This is the best summary I could come up with:
DUBAI/WASHINGTON, Oct 18 (Reuters) - Israel is vowing to wipe out Hamas in a relentless onslaught on the Gaza Strip but has no obvious endgame in sight, with no clear plan for how to govern the ravaged Palestinian enclave even if it triumphs on the battlefield.
Codenamed “Operation Swords of Iron”, the military campaign will be unmatched in its ferocity and unlike anything Israel has carried out in Gaza in the past, according to eight regional and Western officials with knowledge of the conflict who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter.
The immediate Israeli strategy, said three regional officials familiar with discussions between the U.S. and Middle Eastern leaders, is to destroy Gaza’s infrastructure, even at the cost of high civilian casualties, push the enclave’s people towards the Egyptian border and go after Hamas by blowing up the labyrinth of underground tunnels the group has built to conduct its operations.
Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Biden’s visit would have given him a chance to press Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu to think through issues such as the proportional use of force and the longer-term plans for Gaza before any invasion.
Two regional military experts told Reuters that Hamas’ armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, has mobilised for an invasion, setting up anti-tank mines and booby-trapped explosive devices to ambush troops.
Hundreds of Palestinians have died in the West Bank since the start of the year in repeated clashes with Israeli soldiers and settlers, and there is widespread concern that the violence might engulf the territory as nearby Gaza burns.
The original article contains 1,314 words, the summary contains 273 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
FTA:
“Israel has called up a record 360,000 reservists”
Gaza has 365 square kilometers. 141 square miles.
https://www.britannica.com/summary/Gaza-Strip
That seems like an awful lot of soldiers to square meters.
You do realize that this is likely to become a 3 front war. Lebanon in the north. And Bibi has to cowtow to his settler base in the West Bank.
I could definitely see that, Israel has not been shy about invading Southern Lebanon in the past.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_occupation_of_Southern_Lebanon
And one of those fronts will effectively be with iran. You seriously don’t want to fuck with the resources they have to throw into war.
I wonder whether Iran can actually spare an outright war. There is clearly a lot of anti-government energy flowing in Iran, and that won’t have been stamped out by their crackdown on it.
I wonder whether most everyday Iranians would support a war with Israel.
Granted, it’s not likely Iran gets directly involved - they’ll just drive their Hezbollah prop.
I think that was a little bit different in that a) everyone (the West included!) expected Ukraine to just roll over, and b) a lot of those troops weren’t told they were actually going to war, they thought it was just a training mission… the poor bastards.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/04/russian-soldiers-ukraine-anger-duped-into-war
Israeli troops aren’t under any illusion about what they’re doing.
Even Israel doesn’t have a blank check to recreate the holocaust in broad daylight. A ground invasion to stamp out terror is cleaner in that sense.
Note: I could be very, very wrong, but the ruling Israeli far right has been pretty clear about what they wanna do to Gaza.
We all know what the endgame is.
The Gaza strip ceases to exist when it’s taken by force and “settlers” move in so it becomes part of Israel. Millions of Palestinians die in refugee camps.
Taken by force? It was taken by force 56 years ago. Since then the Palestinian population in Gaza has increased about 7-fold.
And there were already Israeli settlements there. They were dismantled in 2005 and the settlers forcibly removed by Sharon’s government.
