...Since Israel ignored warnings in advance of the attack, I think that the Netanyahu government deserves a lot of the blame for what happened. So do many Israelis think that, apparently. However, the situation is very different now. Israel has largely eliminated the threat of another such attack in the near future.
To the extent they've done so, it's because they've killed Hamas fighters and destroyed their capability to launch further attacks. IOW, exactly what you're opposing them having done.
False. Hamas was effectively neutralized after Israel woke up, mobilized, and rushed troops to surround the Gaza strip. The threat of a renewed sneak attack became moot even before Israel started its bombardment, which killed far more Palestinian Gazans than were even involved in the October 7 attack. Israel was never in danger of being conquered militarily by Hamas, although it enjoyed vastly more international support before it began to take revenge on the civilian population.
...The task now is to root out and destroy Hamas.
And to free the hostages.
That would be nice, but many may already have been killed along with the Hamas terrorists and the civilians who had nothing to do with the attack. I really hope that they can save most of the hostages, but it is not at all clear how many still remain to be saved. And I don't think that their recovery was the main objective for Israel's response. That was payback for the October 7 attack.
How do you root out and destroy Hamas with no bombs or missiles?
Negotiation and gradual, methodical occupation. Showing some concern for the lives of noncombatant Palestinians would help Israel to build international support rather than hemorrhage it.
...Actually, they weren't compelled to release any hostages. They did so at the urging of the Qatar government as an attempt at confidence-building towards negotiations.
The notion that those two things are mutually exclusive, or that the timing had nothing to do with a looming Israeli ground invasion, strikes me as rather silly.
Nevertheless, it was pressure from Arab allies of Hamas, not the Israeli bombardment, that led to the token release of hostages in an attempt to broker some kind of negotiated release for more. It failed completely because of the utter indifference of the Israeli government to any kind of negotiation, so that ended the effort. The vast majority of hostages are now either still in captivity or dead.
If they released all the hostages, their bit of leverage would be gone. How you leap from "Hamas still has hostages" to "Israel should use no military force to defeat Hamas," I have no clue.
Normally, hostage negotiators work incrementally and try to implement confidence-building activities. That is actually the argument that the Qatar government seemed to be trying to start, but the Israeli government was more interested in punishing Hamas and the general Palestinian population that they blamed for the attack.
We know why they've restricted supplies to Gaza. They don't want them diverted by Hamas. And they know Hamas is sitting on supplies it's not giving to its people.
Exactly. So Hamas can outlast the general population, whose suffering is reported on daily. Not a winning strategy. Better to let the supplies in, even if Hamas does also get access to some of them. It is possible that the IDF could be part of the distribution by allowing obvious noncombatants into safe areas that it screened and guarded. Securing safety for children, the elderly, and other obvious noncombatants would have been especially welcomed by Palestinians, many of whom were never huge supporters of Hamas to begin with and had nothing to do with the attack.
A ground operation is exactly what they're doing. And if you don't think they're militarily consulting with the US, I'm not sure what to tell you.
Bombardment of densely populated areas with missiles and aircraft is not exactly a ground operation. They have recently started some ground operations. I didn't say that Israel wasn't consulting with the US, but it takes time for the US to organize and send in advisers with experience in urban warfare. It isn't at all clear that advice on lessons learned from Iraq is what the IDF wants to hear. However, much of what is happening is not being shared with the public. All we know is that Israel is not showing the restraint that the US has been urging. That much has been made public.
...More effective, perhaps, would be to bring in Arab governments that would be willing to help once Israel stopped the indiscriminate bombings and expressed some willingness to receive their help....Right now, I think that Israelis would feel very nervous about letting Arab states take over the occupation and administration of Gaza, since they could help to rearm Hamas clandestinely. Moreover, I think that most Arab states are now in a position where it is politically impossible to be seen as doing anything at all to help Israel out of its self-created mess.
Sounds like you're conflicted about this option.
Absolutely. I'm not foolish enough to think I have all the answers or that anyone else here does, either. All we can do is debate the options as we know them, but the real decisions need to be made by people with actual knowledge of conditions and expertise in military and diplomatic operations. What we do know is that the numbers of Palestinians killed by Israeli bombardments and the cutoff of humanitarian aid has caused vastly more suffering among Palestinians than Israelis felt on October 7. So it is totally delusional to think that Israel can expect the rest of the world to accept the horror of the initial attack as sufficient justification for its subsequent acts of retribution, which have involved the deaths of large numbers of non-Hamas non-combatants.
Proportionality is not assessed based simply on number of casualties per side in a conflict.
No, but there appear to be no factors that weigh in favor of an assessment where Israel's response to October 7 comes out as reasonably proportionate to what the Hamas terrorists did. If the idea was to get hostages released, then why haven't more hostages been released?
