Quote (ofthevoid @ Oct 8 2023 10:59am)
They have to act, not after Hamas literally gunned down civilians and dragged others back to Gaza as human shields. Something this bad hasn't happened since the 70s. I honestly don't see how we don't end up without a huge body count. Arabs want a soft touch from Israel, giving warnings, but I think all of Israel is seeing red right now and they don't care.
Probably why they made a point to video everything and spread it over social media, like you said they have to act after something like that, this basically shattered the idea they are untouchable apart from random knife/rocket attacks.
Quote (Goomshill @ Oct 8 2023 11:01am)
Israel isn't going to flatten Gaza. Its simply too large and dense. Its a city of 2 million people packed in like sardines. Israel won't even be willing to cut off water services.
I think the DMZ scenario is a very real possibility in the long term. If Gaza isn't going to go away, and Israel can no longer contain them with soft borders, we may very well see the Gaza Strip surrounded by a minefield, barbed wire, trenches, bunkers, etc. Look at the immediate response from the IDF- they can't just go in guns blazing while Hamas holds a hundred hostages, they won't accomplish anything by leveling more buildings, they aren't even bombing Gaza without first warning people to evacuate with tap strikes. But what did they do? They evacuated all the border kibbutz and villages. All those enclaves the Palestinians overran were liberated, then abandoned overnight. What happens if all the desert between the armistice line and surrounding Israel becomes a layered defense like the Korean DMZ? Only Sderot is too close to the border, and Israel has an obvious solution for that: Annexing the eastern sliver of Gaza (all farmland) and violating the armistice line to build the wall further from Sderot and put the DMZ between them.
Your solution seems reasonable I just don't know how reasonable Israel is feeling. Whatever happens there is going to be some response, that response is inevitably going to cause a lot of civilian casualties and if Hamas started this with the purpose of triggering a wider war then their intention is probably to drag out the fighting at the expense of the people living there.