I don’t disagree that the reaction of land grab/cleaning semantics would still remain the same.

But this speculative ratio is a vague take at best. There are Israeli boots on the ground in Gaza, there is not mass Israeli soldier losses going on, certainly nothing close to a 20:1 ratio. The reality is still more Palestinians will die with a ground incursion than Israeli, such as we are seeing.

This post was edited by Bazi on Nov 24 2023 01:54pm

I saw a documentary few days ago: A part of israelis (typically right wing religious ones, right wing nationalists, or even colonizers who live in stolen lands) would prefer to sacrifice hostages and to let IDF to "finish off" Palestinians.
What you think ? Maybe it will still happen anyway, whatever hostages are liberated or not.

my post is 2 plans. bomb then enter, vs not bomb and enter.

that 20:1 is the latter, the city is bombed into submission currently. so of course casualties are low on the iraeli side.

hamas spent weeks firing rockets back at israel, and moved around weapons caches knowing they'd get destroyed in bombing. but if israel just entered on foot they'd be facing all of the weapons and rockets fired at their position. once you get into urban trench warfare it gets nasty and favors the home team. and thats what we'd see here imo.

in any case i dont see it as accomplishing a goal of defeating hamas. hamas wont fight them openly if they refuse to bomb. theyll snipe and fire rockets as they back further into gaza.

Finally some good point:
Biden orders top aides to prepare reprimands for violent Israeli settlers in West Bank .

==> Visa bans and sanctions for extremist Israeli settlers attacking and displacing Palestinians in the West Bank

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/18/biden-orders-top-aides-to-prepare-reprimands-for-violent-israeli-settlers-in-west-bank-00127940

I see what you’re saying

Yeah I mean it was never realistic they were just gonna go on foot without taking out some military infrastructure so that’s why I’m like this imaginary ratio doesn’t have much purpose

The criticism is that ok bomb military installments but bombing a populated area to kill 1 terrorist at the expense of 100 civilians, doesn’t serve the greater purpose of decreasing radicalism. This isn’t Ukraine vs Russia where 90% of Ukraine casualties are holding a rifle

But alas and it’s been agreed, the goal is not to decrease radicalism, which ultimately I think will be time proven as the more reasonable solution for longer term stability

This post was edited by Bazi on Nov 24 2023 02:20pm

i think we agree on everything but the bolded, because no military installments exist that are separate from civilians. the only thing to israel's credit is they've bombed the exact areas they announced they'd exist. they told people where they think the hamas strongholds are, told people to leave, and they didnt. why they didnt is a complex answer, of course.

there was even a recent story where israel took out a city that was home to a massive hamas training camp, and it was widely reported that they bombed a "refugee camp" rather than a "terrorist training camp". partially because everything is both.

Its all over the news all day, ofc we care what the world thinks

We agree there I think actually

I’m not naive to think that civilians will not die when you target military infrastructure. My point was it’s not just military infrastructure that is a target but also Hamas members themselves. My criticism was destroying a building, and a few dozen children, to destroy a Hamas member, not necessarily a criticism of the civilian deaths that would occur when you destroy a military infrastructure target

It is unfortunate that Israel have created a culture where they have next to zero credibility, and agree Hamas have negative credibility on this spectrum. It is honestly a joke some of the propaganda fails they have had over the last month ranging from the “leaked audio transcript” to social media Misposts to failed translations. Hopefully someone loses their job tbh. It would be easier for the world to cope with some civilian loss of life if they felt there was good faith involved, but it’s a story of terrible faith and dishonesty on all sides. Quite unlike the Ukraine conflict where an unbiased person can quite easily reflect on what’s going on there because of less fog of war.

This post was edited by Bazi on Nov 24 2023 02:29pm

i think, and its just speculation, that had israel been more lenient in their bombing initially we wouldnt see the ground invasion now. we'd have seen a far longer bombing campaign that gets to the same body count more or less. they were never going to move in on foot without bombing into submission first, whether that was a month of loosely targeted bombing or 3 months or more targeted bombing it was reality imo. but i agree id have preferred that. and i think theyd have been taken to task if they did that. they tried to shoot so much so fast that the US couldnt tell them to stop.

If you want to take land with no regards to civilians you bomb them much harder with old school bombs (no precision bombs).
For short period of time and push forward swiftly.

In this case because we have civilians in the way we have to warn them wait for them to move and then bomb our way in which is much less effective but with less casualties.
If Israel wanted we had the Gaza strip in 1 week 200k casualties and Hamas gone for good.
Before the world would even uproar we would be on the border with egypt.