In the north of the Hamas-ruled Palestinian enclave, Israel said its forces were still present at Gaza’s biggest hospital, Al Shifa, but gave no further details of their operations since the previous day when they entered the facility culminating a days-long siege.
Reuters was unable to verify the situation at Shifa on Thursday morning, having lost contact with doctors inside it since Wednesday.
Leaflets dropped overnight from aircraft told civilians to leave the towns of Bani Shuhaila, Khuzaa, Abassan and Qarara, on the eastern edge of Khan Younis, the main southern city. The towns, collectively home to more than 100,000 people in peacetime, are now sheltering tens of thousands more who fled other areas.
I mean, yeah, he’s gonna need to take the whole thing, literally the whole place, if he wants to accomplish his stated objective. So it’s essentially a version of that puzzle where you’re unscrambling an image by sliding tiles one by one, with one empty space to work with. Except instead of unscrambling an image, it’s shuffling around civilians to be under the 5 bombs/day locations instead of the 50 bombs/day locations.
Only other even remotely possible options are evacuating them out of Gaza or arresting every single last one of them, to conduct an investigation.
The dude said “destroy HAMAS” though. I don’t think he’s lying about that specific part, so he will take every last square foot of Gazan soil. He has no other alternative that will result in the potential destruction of his declared enemy, since they have the whole place. If he leaves any part of Gaza undestroyed, then that’s where HAMAS will go.
This is cold military calculation. The goal is to accomplish the objective. It is the civilian govt’s job to rein in the military, if they can.
There is another way to see this, where the IDF moves Palestinians into a smaller and smaller area until 1 bomb would kill them all.
Genocide is as genocide does.
That’s about as dumb a take as it gets. If they wanted to maximize civilian deaths their casualty to bomb ratio would be astronomically higher.
They don’t want to maximize civilian deaths. They just want Palestinians out. If that’s by killing them or just making them refugees, they don’t really care. And if doing it over a few weeks, instead of just outright killing them all instantly, means less international criticism, they’ll do it that way.
They need to maintain the cover that they’re following international law (even though everyone with two braincells, including the UN knows they’re not).