this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2024
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[–] JustZ -2 points 7 months ago (4 children)

On the day after March 7 when was announced, US military brass said it would take approximately sixty days and that the goal date to open would be May 1.

Sounds like they'll be pretty close to that date. At least six ships have deployed to the Mediterranean with 1,000 troops and the Pentagon said yesterday "by the end of April or early May."

I don't know what's involved with the project enough to speculate as to how long it should take and whether the Army and Navy engineers are making good time or not.

The invasion of Rafah has been inevitable for months if you've heard anything Israel has said. The Hamas big whigs followed their own families and neighbors to Rafah, using them as human shields. The war is about ending Hamas and destroying the tunnel system. The tunnels go to Rafah, therefore the IDF was going to Rafah.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

One ship also had issues on its way and had to turn back. It's coming, but building a port from scratch isn't instant sadly. This is the channel to watch for anything involving shipping.

Edit: The human shield argument is bullshit though. Gaza is one of the most populated places on Earth. There are civilians everywhere. There's no option for not being around civilians.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

This is the channel to watch for anything involving shipping.

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Reminder that the existence of a local civilian population does not constitute a human shield. The Israelis seem to want Hamas to all line up in an empty field and unfurl a "strike here" sign, which is obviously unreasonable. Classically, a human shield is holding a guy physically in front of you. It can be extended a bit, like if you operate a missile battery from a declared POW camp, but I don't think they'd be comfortable with their stated doctrine if it was extended to, say, the Warsaw uprising.

Other than that, yeah, I'm pretty sure the pier is still in the works, even if Israel is going to use it as an excuse to permit even less aid-wise.

[–] JustZ -5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

When Hamas is encouraging people to ignore the evacuation warnings, or telling people the warnings are a hoax, in order to increase the body count, I call it human shields. Either way, it's a war crime for soldiers to dress up like civilians and hide with them. Hamas is literally trying to get as many Palestinians killed as possible. It's great publicity for the pan-Islamist/Hamas cause. And it blows my mind that there's people here who seem to be about five Al Jazeera articles short of setting themselves on fire because of war crimes, cheering on an organization that literally gives cash prizes to war criminals for doing war crimes.

Nobody is expecting Hamas to line up, but they are expecting that when they call people on the phone and tell them to get out of the building because the tunnel underneath it is about to be blown up, innocent civilians will evacuate.

They are expecting that the people in charge in Gaza have an iota of decency with which they might surrender the tunnels and the hostages, maybe secure for themselves the rights of prisoners of war instead of terrorists. Seems reasonable to me. Even Japan surrendered for the benefit of its people, as did Germany, as did the Polish resistance in Warsaw.

Hamas thinks they found a lawfare loophole where, if they can muster up enough dead kids for the newspapers, the world powers are going to cede a democracy to Iran. I know it's super uncomfortable to say but that's not going to happen in any foreseeable future.

Maybe you think Hamas is right, that if they can follow the civilian population around long enough, and get the body count up high enough, the western world will turn on Israel, and Iran will come in like Gandalf at dawn on the fifth day to save Gaza (while trying to for real genocide the Jews (in a way comparable to the mass summary executions of 150,000 civilians in 60 days by the Nazis in Warsaw). I don't think the West would stand for that. So, the only way to avoid total war in the middle east as I see is it to deter and contain Iran, and that means neither Hamas nor any other Iranian proxy get to have its own country on Israel's front doorstep. Hamas can and should end the war tomorrow. I like to imagine how Gaza might prosper without a religious psychopaths stealing all the money and food to build tunnels, which after blowing their load on October 7, are proving to be essentially useless against Israel.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

For the record, I don't like Iran either. And definitely not Hamas. All parties directly involved are different flavours of theocratic non-democracies. Apartheid is not democracy, even if it's apartheid in favour of people like me.

I don't think it's realistic that if Hamas disbanded, Gaza would live in peace and "prosper". In fact, the Israeli government has gone out of their way to help Hamas grow in order to have them as an excuse for why that's not happening, because they don't want a 2-state solution.

[–] merthyr1831 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Oh give off with the "human shields" bullshit, I won't even bother giving you a response because you deserve no such respect from me.

Fuck off back to reddit if you want to spout baseless Zionism.

[–] JustZ -3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I wouldn't find anything bullshit about it if terrorists wanted to build a hideout under my house.

[–] merthyr1831 3 points 7 months ago

If the "IDF" has succeeded in anything, it's proving how useless the term "terrorist" is. Every toy of the western PR machine has been thrown out the pram.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The war is about ending Hamas and destroying the tunnel system

That may have been arguable on Oct. 8th, but no one with eyes and a brain buys that anymore. It is a war of annihilation, they are destroying all of Gaza and crushing hopes of a Palestinian nation. The Israeli establishment has made it clear they don't support a Palestinian state of any kind.

Even during this current escalation they have continued to annex land in the West Bank, what does that have to do with Hamas or tunnels?

[–] JustZ -4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

There are between 300 to 450 miles of tunnels, from Hamas's own mouth, built up over fifty years, in an area only 25 miles wide. To build them they used billions in funding, from such beacons of humanity and civil rights as Iran, Qatar, and North Korea. Hamas turned the very foundation of the most populated areas of Gaza into Swiss cheese that isn't fit to hold up a paper hat. And to achieve what? A mass shooting of 1,300 people? That's why millions of Gazans had to live and die in a constant state of malnourishment and dependence on foreign charity with zero hope for prosperity for decadesnas Hamas diverted all public resources toward war crimes?

I get it, extremists sincerely don't like the idea of a Jewish state in the Levant. That doesn't mean they get to have patent and willful disregard for all international laws to try and blow it up. Arabs think it was their land first because the Ottoman empire had been murdering and taking as slaves the indigenous Hebrew-speaking Israelites, Semitic people, for so long, that they held all the deeds and Jews became foreigners on their own land. But the archeological record, recorded history, remembers, and Hamas surely knows this, too, what with all that digging. Regardless, I don't think that's really what motivates people to live and die for such spiteful resentment.

The truth of the matter is that religious tyrants run the middle-east, and the idea that government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the people over whom is governs and to whom it is subservient--to the exclusion of religious "law"--is an existential threat to the established power dynamic, which, again, is based on mysticism and superstition. Law that can be changed on the whim or fantasy of one or two church muckity mucks is not a system that is capable of granting, let alone protecting human or civil rights.

The West Bank is somehow more complicated than Gaza, IMO. Expansion should stop indefinitely and sectarian violence should be dealt with harshly by Israel and by the West, via sanctions, carrots and sticks. I have hope Israel and America will deal with its own tyrants peacefully at the ballot box; we will know soon enough. I'm not opposed to a Palestinian state in the West Bank if its got its shit together. Could start by denouncing Hamas for what it is and demanding its surrender, calling for release of hostages, etc.