steventhedev

So you don't think there's any possible peaceful solution? Only the violent destruction of Israel?

Even though this will elicit a response from them I don't think they will fire an overly large barrage. 5-10 at a time every hour for a few hours will probably get the response they're looking for. This wasn't a Hezbollah member, but they need to save face after drawing the line in the sand - so they'll launch something "easy" but serious enough to make it look like they're doing something.

If they drop a residential building in Tel Aviv it would run the risk of an immediate and extreme escalation.

From the AP article:

U.S. officials had previously pointed to classified intelligence, obtained independently from the Israelis, to offer support for Israel’s raid.

The US and UK (possibly more, I lost track at some point) have been running surveillance flights over Gaza for pretty much the entire duration of the war. There are plenty of eyes on Israel's military operations and ways to gather intelligence inside Gaza.

NYT themselves came to the conclusion that al-Shifa was used for military purposes based on Hamas' own propaganda. It's always been a question of how central it was to Hamas' operations.

I'm going to go a step further and say that the vast majority of Israelis would not agree to attacking civilians in general, and certainly not like this. This is a pretty clear attempt to "poke the bear" which is never a good idea. Even the most hawkish Israelis wouldn't want to preemptively open another front in an already complex war.

AP have the most comprehensive coverage of the document, which is not publicly available. Two sections in jump out to me:

“The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident in its judgment on this topic and has independently corroborated information on HAMAS and PIJ’s use of the hospital complex for a variety of purposes related to its campaign against Israel,” the assessment states. It continues that it believes the groups “used the al-Shifa hospital complex and sites beneath it to house command infrastructure, exercise certain command and control activities, store some weapons, and hold at least a few hostages.”

And

The U.S. believes that Hamas members evacuated days before Israel raided the complex on Nov. 15 and that they destroyed sensitive documents and electronics before Israeli troops entered the facility.

The article didn't mention that they had been deployed since May, and I had thought they were deployed directly from Norfolk in October. That makes a ton more sense.

There are basically three reasons they would withdraw the CSG:

1. They believe the situation is sufficiently stable and withdrawing the CSG will not encourage Iranian backed groups to escalate too much.
2. They want to signal to Israel that ground operations need to wind down within days.
3. This is part of regular deployment changes and a replacement force will be deployed to the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

Given the US were running 24/7 surveillance flights over Gaza, 2 is highly unlikely and there would be other signals like the State department sending that signal.

Option 1 is similarly unlikely given the regional escalations.

Which leaves option 3. Which makes tons of sense and shows military doctrines that are similar - Israel is rotating 5 brigades of reserve troops out of Gaza.

My prediction is that Hezbollah will take a day or two with far fewer rocket launches on Israeli civilians, and then around Jan 3 or 4 they will launch a much larger salvo to test the US response. Hamas already jumped on this, launching 20-some rockets. I haven't seen an explicit Houthi response yet, but the Eisenhower is closer to them than the Ford so I don't think they'll pay close attention to this beyond some saber rattling.

It is unknown how much uranium they have enriched to 90%, but the IAEA have confirmed that at least 280kg have been enriched to 60%, and Iran is producing an additional 9kg per month from these facilities. I'm not overly familiar with how long the enrichment process will take to go from 60% to 90%, or even if it is a different process than their existing one.

But the jump from having sufficient materiel to having a functional physics package is extremely short and not at all complex - it's taught in AP Physics classes and well described on wikipedia.

Point being that they are potentially mere months away from having nuclear weapons.

Intel, whose investment will be over five years, will pay a corporate tax rate of 7.5% instead of 5% previously. The normal tax rate is 23%, but under Israel's law to encourage investment in development areas, companies receive large benefits.

Usually these types of grants are never a good investment but the increased corporate tax rate alone covers a third of the grant (9b yearly taxable revenue at 2.5% over 5 years comes out to 1.125b).

• MSF provide health services and are around 80% efficient (20% of your donation goes to overhead). I'm not sure if they make it easy to earmark a donation to Gaza.
• UNICEF does more infrastructure projects, but have around 30% overhead.

If you really want to maximize your impact, check if your employer or professional association have donation matching for various large charities.

There are obviously many more charities - these are two that I believe have the highest chances of actually reaching civilians in Gaza and not being diverted.

Here's the Wired article this is just copying.

Others, like those in the library, are described as “blind doors,” made to imitate the design of the surrounding walls.