Israeli forces in the past month and that half of them were taken for further questioning in Israel.

Hamas has denied that militants have surrendered and said Israeli forces have arrested civilians.

Israel, though, is unlikely to achieve its war goal of returning the almost 140 hostages still held by Hamas directly through force, Eisin added.

Israeli officials estimate the country’s military has killed at least 7,000 Hamas militants since the start of the war on Oct. 7, when militants from Gaza killed 1,200 people in southern Israel, according to Israeli authorities.

More than 18,400 Palestinians have died in Gaza, two-thirds of them women and children, according to Palestinian health authorities. The figures don’t distinguish between militants and civilians.

Following pressure from the U.S. and the United Nations, Israel on Tuesday began facilitating the movement of trucks of aid into Gaza from the Kerem Shalom crossing between Israel and Gaza. This is the first time the crossing has been used since it was damaged by Hamas during its Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, according to Israeli officials, who say the crossing’s use will double the aid that can enter the enclave.

The U.N. has warned that aid that has been moving through the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza falls far short of what is required to deal with the increasingly dire humanitarian situation inside the enclave, and has called for commercial convoys to be allowed in through Kerem Shalom as well as aid.

On Monday, two mothers were killed and several people were injured at northern Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, which the U.N. said Israeli forces had surrounded. About 3,000 people and dozens of patients have sheltered at the facility, unable to leave amid fighting in the vicinity between Israel and armed groups, the organization said.

Israel’s military said that it “continues to act against Hamas strongholds in the north of Gaza, among them the area of Beit Lahia,” and “takes all feasible precautions to mitigate harm to noncombatants, and is fighting against the Hamas terrorist organization, and not the civilians in Gaza or the medical teams operating there.”

The Israeli military said Tuesday that it recovered the bodies of two hostages held in Gaza since Oct. 7.

Eden Zakaria, 27, was kidnapped from an outdoor music festival, while Israeli soldier Ziv Dado, 36, was killed during Hamas’s initial attacks and his body was taken to the Strip.

Israel didn’t say how Zakaria died but said two other soldiers were killed during an operation to recover Zakaria’s and Dado’s bodies, among them the son of a former Israeli military chief of staff and current war cabinet observer.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said Tuesday that Israeli forces had gathered men including medical staff in Kamal Adwan’s courtyard, and it called for the International Committee of the Red Cross and other international groups to protect them.

Separately, medical charity Doctors Without Borders said one of its surgeons working at Al-Awda Hospital also in northern Gaza was injured by a shot fired from outside the facility. Israeli forces have the hospital surrounded.

The World Health Organization has stepped up calls for the protection of healthcare workers in Gaza. It said Israel detained and harassed two Palestine Red Crescent Society staff members in a U.N. convoy over the weekend. The convoy was on its way to deliver medical supplies to Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City when it was stopped at a checkpoint, the WHO said.

Israel’s military didn’t respond to requests for comment about the injured doctor and Red Crescent staff.

At least 20 soldiers were killed by friendly fire or accidents during the ground operation in the Gaza Strip, representing one-fifth of all fatalities, according to data released by the IDF on Tuesday.

Casualties fell as a result of friendly fire on October 7, but the IDF believes that beyond the operational investigations of the events, it would not be morally sound to investigate these incidents due to the immense and complex quantity of them that took place in the kibbutzim and southern Israeli communities due to the challenging situations the soldiers were in at the time.

On December 13 2023 19:52 Magic Powers wrote:
" “It was pointed out to me — I’m being very blunt with you all — it was pointed out to me that, by Bibi, that ‘Well, you carpet-bombed Germany. You dropped the atom bomb. A lot of civilians died,’” Biden said, according to a White House provided transcript.

Middle East leaders gathered in Qatar sought ideas for what would happen after the Israel-Hamas war ends, but remained firmly opposed to putting their own troops or international forces in the ravaged territory.

The Palestinian question is extremely delicate for leaders in the Arab world, where the war has sparked massive protests.

At the annual Doha Forum that ended Monday, Qatar reiterated that no Arab country would send in forces to stabilize the situation after the guns of Israel and Hamas fall silent.

“No one from the region will accept… to put boots on the ground [following after] an Israeli tank. This is unacceptable,” said Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani.

But he also opposed any international force in Gaza under current conditions. “We shouldn’t always talk about the Palestinians as if they need some guardian,” he said.

The Palestinians were represented by the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the West Bank, but not Gaza, which has been ruled by Hamas terrorists since they violently ousted the Fatah-led PA in 2007.

On December 14 2023 10:33 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Again anyone thinking the Middle East is going to come up with a plan is delusional. Neither will they ever take Gazan/Palestinian refugees because of what has happened to said countries that did so in the past... nor will they ever form a coalition to police said territory.

Jordan allowed Palestinians refugees in and their King was murdered and they kept attacking Israel thus Black September happened, Lebanon let them in then the Civil War broke out and the Paris of the Middle East has still never recovered. Kuwait allowed some in, when Iraq invaded they sided with Husain and Kuwait never forgave them and almost started a mass slaughter after the war. Egypt took some in and ISIS militant movement began... one has to wonder why Iran doesn't just give up and allow a mass migration to their country. Because it makes optics to allow the public to believe in such resistance rather than focus on domestic problems.




Source

JERUSALEM (AP) — Three Israeli hostages who were mistakenly shot by Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip had been waving a white flag and were shirtless when they were killed, a military official said Saturday, in Israel’s first such acknowledgement of harming any hostages in its war against Hamas.

Anger over the mistaken killings is likely to increase pressure on the Israeli government to renew Qatar-mediated negotiations with Hamas over swapping more of the remaining captives, believed to number more than 130, for Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. Hamas has conditioned further releases on Israel halting its punishing air and ground campaign in Gaza, while Israeli leaders have said the hostages’ release can only be achieved through military pressure.

The account of how the hostages died raised questions about the conduct of Israeli ground troops. Palestinians on several occasions have reported that Israeli soldiers opened fire as civilians tried to flee to safety. Hamas has claimed other hostages were previously killed by Israeli fire or airstrikes, without presenting evidence.

The Israeli military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to brief reporters in line with military regulations, said it was likely that the hostages had been abandoned by their captors or had escaped. The soldiers’ behavior was “against our rules of engagement,” the official said, and was being investigated at the highest level.

On December 17 2023 05:15 Magic Powers wrote:


I'm honestly speechless. First journalists, now hostages. Unbelievable.

Israeli bulldozers have demolished tents of displaced Palestinians outside a hospital in the Gaza Strip, “burying people alive” inside them, according to a report.

Video footage from Al Jazeera showed mangled tents and belongings of Palestinians at the courtyard of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, north of Gaza, on Saturday. The report said at least 20 bodies now lie in the yard.

“Dozens of displaced, sick, and wounded people were buried alive. The occupation [Israeli] bulldozers trampled the tents of the displaced people in the hospital yard and brutally crushed them,” Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif reported.

“A terrifying massacre and unspeakable scenes. What the Israeli occupation did inside Kamal Adwan Hospital is a horrific crime against citizens and medical staff,” Sharif said in a post on X.