Israeli defense forces need to fight smarter. Have they not seen how the war is fought in Ukraine? They should be using kamikaze drones to target Hamas instead, of infantry and lots of tanks. Those tanks can easily be destroyed by kamikaze drones or anti-tank missiles which Hamas has. Also, artillery should have a larger role to destroy buildings with Hamas fighters. Tunnels, they should bomb the openings and shut it down and let Hamas expose the other exits. They have to come out sometime to fire rockets, missiles and mortar. As well as attack Israeli forces. That is where you can kill them easily with kamikaze drones.
Wow, where did you learn such nuanced strategy & tactics? Our professional, lifelong officer corps should be ashamed! /s
So over 9000 Hamas terrorist dead and a mere 200 or so IDF members dead. Does this sound like the terrorists are "outfoxing the IDF"? For those who have been paying attention, Israel has been using technology, drones, precision airstrikes, artillery, and other measures to take out Hamas tunnels, and militants while attempting to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties in a crowded urban environment where Hamas uses civilians as human shields. The only thing keeping the Hamas leadership alive in Gaza is the reality that they are using Israeli hostages as human shields -- to prevent attempts to take out the Hamas leadership.
Patrick Lawrence: The Palestinians Won in The Hague: So Did the Rest of Us January 29, 2024 Leave a Comment on Patrick Lawrence: The Palestinians Won in The Hague: So Did the Rest of Us The non–West has spoken, it has raised its voice. Half a dozen years ago I sat in the lobby lounge at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan talking at length with Richard Falk, the scholar, lawyer, U.N. rapporteur, and advocate of Palestinian rights. Inevitably, the conversation turned for a time to international law, a topic on which Falk has long been a recognized authority. Here is a little of what he said as we took our afternoon tea: When international law is on the side of the geopolitical actors, then they are very serious about its relevance. When the American embassy was seized in Tehran after the Iranian Revolution, they talked about the flouting of international law as if that was the most sacred body of law that ever existed. International law is used very instrumentally. If you’re protecting private investment in Venezuela or Chile, then it’s barbaric not to uphold it. But if it’s blocking the pursuit of some kind of interventionist project, then it’s flaky or irrelevant to talk about it … I thought about that exchange over the weekend, as I considered the International Court of Justice’s ruling last Friday that the apartheid state of Israel may be guilty of genocide against Gaza’s Palestinian population, as South Africa charges, and that the case Pretoria brought last month must proceed. Later Friday, the estimable Phyllis Bennis quoted Falk in a piece she wrote for In These Times. Falk called the decision the court’s “greatest moment,” and went on to explain, “It strengthens the claims of international law to be respected by all sovereign states—not just some.” Consistency of thought: It does not get more admirable than this. There are many, many ways to look upon the ICJ’s ruling, many things worth saying. The very first of these is that the significance of the ICJ’s interim finding lies beyond dispute. Will the barbarities of a nation self-evidently suffering a collective psychosis now stop? No. What Dick Falk said six years ago still holds: Israel has already made clear it will ignore The Hague’s judgment. But what “the Jewish state” does this week or next is not for the moment our question. What are the enduring consequences of this ruling for the global order? How shall we situate the court’s judgment? Where does its importance lie? These are our questions. And Falk was right last Friday, too: The ICJ has begun the work—the long work—of restoring international law as a foundational feature of a world order worthy of the term. Having made this point, I must immediately note the abject deflections we find in the reports of our corporate media—which, nearly to a one, urge their readers, listeners, and viewers to dismiss the ICJ’s interim finding as, borrowing from Falk, more or less flaky and irrelevant. In the second paragraph of its main story Friday, The New York Times, fairly bursting to get the point across, wrote, “The court did not rule on whether Israel was committing genocide, and it did not call on Israel to stop its campaign to crush Hamas…” Three untruths here, straight off the top. One, the South Africans did not ask The Hague to issue a ruling on genocide one way or the other. In the cause of expedience, to stop the savagery as quickly as possible, it asked for what it got—a swift interim judgment so the court could order Israel to stop the violence and that the larger case on genocide could proceed. Two, a mountain has been made of the fact that the ICJ did not, in so many words, call upon Israel to cease fire in Gaza. This is preposterously misleading. Peruse the six stipulations that comprise the ruling, the first of which reads, “Israel shall take all measures within its power to prevent all acts within the scope of Genocide Convention, Article 2.” Here I defer to Raz Segal, an Israeli historian who professes at Stockton University in New Jersey. This is from a segment of Democracy Now!, distributed last Friday: We’re already seeing headlines in The New York Times today which frame this as, “The court did not issue an order for a ceasefire”—which, in effect, it actually did, because if it ordered that Israel should cease from genocidal acts, and it ordered Israel should facilitate the entry of humanitarian aid, it actually said, “You have to cease fire because there is no [other] way of doing that.” And three, what Israel is doing in Gaza—as any review of the daily death toll will make clear, any five minutes of video footage—can be characterized as “a military campaign to crush Hamas” only by those so abjectly committed to defending Israeli atrocities that all thought of honest reporting and writing is cast aside. Almost all major media have followed The Times’s lead, per usual. Among the exceptions—and I confess my surprise here—is National Public Radio. It got the no-ceasefire bit wrong, but it otherwise published a quite good, balanced report from London that included worthy material from its South Africa correspondent (unless NPR took this off the wires): Since former President Nelson Mandela’s administration, South Africa has long supported the Palestinian cause, saying it sees echoes of apartheid in the situation between the Israelis and Palestinians. “We, as South Africans, will not be passive bystanders and watch the crimes that were visited upon us being perpetrated elsewhere,” [South African President Cyril] Ramaphosa said Friday. He noted the ICJ affirmed South Africa’s right to take Israel to court, “even though it is not a party to the conflict in Gaza.” But exceptions prove rules, let us not forget. For the sheer nonsense of its reporting, I have to single out—the envelope, please—the reliably egregious MSNBC. You may want to take a moment to read this twice. In its Friday evening newscast, it had it that the ICJ ruling is nicely aligned with the Biden regime’s calls to minimize civilian casualties. Further, we need to know what The Hague’s finding is not and what it does not do: It is not any kind of indictment of the Biden regime’s policy, no, and it does not make Biden and the U.S. complicit in genocide. It is and it does, in my view. The running theme in American media is that The Hague’s judgment has changed nothing. Who can be surprised? Nothing ever changes when these media are telling us about the world. America is never wrong. America never makes a mistake. America is never on the wrong side. America is always good. America never loses. Let us now consider what enormous changes occurred when Joan Donoghue, an American judge who currently presides at The Hague, read out the ruling. Rest of article...
No, it sounds like exaggerated body count. I'm pretty sure we killed off the entire north Vietnamese population several times over. Wasn't uncommon to watch the same guy die 5 times, sometimes dozens dead with no bodies. It was the we musta hit something method of counting. Nothing changes in the war for profit game.
I don't believe the summary of the number of Hamas militant deaths provided by the IDF is exaggerated in the least bit. In fact they are being conservative. It should be noted that Hamas has effectively supported the figures several times while whining about the demise of the dead militants while proclaiming they would get revenge.
plus there's this: https://www.elitetrader.com/et/thre...-of-casualty-information.378065/#post-5918864 Israel's basically looking at the health ministry's numbers above, looking at age and sex of casualties and saying "well, adult male is a fighter (by extension hamas) because which adult male wouldn't fight if we're bombing your household?" FWIW: Dead adult male is how we counted insurgents in iraq. citation needed