Israel/Palestine, 20 October 2023
Good evening everybody!
From north towards south…
Israel-Lebanon
There are continuous exchanges of anti-tank-guided missiles, artillery and mortar fire along the border between Israel and Lebanon. The IDF and the IASF are regularly claiming ‘destruction’ of ‘snipers’, ‘gunmen’. Yesterday, the IDF claimed to have hit á number of ‘Hezbollah sites’ in southern Lebanon, ‘in response to rocket fire’: AFAIK, Hezbollah didn’t fire a single rocket so far (PIJ did), otherwise things would look dramatically different.
West Bank
In the West Bank, the IDF continues raiding for ‘Hamas suspects’. Has hijacked 584 ‘wanted’ Palestinians, claims that these are including ‘375 affiliated with Hamas’, and also the arrest of ’47 Hamas members’. Palestinians resist as far as they can: heaviest clash occurred in the Nur Shams refugee camp, where three (armed) Palestinians and one Israeli Border Guard were killed.
Don’t worry: terrorist settlers are continuing their ‘advance’ too…
Gaza Strip
There’s still no Israeli ground offensive: apparently, there’s a disagreement in this regards between Biden and Netanyahu. USA want to first try evacuating foreign citizens out of the Gaza Strip, and saving at least some hostages. Indeed, RUMINT has it, Washington has deployed the Delta Force to Israel for this purpose. Reason, there are many US and other foreign citizens between up to (this is the latest figure I’ve caught somewhere in the media), ‘250-300’ hostages taken by Hamas, PIJ, and others on 7 October. According to Hamas, more than 20 of these were killed in Israeli bombing so far.
Netanyahu’s government is zip-lip on the hostage issue: it’s ignoring even public protests going on in front of the MOD building for days already. And it couldn’t care less about foreign citizens in the Gaza Strip – which are including, and for example, few hundreds of US Americans, few hundreds of Ukrainians, similar numbers of British and other citizens
‘Instead’, Israel is continuing its disproportional and random aerial- and artillery-onslaught on the Gaza Strip. An ‘updated’ aim (along MOD Yoav Gallant, from today) remains ‘elimination of Hamas and destruction of its military- and governmental capabilities’, but also, so Gallant, ‘the complete removal of Israel’s responsibility from Gaza’, plus ‘the creation of new security regime’…
Frankly, I’ve got no idea what should that mean. Or at least: the two statements are contradictory. At most, they can be assumed to mean something like: ‘mass murder first, then some more annexation of Palestinian territory, with the note that Israel is not going to bear responsibility for the complete destruction of the Gaza Strip, nor any victims. But, once this is over, then Israel is going to impose itself in some sort of remote control’. The alternative would be that Israel is looking for a ‘solution’ in which it completely destroys organised life in the Gaza Strip, and then leaves, creating anarchy and then letting yet more extremist organisations to take over…
See: ‘Another Afghanistan’.
Head of the IDF Southern Command, Major-General Yaron Finkelman, was slightly clearer, yesterday. He said, ‘The manoeuvre (in Gaza) is going to move the fighting into their territory. It’s going to be long and intense.’
That said, the way this operation is progressing so far, I still have my doubts Israel is really searching for a way to destroy Hamas, PIJ and other terrorist groups. Sure, Israel claims to have killed two members of Hamas’ politburo, the last 24 hours, for a total of four so far. Hamas admitted that Jihad Muheisen, head of the National Security Force was killed in a strike on Sheikh Radwan quarter: strangely, the IDF did not claim his death, though… And so, Hamas and PIJ are still firing at least 100 rockets at Israel, every single day – from ‘nearby’ Netivot and Ashkelon, all the way up to at least Lod/Ben Gurion IAP and Jerusalem. Sometimes, there are up to 15 hours between volleys, sometimes ‘just’ 8-9 hours…
The IASF is said to be flying 150-250 sorties and striking about 400 targets a day. Most of weapons remain either old and unguided M117s (375kg) and Mk.82s (125kg), or GPS-guided GBU-31 JDAMs (with Mk.84 warheads weighting 907kg)). From the videos released by the IASF, it’s obvious that most of ordnance is completely obliterating entire buildings. Reported targets are ‘Hamas command centres’ (there must be few thousands of these, at least by the Israeli count), ‘anti-tank guided missile launch sites’ (In the middle of the Gaza City?), and ‘underground infrastructure’.
That said, Israel is increasingly deploying its heavy artillery to pound Gaza. So much so, it has already demanded urgent delivery of 155mm shells from the USA: the Pentagon thus began releasing shells manufactured for Ukraine. Additionally, the White House prepared an ‘aid package’ worth US$14 billion for Israel, and Israeli government is using chartered transport aircraft to haul ‘urgently necessary’ equipment to the country. For example; military ambulances, medical equipment, 4WD vehicles and MRAPs, and around 1,000 tons of arms and ammunition.
Sufficient to say that this, plus White House’s (see: Biden’s) reaction and politics vis-à-vis Israel and Palestine is meanwhile not only provoking mass demos in the USA, but also a growing number of staffers of the State Department to quit in protest. Some of the US media is reporting an outright ‘mutiny’ within the US foreign ministry.
In other news, directors of Shin Bet, AMAN, and ‘even’ Gallant, one by one, publicly announced they are assuming responsibility for failure to prevent or stop the terror attack on 7 October. Benjamin Corruption Netanyahu did nothing similar. Why should he? He’s just a prime minister and thus not responsible for anything (and facing a corruption trial; yes, again: the last time, he came away with a promise he would not return to the politics; as so often, and obviously, he lied, and returned to the politics…).
Post Scriptum on the Strike at the al-Ahli Hospital
Firstly, al-Jazeera has completely smashed the IDF claim according to which its own (al-Jazeera’s) videos would be showing that the hospital was hit by ‘Hamas/PIJ rockets’:
Secondly, more photos from the scene became available, and some of these are not only showing the crater of the weapon that caused the carnage, abut also additional ‘marks’ caused by shrapnel of the weapon. And, gauging by these marks, and thanks to geo-location by a FB-friend from Spain, the following conclusion can be drawn about the trajectory of the weapon that hit the ‘parking lot’ within the compound:
That’s something like 180° different direction from the one claimed by official Israel.
There’s still a big question mark over the weapon used, with there being at least three theories:
- a) 155mm artillery shell, filled with high explosive, and armed with a fuse set on air-burst; that would explain a relatively small crater, and minimal ‘debris’, though not exactly the carnage caused to the hundreds of civilians underneath the detonation;
- b) so-called ‘small diameter bomb’ (essentially, ‘mini-JDAM’, like GBU-39 or GBU-53, weighting 110-113kg; or
- c) Spice 250 (Israeli-made precision guided bomb, similar to JDAM by function).
…where a is most likely because of the (relatively) limited area impacted by the blast (which still knocked out all the doors and shattered all the windows in all the buildings of the complex, plus set some of its rooms on fire).
Whatever it was, it was no usual high-explosive warhead, because Palestinians did not report a large number of victims burned by heat (instead, people directly exposed were, literally, ‘chopped to pieces’), and it was nothing leaving usual pieces of wreckage behind: it left only that, relatively small and shallow crater.
…and neither Hamas nor PIJ have that kinds of warheads in their arsenals.
***
Note for those who might be upset about the ‘Hamas-propaganda’ figure of ‘500 killed’: don’t worry, this was meanwhile decreased to 471, and – to paraphrase Gallant – there were no human losses (because Gallant ‘nicely’ declared all Palestinians for ‘human animals’).
To the same characters, I cannot but recommend watching (or at least: listening to) this interview:
Hope is slim, but at least a few might follow this advice…