I've been a leftist my entire adult life but I will never understand the dogmatic policy among "my people" to never criticize the Palestinians; they can do no wrong. It's dangerous tunnel vision that props up the worst actors among the Palestinian people- and after years of unconditional support where do we end up? October 7th. And where does that lead? To the footage in this video.
As you say, Ryan, in the end it's the average Palestinian dude who suffers the most.
I support Ukraine strongly but if they send the 3rd Assault Brigade into Russia tomorrow to do what Hamas did on 10/7, I'd stop my support immediately, whereas Hamas knows they can essentially behave as barbaric as they please and "my people" on the left will still support them (and then venerate their actions.) It disturbs me to consider what it will take for that to stop. And if it doesn't stop, how far will this all go? How many ordinary Palestinian dudes (and their families) will suffer for it?
You gotta hold your people accountable when they act like animals.
Is a JDAM that takes out the entire building and kills all the other people in it the only way in which the army can respond to seeing a rocket launch holes in the building? You said if you were a soldier you’d call in a airstrike is there nothing else available in the arsenal of Smart modern warfare?
You can use smaller bombs. JDAMS come in different sizes. But other then sending in troops, there isn't much you can do. Maybe you could send in a drone if they are available. But if you have a timetable, you aren't going to stop to deploy a drone. You drop the building and keep moving.
The other people that might be in the home know very well what having terrorists use their building for launching rockets means, and would be very stupid if they were anywhere nearby. The interior of that home likely has significant damage from the rockets backblast, even if hammering holes in the walls wasn't an issue.
In war, you use what is available at the moment you have a target. It's not a video game, with a menu of different things you can choose. If the only available weapon to address the threat from that building is a JDAM, then you use it. If a tank gun is what you have, you use that. There is no requirement to risk soldier's lives to eliminate a position used to attack you, and there is wide latitude for what you can do to deal with it. Bottom line is that Al Quds (or Hamas, or whoever) used this private home for an attack, rendering it a legitimate military target. Israel has the legal right to deal with that target in any way it sees fit, within some wide band of proportionality. If you want to whine about damage to private property or deaths of civilians, point your critique at the folks who turned that private property into a military target.
Exactly. Do I send more of my friends in to die because I'm trying to protect the people likely complicit in the act or do I take out the target and move on?
Does the taking of that target justify the civilians held against their will in that building being killed? Did I hold them in that building against their will?
Who took the building for the purpose of using it as a military action?
If a building is being used to launch rockets, I destroy the building before it destroys me.
I suppose if they had a tank available they could fire 1 or more 120 mm projectiles or perhaps they are going to call in a 155 mm artillery strike. Any of those would likely level the target. Pick your method of stand off weapons.
Just like Ukrainians are using drones to hit tanks because it’s much cheaper and much more effective than artillery. Could that not be used to take out militance within a house? Or is it something that just hasn’t advanced just yet? Like a grenade and a drone would be cheaper more effective and create much less collateral damage.
Perhaps, but why do you think that only the one apartment has militants? Israel takes out the one apartment then what? The other apartments with militants attack them?
This is the issue when one side hides among civilians, dresses like civilians, and uses civilians as human shields. Israel's job is to protect Israelis, including Israeli soldiers. It is not the job of Israel to protect the lives of Gazans. It is the job of Hamas, as the government of Gaza, to protect Gazan civilians. Instead, they have done everything in their power to get Gazan civilians killed.
If you want to get mad at someone for all of the civilian casualties in Gaza, get mad at Hamas. They are 100% responsible for every Gazan and Israeli death.
And so many people completely ignore that vital fact: as the government in Gaza, Hamas is obligated to protect its civilians. It is, as you put it, their job. Not Israel's.
What completely blows my mind is how Hamas made zero substantive effort to evacuate its people as Israel prepared its response. If I remember correctly, there was about three weeks until the IDF arrived, post-10/7. That is a lot of time to get civilians safely out of what is about to become a deadly war zone.
Not only did Hamas not evacuate, Hamas told its people to stay.
I'm not going to celebrate thousands of dead Palestinian kids, but I'm not going to condemn Israel either. Even the Nazis had enough moral spine to send their kids to the countryside when we started bombing their cities.
Meanwhile, how many kids are dead because of the callous indifference of Hamas?
Early on in this conflict I saw a news report from Gaza that showed a Palestinian woman crying over her child's lifeless body. She was screaming something to the effect of 'fu** you Hamas! Not Israel, Hamas.
Imagine working hard to create a home for you and your family only to have a bunch of 'soldiers'(?) knock on your door and TELL you that they are going to use your living room as a firing point.
Imagine laying PVC pipe to irrigate your field only to have the same people come and dig it up to use for making rockets.
Hamas, Quds, et.al. started this war. They should get no love from the world and even less from the people of Gaza.
You are throwing munitions at me from behind a brick wall and brick ceiling. To kill you and destroy your munition I need to penetrate said brick wall and ceiling (or, walls and ceilings). Any counterstrike that can do that is likely to do major damage to the building, if not flatten it outright. I fail to see how drones and the like can do the same job with less power, since there are actual walls people are sheltering behind. A grenade sized drone could go through an open window, but that can be accounted for by windows (drone would need to smash the window without popping the grenade, etc), and might not have enough power to take out all the enemies and their munitions, etc. This thing of surgical violence is bullshit that people believe because they have never had to dish it out, stay alive while they do it, and pick up the pieces afterwards. Things are far more complex in the real world than what theory and movies would like us to believe.
Depends on who’s engaging the target if for example you’re a armoured column you might not have a drone operator but you do have a tank cannon so you’re going to use what’s available to you, if you have a drone great use a drone but more times then not you’re probably not going to have a drone and operator on hand.
Let's be honest though, you can show them this video and plenty of people will still deny that it justifies Israel's military actions. As far as many people are concerns, hamas and other jihadist groups that commit every war crime under the rome statute don't exist unless they have some 'glorious victory' they can brag about as a middle finger to the 'colonial oppressors' which they obviously achieved without a single war crime being committed or civilian endangered.
Let's not act like this whole conflict isn't Israel's fault. Hamas and groups like it exist because Israel has created a situation where they feel terrorism is their only remaining avenue of change. That's not an excuse of terrorism, but the opposite of that doesn't have to be supporting how Israel has treated Palestine for decades.
No, what you wrote IS an (attempted) excuse for terrorism.
The political plight of the Palestinian people is legitimate, baseline I sympathize with them, but if the best they can come up with to solve that plight is entering the homes of civilians and killing people in front of their families and then taking the survivors as hostages....then to hell with them. That's NOT political. There's NOTHING political about mass murder. It's just mass murder.
Stop rationalizing the barbarity of sociopaths.
I am sick of the world acting like no one has it as bad as the Palestinians. I live in Philadelphia. I completely reject the fallacy that your average kid in northern Gaza has it "worse than" the average kid living here in North Philly, or Southwest Philly, or Kensington.
Have you seen the livecams of our Kensington neighborhood? I'm guessing even the (former, unfortunately) citizens of Northern Gaza would blush.
For starters, Gaza doesn't have a fraction of the crime we do, the murders, the sexual assaults, the overdose deaths, etc. And yes, our most vulnerable citizens are also politically marginalized, unfortunately.
But do WE degrade ourselves by resorting to mass murder?
The barbarity that the Palestinian community has resorted to is no one's fault but their own and I really wish the world would stop giving them a pass. Everyone has a choice to not become a monster.
Israel has been doing the same thing for many decades? They started it. Jewish terrorism predates Arab terrorism in the region and the world by half a century.
It's you that's pretending that this started with Israel (IE Jews) at all. Every possible source of this cycle of violence, short of being a legal immigrant lawfully buying land, started with Palestinian extremists committing atrocities against Jews from the battle (massacre) of tel hai, nebi Musa riots in 1920, Jaffa riots in 1921, and the Hebron massacre in 1929, to the day after the UN decided on a two state solution in 1947 as well as every time thereafter Palestinians sided with Israel's enemies when they invaded or the leaders of palestine rejected a two state solution because they want full legal legitimacy in their imaginary world where they somehow manage to take over Israel. Not to mention every poll we see from Palestine shows they don't want a two state solution, they don't even want a one state, two people solution. They want a one state solution and all the Jews ethnically cleansed from the region.
Palestinians have been there own worst enemy and have been the reason they are treated the way they are for decades and have encouraged more extremist Israeli ideologies and actions by convincing more and more Israelis, including Arab Israelis, that a two state solution isn't even possible anyway so what's the point in trying to accommodate for a people who, for decades, have favoured your extermination over coexistence.
So I just put up a comment condemning the initial comment here which claims the whole conflict is Israel's fault and then attempts to rationalize the savagery of Hamas, but I have to say I would disagree with saying "none of" the overall conflict is Israel's fault.
I've always avoided taking sides in this conflict because they have each committed terrible atrocities, and supporting either would mean compromising my own values to a degree I'm not willing to.
That said, recently the Palestinians have been, in my opinion, shockingly more abominable and my sympathy is with Israel for the moment; essentially I believe Hamas must be unequivocally destroyed.
But I would never say Israel is blameless for the political situation.
There's no excuse for 10/7. It is indefensible and Israel is right and just for destroying Hamas in its wake. But I can't personally say that everything that came before it is the fault, solely, of one side or the other. There's blame to go around in that conflict.
How is Israel at fault even before Oct 7th? Possibly they are at fault for being too lenient on the Palestinians in the past.
They've suffered thousands of rocket attacks per year from Gaza without responding.
They've tried offering land for peace multiple times and each time it ended with the Palestinians walking away and launching terrorist campaigns.
Since the day Israel was founded they've been under assault by Arabs within Palestine and without.
Even the narrative of the situation is stacked against Israel. By any rational definition, Palestinians are not refugees. The idea of someone being a refugee in an area where they were born and raised is for multiple generations is an ludicrousl. The Jews who were forced out of Arab countries in the 40s, 50s, and 60s are not considered to be refugees. But Palestinians whose ancestors who have lived in the west bank and Gaza for hundreds of years are refugees? The descendants of Palestinians who voluntarily left Israel or who took up arms against Israel and were kicked out in the 40s are refugees, but tens of millions of Europeans whose ancestors were displaced during WWI and WWII are not.
I'm not sure exactly what Israel has done in any of this for it to be at fault. Except to defend itself.
Israel has not created a situation so desperate that they have to resort to terrorism. Israeli Arabs live with full political and civil rights. Hamas could have taken steps to normalize their relationship with Israel. But then they wouldn't be Hamas.
Jesus, not what a 107mm rocket is supposed to be used for or delivered from. Thanks Ryan I am glad to have subscribed for a year. You are an awesome "go to" source for the reality of things.
Thanks Ryan even in New Zealand our news is very average, its good to have a trustable information source, keep up the good work. Also you'd think they might cover the holes up with a flag or sheet until launch unless this was a promotional video in a safe area.
Ryan, this is good insight but isn’t a fulsome explanation for the absolute devastation Israel has unleashed. You’re 100% right; we (Western coalition forces) would call down a JDAM, a 500lb type. GBU-54, BLU-111, etc. Or put a tank round or AT-4 through it. But for a huge chunk of this war, Israel’s been tossing unguided 2000 lb. Mk.84 munitions out like candy into dense urban environments. This is borderline unthinkable for Western planners, and a grievous moral/legal concern (nevermind the strategic implications). Israel has a right to pursue Hamas to extinction, but we must demand precision and proportionality from those with whom we so closely ally. We can’t write off their almost cartoonish disregard for civilian destruction quite so easily.
A rare but severe disappointment from someone who makes his brand on truth, accuracy, and technical analysis. The open source intelligence is out there on the ordnance that’s been dropped, and there’s literally no viable explanation other than Israel is all out of F’s to give about collateral damage.
He should’ve called up the A-10 pilots he met during the NFL flyover episode and ask them under what circumstances they’d drop Mk.84s in a dense urban environment. And watch their facial expressions.
Spot on twice: No, they aren't stupid. They are very resilient, resourceful and determined. Yes, it is the Iranian government; not the Iranian people. This building becomes a legitimate target the moment the enemy occupy and use it. Let's not forget those people running the show don't care about the people they supposedly represent. Theirs is a very different mindset to ours and judging them by our values or thinking they will do what we would is the fast track to losing.
My sense from the huge number of civilian casualties, UN and Aid workers, medical workers and journalists who have been killed, (not to mention escaped hostages with no shirts and white flags) that the IDF is not being terribly discerning about what it fires machine guns and high explosives at. I mean, 23,000 people in three months?
Is this kind of rocket emplacement (if that’s what it is) common enough to justify the astonishing level of destruction the IDF has visited on Gaza? After all, Hamas can and probably does use vacant and damaged buildings for all kinds of things, snipers, anti tank rockets and other shoulder launched missiles and so on.
It is a very thorny problem for the IDF that a Hamas fighter and some average Palestinian Joe looking for firewood are pretty much indistinguishable from one another, if the guy is not holding a gun. But all those women and children?
There's a lot of misinformation in the casualty numbers. Start with the fact that the number is always quoted as the number of Palestinians who have died. This number is often quoted as the number of civilian casualties, but it actually includes militants as well. At least 1/3 of the deaths are actually Hamas and other Islamist militants. This shows that Israel is not targeting Gaza indiscriminately. And it's a relatively low ratio of civilian deaths in an urban environment where one side is deliberately trying to get civilians killed.
Another misleading statistic is the number of women and children. First, women can also be militants. And second, the category of children includes 15 to 17 year olds, many of whom are Hamas militants.
And finally, let's not forget to take these casualty numbers with a grain of salt. These numbers come from Hamas, and Hamas has a history of inflating casualty numbers, has shown that they are still doing so (remember the reports of over 500 dead at the al-Ahli hospital?), and they have every incentive to continue to do so.
I feel pretty strongly that those numbers (which I won't minimize, they're horrible) are not so much the fault of IDF recklessness as much as they are the fault of Hamas never evacuating their people.
In Ukraine, for instance, the city of Bakhmut has been completely destroyed (one of many), just like northern Gaza. The fighting has been raging for over a year and it now resembles a moonscape. But you don't see unimaginably large civilian casualties coming out of Bakhmut; total, about 200 of its citizens have been killed (many thousands injured, unfortunately.)
This is primarily because the Ukrainians are good people who care about their civilians- and so they evacuate their civilians. All around Ukraine cities and villages like Avdiivka and Marinka have been destroyed, but you don't hear about the same kind of terrible civilian casualties we see in northern Gaza.
I feel the lesson to be learned here is: when you don't evacuate civilians from a war zone, civilians die in very large numbers. What makes me particularly sick is not only did Hamas make no real effort to get their people out of there, Hamas told their people to stay. As the government in charge, Hamas bore a sacred obligation to protect them as the IDF began gearing up across the border. It leaves me stunned that Hamas did nothing.
I'm pretty certain it affects people like me and you more than it does anyone in Hamas. Those sociopaths are in a different spacetime.
First of all, I am not defending Hamas, which is pretty clearly a terrorist organization which targets civilians. Regarding the casualty numbers, these are the figures widely reported in the mainstream media, and I used to work in the mainstream media and have a fair amount of confidence in it, flawed though it is. That the numbers should be discounted because they come from Hamas has been disputed based on earlier casualty figures from Hamas which proved to be correct. We should also keep in mind that there is expected to be a large number of people still under the rubble whose bodies were never excavated so the casualty figures should rise. And we can also expect further deaths from injury and diseases. Whether or not more or less of these casualties might or might not be made up of fighters or teenaged fighters in no way reduces the extraordinary scope of the bombing campaign, as has also been widely reported.
The idea that Hamas should have organized some kind of evacuation is very odd. The people tried to follow Israeli evacuation orders and the Israeli’s bombed them in what was supposed to be “safe” areas. The entire process of mass confusion and terror among the Gaza population which was trying to evacuate is very well documented.
This is not to defend Hamas, who would have known exactly what would happen to the Gaza civilians as a result of the October 7th atrocities and did it anyway. That these guys have some kind off martyr mentality is no surprise, given how prevalent this world view is among Muslim fundamentalists, and civic responsibility would have been at the bottom of their todo list, but it is just goofy to suggest that they might have organized some kind of evacuation in the face of the Israeli orders for mass displacement of civilians. And there was really no place for the evacuees to go, as there was in Ukraine.
I also don’t mean to drag the conversation into areas of political disagreement, since the history of political violence in the region is long and complex, and many people have a tendency to look at the conflict as if one side has white hats and the other has black hats. There is plenty of blame to go around. After all, even something as awful as the October 7th attack can also be seen as an act of resistance (as many Palestinians do). But thanks for taking the time to respond to my comment.
If Hamas cared about it's civilians in that way, instead of just using their deaths for PR purposes, this conflict probably would not be going on right now
Each war is different. Ukraine features trenches and minefields. Gaza features tunnels and apartment buildings. Not the these features are mutually exclusive, by reflect the nature of the terrain and of the combatants.
Thank you for going into detail on distinctive features like these.
Many people aren't sophisticated enough and all they're seeing are endless videos of dead children and women.on the face of it, it looks really, really bad. The Israelis should have tried to learn a little from the Ukrainians and done more to counter that kind of propaganda. Everyone knew it would be coming. Even I have difficulty with what's happening and questions like how did the Palestinians manage to do so many extremely sophisticated tunnel systems? That's A LOT of work- loud work that requires supplies, heavy machinery, etc and Israel is constantly watching them (because they bear watching). Also, who develops the most sophisticated system in the world to keep Palestinians from doing exactly what they did on October 7th and doesn't understand that taking out the internet would disable the system, make them effectively blind, etc. And putting all of your officers in one building? I'm just a middle aged housewife and even I know better than that.
I don't know. But then again, I don't know what's happened the the conservatives either. I think I stopped being a lifelong Republican when Republican members of Congress "celebrated" July 4th with Vladimir Putin. Things started to feel unreal then. 364 days of the year would have been, "hmm, wonder what that was about?" And then moved on. But the 4th of July with a Russian dictator? Nope, that's when I got off the bus.
If it's real video, is it propaganda? The Israelis don't respect us. They don't really care if we actually believe them as long as they can capture our government and media.
Thanks Ryan! I have used this as a talking point already. I really appreciate your intelligence as I no longer can access my sources as freely as a civilian.
Wow, Ryan. It's really great that Hamas types are "so intelligent" at computing rocket trajectories. Are you actually praising them? Wouldn't it be nice if they were intelligent enough to see that they are devastating the Palestinian people? Please direct your admiration more carefully.
I'm not sure how you discerned "admiration" out of what Ryan has to say here, particularly the last bit which I feel is a powerful condemnation OF Hamas types.
He wasn't saying they're "so intelligent". He was saying they're not stupid.
I disagree. Ryan is working on the idea that you must know your enemy, and Israel's (or Bibi's) greatest mistake to date has been to downplay Hamas (and other players) as capable of what they can do. If Bibi had read the memo from a year ago, if he had heard the intel from his own and Egyptian sources, he could have headed off October 7. But he said that Hamas was incapable of that. We'd better know what those guys are capable of.
There is a big difference between miscalculating your enemy’s intentions and underestimating their capabilities. I believe Israel misjudged intentions and knew quite well what their military capabilities were.
Mileikowsky, or "Netanyahu", and much of his Likud party want attacks, they need them to justify their intentions. PBS Frontline did a great episode on him in particular, the bus bombings happened more than once, while he was simultaneously politically imperiled. 2023 was his worst year with massive demonstrations against him, and then Oct 7.
Ingenuity and ideology are not the same thing. These guys are smart, but their ideology absolves them of responsibility for what is happening in Gaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon. They literally think that they are doing God's work, even if turning their skills to productive things would make everyone better off.
he is not praising anyone . facts are facts . he is just relaying the facts of the situation. sure it would have been nice back in 1947 if they had accepted the partition plan and worked to make their land prosperous. but instead they bury themselves in their religious dogma going back to the 1200's.
We got to this situation where we are today because we seriously underestimated their ability to attack us. We were all happy to believe that their training exercises neutralizing tanks and attacking settlements was them playing macho but that they were too incapable to actually do it. His point is super important.
Question: Why does the militant aiming the rockets have bare feet, in a room covered in broken glass and debris? Is this cultural? or potentially logistical? Seems very perplexing to me that a member of a military/militia would be "working" in a hazardous environment (within kilometers of the enemy) without basic footwear. Any ideas?
Excellent video essay, Ryan.
I've been a leftist my entire adult life but I will never understand the dogmatic policy among "my people" to never criticize the Palestinians; they can do no wrong. It's dangerous tunnel vision that props up the worst actors among the Palestinian people- and after years of unconditional support where do we end up? October 7th. And where does that lead? To the footage in this video.
As you say, Ryan, in the end it's the average Palestinian dude who suffers the most.
I support Ukraine strongly but if they send the 3rd Assault Brigade into Russia tomorrow to do what Hamas did on 10/7, I'd stop my support immediately, whereas Hamas knows they can essentially behave as barbaric as they please and "my people" on the left will still support them (and then venerate their actions.) It disturbs me to consider what it will take for that to stop. And if it doesn't stop, how far will this all go? How many ordinary Palestinian dudes (and their families) will suffer for it?
You gotta hold your people accountable when they act like animals.
Ryan, you are a one man machine. Excellent presentations....
Is a JDAM that takes out the entire building and kills all the other people in it the only way in which the army can respond to seeing a rocket launch holes in the building? You said if you were a soldier you’d call in a airstrike is there nothing else available in the arsenal of Smart modern warfare?
You can use smaller bombs. JDAMS come in different sizes. But other then sending in troops, there isn't much you can do. Maybe you could send in a drone if they are available. But if you have a timetable, you aren't going to stop to deploy a drone. You drop the building and keep moving.
And you're not going to sacrifice members of your unit in a assault on a defended position if you have air support available.
The other people that might be in the home know very well what having terrorists use their building for launching rockets means, and would be very stupid if they were anywhere nearby. The interior of that home likely has significant damage from the rockets backblast, even if hammering holes in the walls wasn't an issue.
In war, you use what is available at the moment you have a target. It's not a video game, with a menu of different things you can choose. If the only available weapon to address the threat from that building is a JDAM, then you use it. If a tank gun is what you have, you use that. There is no requirement to risk soldier's lives to eliminate a position used to attack you, and there is wide latitude for what you can do to deal with it. Bottom line is that Al Quds (or Hamas, or whoever) used this private home for an attack, rendering it a legitimate military target. Israel has the legal right to deal with that target in any way it sees fit, within some wide band of proportionality. If you want to whine about damage to private property or deaths of civilians, point your critique at the folks who turned that private property into a military target.
Exactly. Do I send more of my friends in to die because I'm trying to protect the people likely complicit in the act or do I take out the target and move on?
Does the taking of that target justify the civilians held against their will in that building being killed? Did I hold them in that building against their will?
Who took the building for the purpose of using it as a military action?
If a building is being used to launch rockets, I destroy the building before it destroys me.
I suppose if they had a tank available they could fire 1 or more 120 mm projectiles or perhaps they are going to call in a 155 mm artillery strike. Any of those would likely level the target. Pick your method of stand off weapons.
I just watched a movie on Netflix called unknown: killer robots, which states that Israel is already using drones to discover militant hiding in houses, so does this article https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2021/07/israels-drone-swarm-over-gaza-should-worry-everyone/183156/
Just like Ukrainians are using drones to hit tanks because it’s much cheaper and much more effective than artillery. Could that not be used to take out militance within a house? Or is it something that just hasn’t advanced just yet? Like a grenade and a drone would be cheaper more effective and create much less collateral damage.
Perhaps, but why do you think that only the one apartment has militants? Israel takes out the one apartment then what? The other apartments with militants attack them?
This is the issue when one side hides among civilians, dresses like civilians, and uses civilians as human shields. Israel's job is to protect Israelis, including Israeli soldiers. It is not the job of Israel to protect the lives of Gazans. It is the job of Hamas, as the government of Gaza, to protect Gazan civilians. Instead, they have done everything in their power to get Gazan civilians killed.
If you want to get mad at someone for all of the civilian casualties in Gaza, get mad at Hamas. They are 100% responsible for every Gazan and Israeli death.
And so many people completely ignore that vital fact: as the government in Gaza, Hamas is obligated to protect its civilians. It is, as you put it, their job. Not Israel's.
What completely blows my mind is how Hamas made zero substantive effort to evacuate its people as Israel prepared its response. If I remember correctly, there was about three weeks until the IDF arrived, post-10/7. That is a lot of time to get civilians safely out of what is about to become a deadly war zone.
Not only did Hamas not evacuate, Hamas told its people to stay.
I'm not going to celebrate thousands of dead Palestinian kids, but I'm not going to condemn Israel either. Even the Nazis had enough moral spine to send their kids to the countryside when we started bombing their cities.
Meanwhile, how many kids are dead because of the callous indifference of Hamas?
Do you have a documented source that Hamas told its people to stay? Not that I don't believe you, but I would really like to share with skeptics.
Early on in this conflict I saw a news report from Gaza that showed a Palestinian woman crying over her child's lifeless body. She was screaming something to the effect of 'fu** you Hamas! Not Israel, Hamas.
Imagine working hard to create a home for you and your family only to have a bunch of 'soldiers'(?) knock on your door and TELL you that they are going to use your living room as a firing point.
Imagine laying PVC pipe to irrigate your field only to have the same people come and dig it up to use for making rockets.
Hamas, Quds, et.al. started this war. They should get no love from the world and even less from the people of Gaza.
You are throwing munitions at me from behind a brick wall and brick ceiling. To kill you and destroy your munition I need to penetrate said brick wall and ceiling (or, walls and ceilings). Any counterstrike that can do that is likely to do major damage to the building, if not flatten it outright. I fail to see how drones and the like can do the same job with less power, since there are actual walls people are sheltering behind. A grenade sized drone could go through an open window, but that can be accounted for by windows (drone would need to smash the window without popping the grenade, etc), and might not have enough power to take out all the enemies and their munitions, etc. This thing of surgical violence is bullshit that people believe because they have never had to dish it out, stay alive while they do it, and pick up the pieces afterwards. Things are far more complex in the real world than what theory and movies would like us to believe.
Depends on who’s engaging the target if for example you’re a armoured column you might not have a drone operator but you do have a tank cannon so you’re going to use what’s available to you, if you have a drone great use a drone but more times then not you’re probably not going to have a drone and operator on hand.
No that makes sense. I did not consider drones and that would be something they might well have.
Let's be honest though, you can show them this video and plenty of people will still deny that it justifies Israel's military actions. As far as many people are concerns, hamas and other jihadist groups that commit every war crime under the rome statute don't exist unless they have some 'glorious victory' they can brag about as a middle finger to the 'colonial oppressors' which they obviously achieved without a single war crime being committed or civilian endangered.
Let's not act like this whole conflict isn't Israel's fault. Hamas and groups like it exist because Israel has created a situation where they feel terrorism is their only remaining avenue of change. That's not an excuse of terrorism, but the opposite of that doesn't have to be supporting how Israel has treated Palestine for decades.
No, what you wrote IS an (attempted) excuse for terrorism.
The political plight of the Palestinian people is legitimate, baseline I sympathize with them, but if the best they can come up with to solve that plight is entering the homes of civilians and killing people in front of their families and then taking the survivors as hostages....then to hell with them. That's NOT political. There's NOTHING political about mass murder. It's just mass murder.
Stop rationalizing the barbarity of sociopaths.
I am sick of the world acting like no one has it as bad as the Palestinians. I live in Philadelphia. I completely reject the fallacy that your average kid in northern Gaza has it "worse than" the average kid living here in North Philly, or Southwest Philly, or Kensington.
Have you seen the livecams of our Kensington neighborhood? I'm guessing even the (former, unfortunately) citizens of Northern Gaza would blush.
For starters, Gaza doesn't have a fraction of the crime we do, the murders, the sexual assaults, the overdose deaths, etc. And yes, our most vulnerable citizens are also politically marginalized, unfortunately.
But do WE degrade ourselves by resorting to mass murder?
The barbarity that the Palestinian community has resorted to is no one's fault but their own and I really wish the world would stop giving them a pass. Everyone has a choice to not become a monster.
Israel has been doing the same thing for many decades? They started it. Jewish terrorism predates Arab terrorism in the region and the world by half a century.
It's you that's pretending that this started with Israel (IE Jews) at all. Every possible source of this cycle of violence, short of being a legal immigrant lawfully buying land, started with Palestinian extremists committing atrocities against Jews from the battle (massacre) of tel hai, nebi Musa riots in 1920, Jaffa riots in 1921, and the Hebron massacre in 1929, to the day after the UN decided on a two state solution in 1947 as well as every time thereafter Palestinians sided with Israel's enemies when they invaded or the leaders of palestine rejected a two state solution because they want full legal legitimacy in their imaginary world where they somehow manage to take over Israel. Not to mention every poll we see from Palestine shows they don't want a two state solution, they don't even want a one state, two people solution. They want a one state solution and all the Jews ethnically cleansed from the region.
Palestinians have been there own worst enemy and have been the reason they are treated the way they are for decades and have encouraged more extremist Israeli ideologies and actions by convincing more and more Israelis, including Arab Israelis, that a two state solution isn't even possible anyway so what's the point in trying to accommodate for a people who, for decades, have favoured your extermination over coexistence.
This is completely false. Israel has done everything in its power to support the creation of a Palestinian state.
Absolutely none of this conflict is the fault of the Israelis. Gazans had every opportunity to change their lives in 2005. What happened?
So I just put up a comment condemning the initial comment here which claims the whole conflict is Israel's fault and then attempts to rationalize the savagery of Hamas, but I have to say I would disagree with saying "none of" the overall conflict is Israel's fault.
I've always avoided taking sides in this conflict because they have each committed terrible atrocities, and supporting either would mean compromising my own values to a degree I'm not willing to.
That said, recently the Palestinians have been, in my opinion, shockingly more abominable and my sympathy is with Israel for the moment; essentially I believe Hamas must be unequivocally destroyed.
But I would never say Israel is blameless for the political situation.
There's no excuse for 10/7. It is indefensible and Israel is right and just for destroying Hamas in its wake. But I can't personally say that everything that came before it is the fault, solely, of one side or the other. There's blame to go around in that conflict.
How is Israel at fault even before Oct 7th? Possibly they are at fault for being too lenient on the Palestinians in the past.
They've suffered thousands of rocket attacks per year from Gaza without responding.
They've tried offering land for peace multiple times and each time it ended with the Palestinians walking away and launching terrorist campaigns.
Since the day Israel was founded they've been under assault by Arabs within Palestine and without.
Even the narrative of the situation is stacked against Israel. By any rational definition, Palestinians are not refugees. The idea of someone being a refugee in an area where they were born and raised is for multiple generations is an ludicrousl. The Jews who were forced out of Arab countries in the 40s, 50s, and 60s are not considered to be refugees. But Palestinians whose ancestors who have lived in the west bank and Gaza for hundreds of years are refugees? The descendants of Palestinians who voluntarily left Israel or who took up arms against Israel and were kicked out in the 40s are refugees, but tens of millions of Europeans whose ancestors were displaced during WWI and WWII are not.
I'm not sure exactly what Israel has done in any of this for it to be at fault. Except to defend itself.
Israel has not created a situation so desperate that they have to resort to terrorism. Israeli Arabs live with full political and civil rights. Hamas could have taken steps to normalize their relationship with Israel. But then they wouldn't be Hamas.
Damn right. Now consider using a kindergarten, hospital or dense population area as a place to manufacture and launch missiles.
Jesus, not what a 107mm rocket is supposed to be used for or delivered from. Thanks Ryan I am glad to have subscribed for a year. You are an awesome "go to" source for the reality of things.
They are normally fired from these 12 shot launchers.
It’s cheap saturation fire.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_63_multiple_rocket_launcher
I know know Ryan, but they forgot to get the Nebelwerfer out of the trunk, lol!
Thanks Ryan even in New Zealand our news is very average, its good to have a trustable information source, keep up the good work. Also you'd think they might cover the holes up with a flag or sheet until launch unless this was a promotional video in a safe area.
Ryan, this is good insight but isn’t a fulsome explanation for the absolute devastation Israel has unleashed. You’re 100% right; we (Western coalition forces) would call down a JDAM, a 500lb type. GBU-54, BLU-111, etc. Or put a tank round or AT-4 through it. But for a huge chunk of this war, Israel’s been tossing unguided 2000 lb. Mk.84 munitions out like candy into dense urban environments. This is borderline unthinkable for Western planners, and a grievous moral/legal concern (nevermind the strategic implications). Israel has a right to pursue Hamas to extinction, but we must demand precision and proportionality from those with whom we so closely ally. We can’t write off their almost cartoonish disregard for civilian destruction quite so easily.
I liked his video but the idea that "this is why every home in Gaza has been destroyed through terror bombing" is laughably ridiculous
A rare but severe disappointment from someone who makes his brand on truth, accuracy, and technical analysis. The open source intelligence is out there on the ordnance that’s been dropped, and there’s literally no viable explanation other than Israel is all out of F’s to give about collateral damage.
He should’ve called up the A-10 pilots he met during the NFL flyover episode and ask them under what circumstances they’d drop Mk.84s in a dense urban environment. And watch their facial expressions.
Spot on twice: No, they aren't stupid. They are very resilient, resourceful and determined. Yes, it is the Iranian government; not the Iranian people. This building becomes a legitimate target the moment the enemy occupy and use it. Let's not forget those people running the show don't care about the people they supposedly represent. Theirs is a very different mindset to ours and judging them by our values or thinking they will do what we would is the fast track to losing.
Thoughtful piece, Ryan, thanks.
My sense from the huge number of civilian casualties, UN and Aid workers, medical workers and journalists who have been killed, (not to mention escaped hostages with no shirts and white flags) that the IDF is not being terribly discerning about what it fires machine guns and high explosives at. I mean, 23,000 people in three months?
Is this kind of rocket emplacement (if that’s what it is) common enough to justify the astonishing level of destruction the IDF has visited on Gaza? After all, Hamas can and probably does use vacant and damaged buildings for all kinds of things, snipers, anti tank rockets and other shoulder launched missiles and so on.
It is a very thorny problem for the IDF that a Hamas fighter and some average Palestinian Joe looking for firewood are pretty much indistinguishable from one another, if the guy is not holding a gun. But all those women and children?
There's a lot of misinformation in the casualty numbers. Start with the fact that the number is always quoted as the number of Palestinians who have died. This number is often quoted as the number of civilian casualties, but it actually includes militants as well. At least 1/3 of the deaths are actually Hamas and other Islamist militants. This shows that Israel is not targeting Gaza indiscriminately. And it's a relatively low ratio of civilian deaths in an urban environment where one side is deliberately trying to get civilians killed.
Another misleading statistic is the number of women and children. First, women can also be militants. And second, the category of children includes 15 to 17 year olds, many of whom are Hamas militants.
And finally, let's not forget to take these casualty numbers with a grain of salt. These numbers come from Hamas, and Hamas has a history of inflating casualty numbers, has shown that they are still doing so (remember the reports of over 500 dead at the al-Ahli hospital?), and they have every incentive to continue to do so.
I feel pretty strongly that those numbers (which I won't minimize, they're horrible) are not so much the fault of IDF recklessness as much as they are the fault of Hamas never evacuating their people.
In Ukraine, for instance, the city of Bakhmut has been completely destroyed (one of many), just like northern Gaza. The fighting has been raging for over a year and it now resembles a moonscape. But you don't see unimaginably large civilian casualties coming out of Bakhmut; total, about 200 of its citizens have been killed (many thousands injured, unfortunately.)
This is primarily because the Ukrainians are good people who care about their civilians- and so they evacuate their civilians. All around Ukraine cities and villages like Avdiivka and Marinka have been destroyed, but you don't hear about the same kind of terrible civilian casualties we see in northern Gaza.
I feel the lesson to be learned here is: when you don't evacuate civilians from a war zone, civilians die in very large numbers. What makes me particularly sick is not only did Hamas make no real effort to get their people out of there, Hamas told their people to stay. As the government in charge, Hamas bore a sacred obligation to protect them as the IDF began gearing up across the border. It leaves me stunned that Hamas did nothing.
I'm pretty certain it affects people like me and you more than it does anyone in Hamas. Those sociopaths are in a different spacetime.
First of all, I am not defending Hamas, which is pretty clearly a terrorist organization which targets civilians. Regarding the casualty numbers, these are the figures widely reported in the mainstream media, and I used to work in the mainstream media and have a fair amount of confidence in it, flawed though it is. That the numbers should be discounted because they come from Hamas has been disputed based on earlier casualty figures from Hamas which proved to be correct. We should also keep in mind that there is expected to be a large number of people still under the rubble whose bodies were never excavated so the casualty figures should rise. And we can also expect further deaths from injury and diseases. Whether or not more or less of these casualties might or might not be made up of fighters or teenaged fighters in no way reduces the extraordinary scope of the bombing campaign, as has also been widely reported.
The idea that Hamas should have organized some kind of evacuation is very odd. The people tried to follow Israeli evacuation orders and the Israeli’s bombed them in what was supposed to be “safe” areas. The entire process of mass confusion and terror among the Gaza population which was trying to evacuate is very well documented.
This is not to defend Hamas, who would have known exactly what would happen to the Gaza civilians as a result of the October 7th atrocities and did it anyway. That these guys have some kind off martyr mentality is no surprise, given how prevalent this world view is among Muslim fundamentalists, and civic responsibility would have been at the bottom of their todo list, but it is just goofy to suggest that they might have organized some kind of evacuation in the face of the Israeli orders for mass displacement of civilians. And there was really no place for the evacuees to go, as there was in Ukraine.
I also don’t mean to drag the conversation into areas of political disagreement, since the history of political violence in the region is long and complex, and many people have a tendency to look at the conflict as if one side has white hats and the other has black hats. There is plenty of blame to go around. After all, even something as awful as the October 7th attack can also be seen as an act of resistance (as many Palestinians do). But thanks for taking the time to respond to my comment.
If Hamas cared about it's civilians in that way, instead of just using their deaths for PR purposes, this conflict probably would not be going on right now
Each war is different. Ukraine features trenches and minefields. Gaza features tunnels and apartment buildings. Not the these features are mutually exclusive, by reflect the nature of the terrain and of the combatants.
Thank you for going into detail on distinctive features like these.
Many people aren't sophisticated enough and all they're seeing are endless videos of dead children and women.on the face of it, it looks really, really bad. The Israelis should have tried to learn a little from the Ukrainians and done more to counter that kind of propaganda. Everyone knew it would be coming. Even I have difficulty with what's happening and questions like how did the Palestinians manage to do so many extremely sophisticated tunnel systems? That's A LOT of work- loud work that requires supplies, heavy machinery, etc and Israel is constantly watching them (because they bear watching). Also, who develops the most sophisticated system in the world to keep Palestinians from doing exactly what they did on October 7th and doesn't understand that taking out the internet would disable the system, make them effectively blind, etc. And putting all of your officers in one building? I'm just a middle aged housewife and even I know better than that.
I don't know. But then again, I don't know what's happened the the conservatives either. I think I stopped being a lifelong Republican when Republican members of Congress "celebrated" July 4th with Vladimir Putin. Things started to feel unreal then. 364 days of the year would have been, "hmm, wonder what that was about?" And then moved on. But the 4th of July with a Russian dictator? Nope, that's when I got off the bus.
If it's real video, is it propaganda? The Israelis don't respect us. They don't really care if we actually believe them as long as they can capture our government and media.
Thanks Ryan! I have used this as a talking point already. I really appreciate your intelligence as I no longer can access my sources as freely as a civilian.
Keep up the excellent work.
Wow, Ryan. It's really great that Hamas types are "so intelligent" at computing rocket trajectories. Are you actually praising them? Wouldn't it be nice if they were intelligent enough to see that they are devastating the Palestinian people? Please direct your admiration more carefully.
The point I took from Ryan's comment was to never underestimate the enemy.
I'm not sure how you discerned "admiration" out of what Ryan has to say here, particularly the last bit which I feel is a powerful condemnation OF Hamas types.
He wasn't saying they're "so intelligent". He was saying they're not stupid.
This is something you either get or you don't.
I disagree. Ryan is working on the idea that you must know your enemy, and Israel's (or Bibi's) greatest mistake to date has been to downplay Hamas (and other players) as capable of what they can do. If Bibi had read the memo from a year ago, if he had heard the intel from his own and Egyptian sources, he could have headed off October 7. But he said that Hamas was incapable of that. We'd better know what those guys are capable of.
Fair point. Dan
There is a big difference between miscalculating your enemy’s intentions and underestimating their capabilities. I believe Israel misjudged intentions and knew quite well what their military capabilities were.
Mileikowsky, or "Netanyahu", and much of his Likud party want attacks, they need them to justify their intentions. PBS Frontline did a great episode on him in particular, the bus bombings happened more than once, while he was simultaneously politically imperiled. 2023 was his worst year with massive demonstrations against him, and then Oct 7.
Ingenuity and ideology are not the same thing. These guys are smart, but their ideology absolves them of responsibility for what is happening in Gaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon. They literally think that they are doing God's work, even if turning their skills to productive things would make everyone better off.
he is not praising anyone . facts are facts . he is just relaying the facts of the situation. sure it would have been nice back in 1947 if they had accepted the partition plan and worked to make their land prosperous. but instead they bury themselves in their religious dogma going back to the 1200's.
We got to this situation where we are today because we seriously underestimated their ability to attack us. We were all happy to believe that their training exercises neutralizing tanks and attacking settlements was them playing macho but that they were too incapable to actually do it. His point is super important.
Thank you for your clarification of the Iranian people. A lot of people don't understand that distinction.
Question: Why does the militant aiming the rockets have bare feet, in a room covered in broken glass and debris? Is this cultural? or potentially logistical? Seems very perplexing to me that a member of a military/militia would be "working" in a hazardous environment (within kilometers of the enemy) without basic footwear. Any ideas?
They have nothing to lose but their lives. Most have lost relatives or direct family. Combat boots are not required.