China’s disinterest in Red Sea policing role underscores Beijing’s reluctance to back its rhetoric on Middle East peace with substantive action.
The Chinese government appears to be brushing off Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s call for Beijing to assist an international coalition in protecting commercial shipping in the Red Sea from Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militias.
Beijing signaled that it has no interest in joining the Pentagon’s Operation Prosperity Guardian , a multinational force including Canada, the United Kingdom and Bahrain, in providing security for cargo ships under threat of Houthi attack.
“We believe relevant parties, especially major countries with influence, need to play a constructive and responsible role in keeping the shipping lanes safe in the Red Sea,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Thursday in an indirect reference to U.S. military and diplomatic heft in the region.
My theory on the Hamas attack is that they mostly intended to take hostages to negotiate the release of Palestinians being held by Israel. They do that all the time. They expected to meet with a large military response and take mostly non-civilian hostages (as they’ve done in the past since IDF soldiers are high value hostages).
But Israel had shifted so much of their security forces to the West Bank that Hamas met with basically no effective resistance and ended up getting further into Israel than they ever planned.
I’m not saying Hamas was above killing civilians. But think we’ll learn one day that they were imagining more like 50-100 civilian deaths to draw a fight and then as many police and military hostages as they could muster. Most of the Hamas fighters probably expected to die just escaping Gaza.
Interesting perspective, but these attacks were different from what they did before. I can see the argument that the Israeli government downplayed their preparedness to make Hamas’s attack more devastating than if they had taken it seriously from the beginning. This tactic could then be used to partially legitimize retaliation and the subsequent siege of Gaza.
There are too many factors at play for this to be a “normal” Hamas attack gone wrong. The scale and preplanned targets suggest it was not an “ordinary” Hamas operation.
While I usually agree that the simplest solution is often the right one, do you really believe this was more or less a “normal” attack that spiraled out of control?
I obviously don’t have any insider information. It definitely seems like it was planned to be on a different level than past attacks.
Something else I’ve been wondering about is just how asymmetric warfare is easier now with cheap drones and better weapons. Maybe even satellite imagery since you can just buy it now. Hamas might have always wanted to do something this big and just couldn’t.
