What lies in wait for Israeli ground troops in Gaza, security sources say, is a Hamas tunnel network hundreds of kilometres long and up to 80 metres deep, described by one freed hostage as “a spider’s web” and by one expert as the “Viet Cong times 10”.
The Palestinian Islamist group has different kinds of tunnels running beneath the sandy 360-sq-km coastal strip and its borders - including attack, smuggling, storage and operational burrows, Western and Middle East sources familiar with the matter said.
The United States believes Israel’s special forces will face an unprecedented challenge having to battle Hamas militants while trying to avoid killing hostages held below ground, a U.S. official said.
Eliminate Hamas > free hostages
But are Hamas going to be blamed for those deaths?
When in reality the hostages were killed due to an aerial bombardment coming from Israel?
What’s disturbing is that the Israelian government seems to care very little about those hostages.
Yes, probably. Just as when a bank robber’s partner - or a civilian in the bank, etc - is shot and killed by responding police, the robber is charged with murder. The idea is that the dead person would not have been in that situation had it not been for the robber, making them the responsible party.
They don’t care at all, Netanyahu and his right wing cohorts are so concerned with holding on too their seats that they don’t even realise that taking responsibility for this mess and focusing on freeing the hostages would get a lot of the population to back them again (they shouldn’t, but they would), to them conflict = distraction = more time to fund more illegal settlements to make sure another conflict is always coming up, all so they can keep living like kings at the expense of the whole region.
And of course not at the same level, but Hamas leadership aren’t acting in the best interest of their people either, yes, they are reacting to oppression which is understandable, but they’re doing it a way that won’t ever lead to that oppression ending, but only to their population to be decimated (if they had attacked only military targets and power/water supply and transportation routs like destroying roads and railways, they could have shut Israel down, add maybe banks or other financial institutions, and they would have put the Israeli government in a much harder position)
Look at what Hamas could extort from the Israeli government with one hostage (see: Gilad Shalit).
At a certain point, the Netanyahu administration needs to sit down with its military apparatus and get answers to hard questions like:
It’s not hard to imagine a calculated decision around a table where the outcome favors eradicating Hamas over recovering hostages.
And with respect to
It seems like academic distinction at this point. There is casus belli for Israel to attack Hamas. Now there’s a war. War sucks for many, many, many reasons, among which is collateral civilian damage. Made even worse when the Israeli military fights against irregular forces who have deliberately embedded themselves into and under high-density vulnerable targets amongst their own population. Do you blame the missile striking its target? The institution with justification to launch them? The deliberate design decision for the Hamas government to bunker up their terrorist leaders underneath civilian hospitals?
What are you trying to sort out for yourself by deciding how to mete out the blame?
War is war. Innocent people will die. So it goes. “Poo-tee-weet,” as Vonnegut wrote about the whole disgusting affair.
Yeah, there’s so much space for them to work with, right?