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Surprise or no surprise?
Most people have heard of the Israeli rescue mission to Entebbe on 07/03/1976 which was subsequently recreated in at least three feature films. Fewer people are aware that the sole Israeli military fatality in the operation was Yonatan Netanyahu, brother of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, who led the force that successfully attacked the airport terminal and liberated most of the hostages. He was killed by gunfire from Ugandan soldiers in the airport control tower. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entebbe_raid This raid succeeded through a combination of good intelligence on the situation at the Entebbe airport and ineptitude on the part of Idi Amin and the Ugandan military who do not seem to have taken the possibility of a rescue attempt very seriously, otherwise the small and lightly armed airborne Israeli force would have found hundreds of Ugandan troops and armored vehicles waiting for them. In fact, it had become clear by 3 July that the Ugandan army were only present at the airport in large numbers during the day when Amin made his visits. At night the hostages were being guarded only by the four hijackers, two Palestinian PFLP members and two West Germans in the terminal, a few Ugandan guards at the entrance to the terminal and a small force at the control tower. The situation of the Israeli hostages in Gaza is obviously very different, any rescue attempt has to fight it's way through hundreds of HAMAS members and it can be assumed that those assigned to guard the hostages have orders to kill them in the last resort to prevent their recapture or rescue. There is a contradiction between the Wikipedia article about one of the hijackers, Brigitte Kuhlmann which states that all of the hijackers died without firing a shot, and the article linked above. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigitte_Kuhlmann Dec 10 23 06:13 am Link JSouthworth wrote: So why bring it up, other than an obsessive compulsion to dominate threads by carpet bombing with irrelevancy, misinformation, and personal conclusions presented as facts based on a logic unknown. Dec 11 23 09:19 am Link Mod 7 (Cust. Svc.) wrote: Errr, no. Dec 11 23 10:28 am Link The Israeli army recently suffered the loss of nine soldiers from the Golani brigade, including a full colonel in what is being described as a "complex ambush" in Gaza City; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ … mas-ambush The Golani brigade is usually considered the most elite unit of the Israeli Army; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golani_Brigade The resistance of HAMAS has not diminished significantly since the beginning of the Israeli invasion. The Israelis are now pumping seawater into the Gaza "metro" in an attempt to force HAMAS to abandon the tunnels. This is an obvious move on their part, you would think they might have done that at an earlier stage if they really thought it would work. The fact that they are doing it now can be interpreted as an indication that things are not going well for them. Videos have been posted showing Israeli soldiers vandalising Palestinian shops and aid supplies, this indicates that their morale is beginning to suffer under the immense psychological pressure of urban warfare in which the possibility of death is ever present. Dec 13 23 06:30 am Link JSouthworth wrote: Thanks for sharing. Terrible behavior. Indefensible. Dec 13 23 08:28 am Link The Southworth News Network is now reporting on the psychological state of the Israeli army which it claims is feeling the ill effects of a fierce battle. Southworth News Network is reporting the hesitancy to flood the tunnels is due to uncertainty rather than the Israeli's concern of drowning hostages. Add that to the unconfirmed videos of looting and soldiers having untucked uniforms as well and boots lacking in spit shine all clear indicators of an army on the verge of moral collapse. The war is serious and awful. No one is questioning that. Far too many people have died. It is a complex situation with no easy solution. Does amateur armchair quasi-news opinions help anything? Does it relate in any way at all to a model/photographer web site? Dec 13 23 05:05 pm Link Weldphoto wrote: Not looting, vandalism. If you've seen the videos then you know what I'm referring to, if you haven't then you don't. Dec 14 23 02:51 am Link Joe Biden recently expressed the opinion that Israel's indiscriminate bombing attacks on Palestinian civilians (carried out using US supplied aircraft and munitions) are the reason Israel lacks international support for it's invasion of Gaza. That is one reason, another is that neither the Israeli state's policy towards the Palestinians nor US support for the Israeli state have any ethical basis beyond the idea that "might is right", that because they have military and economic superiority they can act with impunity. That illusion was destroyed by the events of 7 October and there is nothing the Israeli military can do in Gaza that will restore it. The Israeli military have planned for an invasion of Gaza for years. But prior to October 7 they did not put them into effect because HAMAS were useful to the Israeli right wing as a bogey with which to intimidate their political opponents in the Knesset. To that extent the events of 7 October can be seen to have produced a change in the logic of the political as well as the military situation in Israel, not necessarily to the advantage of Netanyahu and his right-wing government. For decades, millions of Palestinians have been living as prisoners within Israel's borders, discriminated against and denied the opportunity for real economic progress. Can the historical fact of the Holocaust justify this behaviour by the Israeli state? Of course not, any more than the Nazis' policies towards the Jews were justified by the argument that they were necessary for the security of the German people. From the domestic political perspective, Joe Biden's wisdom in putting his faith in the Israeli state and military to the extent that he did immediately after October 7 is also questionable. If you need to take a chance on your own military, you can justify it in terms of patriotism and replace people if they don't deliver the goods. Dec 14 23 03:12 am Link WARNING: The following website contains violent content. Viewer discretion is advised. https://www.hamas-massacre.net/categori … y-massacre https://www.hamas-massacre.net/categori … heir-homes https://www.hamas-massacre.net/categori … he-streets https://www.hamas-massacre.net/categori … gaza-strip https://www.hamas-massacre.net/categori … lian-areas Dec 14 23 04:29 am Link The Israeli military are saying it will take months to achieve their objectives in Gaza. I don't think they have that much time. Even if they did have the time, what would the complete destruction of Gaza actually achieve? Nothing in the medium term. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles … -unlivable HAMAS are claiming that their tunnel system in Gaza has been engineered to resist attempts at flooding; https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl … tages.html Dec 15 23 08:02 am Link JSouthworth wrote: "The Israeli military have planned for an invasion of Gaza for years. But prior to October 7 they did not put them into effect because HAMAS were useful to the Israeli right wing as a bogey with which to intimidate their political opponents in the Knesset. " Dec 16 23 07:44 am Link Focuspuller wrote: JSouthworth wrote: Wrong. Their basic attitude is that the rest of the world owes them something. Many of them believe that the Western world including the United States was complicit with Nazi Germany in the Holocaust, and that they are not obliged to comply with international law in their dealings with the Palestinians because international law didn't protect them in the 1930s-40s. Dec 17 23 05:45 am Link While the Israeli government has expressed the intention to take responsibility for security in Gaza, whatever that would mean in practice, they do not seem to have any interest in taking responsibility for healthcare and public services in Gaza, as is evident whenever the US Government disputes the casualty figures issued by the HAMAS-run Palestinian Health Authority. This exposes the fundamentally racial as well as political nature of the conflict in which the US Government has chosen to involve the US armed forces in a supportive role, and makes a sharp contrast with the medical assistance provided by the Allied armed forces to the civilian populations of Italy, France and later Germany during the Second World War in Europe. The Israeli military makes no effort to provide medical assistance to civilians in Gaza, and to do so might be perverse if their only real objective is to kill as many Palestinian people as is possible without completely alienating the rest of the world. Dec 17 23 05:57 am Link Deleted Dec 17 23 09:26 am Link JSouthworth wrote: Do not change the subject. Despite your dishonest editing, what I said was," Nobody is actually saying "Israelis have the right to mistreat Palestinians because the Holocaust" but you. Waiting for your bogus "evidence"...." Dec 17 23 10:47 am Link Focuspuller wrote: The Israelis started the 1948 war because they didn't like the UN Partition Plan, they carried out a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" against the Palestinians, killing several thousand and confining the rest to what is now the Gaza Strip. Then in 1967 they occupied the West Bank which was part of the land allocated to the Palestinians, and which had been taken over by Jordan in 1948. They were able to do these things, because they had the support of the US Government. Only now is the full cost of that support becoming apparent. Dec 19 23 04:17 am Link JSouthworth wrote: Since sticking to the subject is not your forte, the question is,"Who is using the Holocaust to justify Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians? YOUR charge. YOU prove it. Still waiting. Dec 19 23 03:24 pm Link Focuspuller wrote: JSouthworth wrote: The Jewish leaders used the Arab rejection of the UN Partition Plan as their excuse for rejecting it also; Dec 20 23 08:23 am Link JSouthworth wrote: "Their basic attitude...Many of them believe...they are not obliged..." Dec 21 23 08:56 am Link JSouthworth wrote: "If the Israelis were prepared to accept a two state solution in 1948, then why are they so opposed to it today?" Dec 21 23 09:39 am Link Focuspuller wrote: Really, what rubbish. Syrian forces were involved in resisting the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, but Egypt and Jordan haven't been at war with Israel since 1973. Dec 21 23 08:15 pm Link JSouthworth wrote: What rubbish, indeed; conveniently omitting: Dec 22 23 09:59 am Link Focuspuller wrote: In reality it is of course the citizens of Gaza who are surrounded and enclosed in what is in effect the world's biggest prison camp. Dec 25 23 07:37 am Link Israel's defense minister (or is he the former defense minister? there seems to be confusion on this point within the Israeli government) Yoav Gallant has stated recently that it will soon be safe for Israeli civilians to return to settlements in Southern Israel near the Gaza strip, which would seem to be at variance with reality even if we allow the words "safety" and "security" to have different meanings in Israel than they do in other places. One reason for the high number of fatalities on October 7 was that the people living in the kibbutzim near the Gaza strip thought they were safer than they were. They had military weapons, and could perhaps have defended themselves or made good their escape if they'd been more alert to danger. Over-reliance on their government and military proved fatal however. At the same time, Gallant also says that the war in Gaza will continue for many months. In reality, it may continue indefinitely without the Israeli military being able to achieve their objectives, which are not within reach at present. About 150 Palestinian civilians are still being killed every day in Gaza, that will mean another 58,000 civilian fatalities over the next 12 months if things continue as at present. Useful article from Reuters here; https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/fi … &ei=23 Jan 02 24 08:35 am Link Having provided Israel with the aircraft, bombs and shells which they've used to destroy most of the buildings in Gaza, killing and injuring nearly 100,000 civilians in the process, the American taxpayer will now be paying for it's reconstruction, according to Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant; https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/is … &ei=11 Jan 06 24 03:51 am Link There is a rule of 3s when it come to human survival. Three minutes without oxygen, 3 days without water, or 3 weeks without food generally means survival is greatly diminished. It's been 3 months and most of the Palestinians in Gaza are still with us. So they have had food and water in storage or they are likely being supplied by means other than via passage from Egypt. And they still have Iranian rockets to launch almost daily into Israel, although not as many as 3 months ago. Jan 06 24 06:09 pm Link An article in the Jerusalem Post puts the absurd question of whether pro-Palestinian activism on US university campuses led to the events of October 7. Does the Israeli government need to send Mossad goon squads to the US to beat up and kill American university students? Somehow I don't think so. 75 years of displacement, murder, abuse and discrimination against Palestinians, who constitute the majority of people who live within Israel's present borders, by the Israeli state coupled with a realisation on the part of HAMAS that they had to put their issue back on the global agenda, led to the events of October 7. Only in the context of this grotesque history of systematic abuse is it possible to even begin to understand the savagery of these events. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/di … &ei=25 Jan 07 24 06:16 am Link "This time we're not going to mow the grass, we're going to kill the grass". The words of an Israeli air force general after the events of October 7. "Mowing the grass" is a term often used by Israelis to refer to the continual bombing of Gaza by the Israeli air force over the last ten years. The Palestinian people are the grass, so this is a way of dehumanising them. If you wanted to kill the grass on your lawn, how would you do that? Probably you would use chemicals to do it and there have been implied threats to use chemical weapons against Gaza in the past. The Israelis are believed to have these and also biological weapons; https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/i … iological/ Why would Israel use chemical and/or biological weapons in Gaza? Perhaps in an attempt to avoid a situation in 12 months time from now in which around 100,000 Palestinians are dead along with 1000-1500 Israeli soldiers, with no end in sight. So far 192 IDF members have been killed in the ground offensive in Gaza, according to official Israeli sources. https://www.timesofisrael.com/authoriti … as-attack/ More video here of combat in Gaza: https://uk.video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/s … daa4c871a5 https://uk.video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/s … f163925abf Jan 13 24 04:44 am Link Asked about media reports that a ceasefire deal was being discussed, an Israeli government spokesperson, Eylon Levy recently defined the Israeli government's objectives in Gaza as “The destruction of Hamas’s governing and military capabilities in the Gaza Strip and the return of all the hostages”. This underlines a fundamental problem of the IDF's operation in Gaza, the lack of consideration for the needs of the civilian population. HAMAS controls the health services in Gaza, so the destruction of it's governing capabilities would obviously lead to a complete breakdown of medical care unless the IDF were able to provide such services themselves. The Israeli government would like to see a breakdown of public services and civil order in Gaza because that would reinforce the subtext of it's policies, specifically the idea that the Palestinians are sub-human "human animals" that have to be controlled by force. Once again the parallel with Nazi Germany is too obvious to ignore. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/ … stract.com The US Government should be aware that the destruction of medical facilities in Gaza by the IDF is not incidental, but actually an integral part of a strategy of deconstructing Gaza at the social level. When the Nazis invaded Poland they targeted medical personnel as well as journalists, leaders and intellectuals for the same reasons. Jan 24 24 04:19 am Link Benjamin Netanyahu says that there there can be no security in Israel while HAMAS exists, but HAMAS is in part a product of Israel's violent and inhumane occupation policies, and when Israel kills a HAMAS leader, he is replaced like his predecessor. Even the extermination of the entire population of Gaza will not achieve the elimination of HAMAS and the other Palestinian militia organisations. As for security in Israel, there was no security on October 7, there was none before that, and there is no reason to think that the situation will be better in the future without political progress. The security problem of Israel obviously does not begin or end with HAMAS. From the US government perspective it should be clear that if they want a satisfactory outcome they need to act more decisively. In the 1960s and into the 1970s the US supported an unstable and corrupt regime in South Vietnam that ultimately proved indefensible militarily as well as morally and politically, part of the reason for that failure was the unwillingness on the part of the US to impose it's will on the Vietnamese leadership. In some ways, US support for South Vietnam actually hastened it's downfall because it encouraged the most reactionary elements in the successive South Vietnamese governments, who opposed reforms that would have led to more representative government and reduced support for the NLF or Vietcong, and because it led to excessive dependence on US economic and military aid. Tactically, the US military had some successes against the North Vietnamese but these prolonged the problem rather than providing a solution. The IDF's operations in Gaza cannot even be called a tactical success, they have suffered significant losses and killed a lot of civilians, mostly women and children, for the sake of eliminating perhaps 2000-3000 militia members including those killed in Southern Israel on and after October 7. Both sides are making exaggerated claims for enemy personnel. The Israeli authorities are now preventing food aid shipments from reaching Gaza, which demonstrates an awareness that they are not winning this war. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/mi … &ei=24 Feb 10 24 04:41 am Link A bizarre article in the Daily Telegraph claims that Israel (a country that didn't exist before 1948) was together with classical Greece, the "wellspring of our morality". https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/20 … ory-hamas/ Spain was the wellspring of the Spanish Inquisition and Austria may have been the wellspring of Nazism, but we don't hold it against them because it's past history. Feb 12 24 05:52 am Link The Egyptian government are saying that they may suspend the Camp David Accords if Israel invades the Rafah area of Gaza. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/eg … &ei=26 The Camp David Accords were a great achievement in diplomacy on the part of the Carter administration, but the actions of subsequent US governments have generally done little to strengthen them. Feb 12 24 06:11 am Link An article here contains some good points made by a number of people in the debate over Gaza at the ICJ; https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog … te=2728263 Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi makes the comparison with French Algeria, the history of French Indo-China is similar in many respects. In both of these colonies, the French made maximum use of conventional military power and failed. Feb 23 24 05:06 am Link Over the weekend there has been extensive combat between HAMAS and the IDF in Gaza, two IDF members including a company commander have been killed in action; https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/r … ajaxhist=0 The relatively high number of IDF officer casualties in Gaza can be regarded as an indication that they are having to lead their troops from the front, and HAMAS snipers are targeting them. Feb 25 24 07:43 am Link Over 100 Palestinian civilians are reported to have been killed when IDF soldiers opened fire on people waiting for food aid in Northern Gaza today. Another 760 civilians are reported to have been wounded. It is predicted that this will affect negotiations over the release of Israeli hostages; https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/mo … &ei=12 The Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilian and militant casualties, now says that 30,000 Palestinians have killed since 7 October 2023, of which two thirds are women and children. If this is correct then Israeli government claims for HAMAS militants killed are far too high. Feb 29 24 08:52 am Link Kemala Harris recently made a speech in which she appeared to criticise Israel's aerial bombardment of Gaza while stressing the humanitarian need for a ceasefire; https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/ka … r-BB1jgTXy Meanwhile the US government is sending more Mk82 500lb bombs to Israel; https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel-a … ael-report Reading between the lines, Harris is trying to frame the conflict as a qualified victory for Israel and the US when it's a defeat, because the Israel military have failed to achieve their stated objectives, because opinion in the Middle East and elsewhere has been radicalised against Israeli government and US foreign policy, and because the illusion of political stability and physical security in Israel has been largely destroyed. This may not be what the US and Israeli governments are telling each other. The lesson that needs to be learned from the events of recent years is that no amount of racial discrimination and violence by the Israeli state against the Palestinians will ever guarantee it's security. Meanwhile fighting on the ground continues; https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/r … ORM=VRDGAR https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/r … ajaxhist=0 Wikipedia article here has some useful facts and statistics; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_i … aza_Strip_(2023%E2%80%93present) Mar 05 24 04:28 am Link Benjamin Netanyahu says that he will send the IDF into Rafah despite opposition and that whoever tells him not to do so is telling him to lose the war. But HAMAS are present not only in Rafah but throughout Gaza, with combat continuing in Northern parts of the strip as well as Khan Younis. There is little reason to think that their strength has been substantially degraded over the last five months. And Netanyahu's government has already lost this war politically and militarily. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/ne … r-BB1jvjS6 From the HAMAS perspective, the best thing that can happen now is for the IDF to launch a clumsy offensive into Rafah, resulting in the deaths of thousands more civilians and probably most of the remaining hostages. HAMAS will survive this, but Israel's credibility in the community of democratic nations will not, when the policies of it's government are regarded as racist, stupid and counterproductive. The second battle of Fallujah in 2004 offers a possible comparison with the present conflict in Gaza; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Battle_of_Fallujah This is the subject of an episode in the History Channel "Shootout" TV series, titled D-Day; Fallujah. In this six week battle the US Army and USMC killed over 1000 Islamist insurgents at a cost of 95 dead and 560 wounded, with about 700 civilian fatalities. In Gaza, the IDF have eliminated approximately 1500 to 2000 militia members at a cost of about 250 fatalities, but have killed over 30,000 civilians, mostly in indiscriminate air strikes on residential areas which are intended to undermine support for HAMAS among the civilian population, but are generally considered cowardly and criminal by modern standards, if not by the standards of the 1940s that Netanyahu and some other Holocaust-fixated Israeli politicians are trying to apply to the present. Here's an article in which former UK cabinet minister Theresa Villiers refers to Israel as an ally of the UK and claims that the IDF are making "huge efforts to minimise civilian casualties and facilitate aid to Gaza"; https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/lo … &ei=15 In reality the Israeli government is currently attempting to starve Gaza into submission, having failed to achieve this by military means. The deliberate killing of Palestinian civilians, referred to as "mowing the grass" has been an integral part of their Gaza policy for years, and Israel has never been an ally of the UK, the United States or any other country although they did provide the apartheid regime in South Africa with nuclear technology. Mar 08 24 03:04 am Link UK Secretary of State Michael Gove recently warned that chanting "From the river to the sea" may constitute political extremism under a new set of definitions that he wants to introduce. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/m … &ei=23 At the present time it is mainly the Israeli government and in particular Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who are trying to promote the idea that the Israeli state and a Palestinian state are mutually exclusive alternatives. If that were the case then the establishment of a Palestinian state would logically necessitate the elimination of the Israeli state. There are also some radical Palestinian and Islamist groups who take the same position. So who is guilty of political extremism? The idea of a one state solution has attracted support from both Israelis and Palestinians. This would involve the replacement of the the state of Israel with an inclusive, non-sectarian secular state. But the two state solution is regarded by many others as preferable. A further alternative would be for Gaza and the West Bank to become separate independent states. Mar 11 24 03:54 am Link JSouthworth wrote: ...no doubt. Mar 18 24 04:40 pm Link Currently there is a debate over the planned IDF offensive in Rafah, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisting on going ahead. But he is delusional if he thinks this will destroy HAMAS; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/ … -joe-biden Most recent ground combat has taken place in the Northern part of the Gaza strip, which the IDF has been claiming to control for months; https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/is … r-BB1kdipr It's been said that the IDF occupies one third of the Gaza strip and controls none of it, which may be crediting them with more than they have. Mar 20 24 05:28 am Link |
