Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to expand military operations in Gaza and said the brutal assault on the besieged enclave is not close to being finished.
“We are not stopping. We are continuing to fight, and we will be intensifying the fighting in the coming days, and the fighting will take long and it is not close to concluding,” Netanyahu said on Monday.
The following day, the Israeli military said it was expanding ground operations in refugee camps in central Gaza after Israeli airstrikes pounded the area. Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi said Tuesday that Israeli operations in Gaza will continue for “many months.”
The comments about increased operations and a long war come after US officials have said they want Israel to wrap up its current phase of operations, which involves constant airstrikes and ground offensives, and transition into more targeted attacks on Hamas leadership. But there’s no indication Israel is listening to the US advice, and the Biden administration continues to provide unconditional military aid.
Netanyahu made similar comments while visiting an IDF intelligence unit. “We are continuing the war, and are intensifying the fighting in the southern Gaza Strip and other places. We will fight to the end, with the help of the most advanced technology,” he said.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said Tuesday that Israel’s bombardment killed 241 Palestinians and wounded 382 in the past 24 hours. The Palestinian death toll is close to 21,000, including over 8,000 children.
Many more could end up dying from hunger as a recent report using data from the UN and other aid agencies operating in Gaza found over 570,000 Palestinians in the Strip are starving and facing famine-like conditions.
The Likud has failed. Doubling down on failure ain‘t a winning strategy;
A bunch of sources indicate IDF KIA and WIA in Gaza are many times higher than officially reported. Some even suggest that IDF has 1,600 KIA and 3,400 WIA in Gaza alone ; plus there are significant iDF causalities on Northeen Fromt.
Combat videos show IDF infantry amateurish action – bunching together, no eyes all around, standing in front of big picture windows, poking weapons out of windows, and most shocking complete abandonment of IDF Armour. These are signs of a demoralized military.
The widespread blind rage attacks on civilians are also a sign of a defeated military. Victorious militaries don‘t bulldoze women and children sleeping in tents.
10% of Jewish Istaelis have already voted with their feet and left Likud governed Israel. More are leaving every day. The Likid has failed.
Retired IDF chief of staff agrees
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HGtTJ5bP-FU
That link was an eye-opener. What we haven’t been told by our illustrious main-stream media is that the Israeli economy is in shambles. The northern edge of the country is now uninhabited, as they’ve all been evacuated due to the northern front of Hezbollah. They’ve managed to commit the most horrendous genocide ever seen on live television, and they’ve sickened and appalled pretty much the entire world. The gate-keepers will be out in force today to put a damper on the truth.
The Hamas pogrom is being avenged’Hamas is being crushed.
Crikey Jake. Not really much of a response, really. Until there is a true, fair and lasting peace, between all sides, things are truly effed up!…
He just rants along at will, the same old mantras, despite them being largely discredited. Myself, I’ve stopped “feeding the trolls”. I don’t see it as helping anything. Believe me, I realize that the urge to keep responding to them is strong. 🙂 Bless you and yours this holiday season !
Nobody knows what is going on.
Just assume everyone is lying.
Those that don’t know what is going on are those that don’t want to know. Ignorance is a choice not an exemption.
“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.” -John Stuart Mill
“A bunch of sources” Care to share those sources. Posting a political ad by an opponent of Benjamin Netanyahu is not much proof.
Booby trapped house Wednesday local time – 40 IDF KIA‘d ( claim by Arabs)
Hate builds hate. As far as criticizing military tactics,urban warfare is a mess, as is fighting death cultists. A brave citizen army is fighting well trained bloodthirsty fanatic killers. If the tunnels were pumped full,of nerve gas,progressives would holler and holler.
….. A brave citizen army is fighting well trained bloodthirsty fanatic killers…..
You turning anti-Semitic now ?
Is it possible he could be SOOOO pro-ASI that he exceeded the 256-kb limit of his RAM and looped back around to zero ?
“…pumped full,of nerve gas,progressives…”
Who are you, William Shatner now, with these commas ? Incoherent.
Yes, progressives would “holler and holler”, because sensible people know that a) the use of poison/toxic gas in warfare is wildly illegal, and b) the IDF does not know who is in the tunnels. It’s a blind attack with likely hideous consequences for innocents.
There very well could be makeshift hospitals down there (recall – your vaunted IDF has basically destroyed all the ones on the surface) housing injured and critical patients moved down from the surface. Maternity wards; geriatric care; operating rooms and oncology wards.
And if you mean the IDF is the “…citizen army…” you’re a bigger propagandist than you are a failing English 098 student. The IDF is among the best trained & best equipped militaries on the planet. And they’re up against one of the poorest-supplied, least-mobile militas within 1,000 km’s of their borders.
Why is it, Sully, that you simultaneously tout the IDF as “farmers taking up arms against the British Redcoats” AND rattle on about a “50,000 man” Hamassian elite forces that you seem surprised haven’t sent their air force, navy, and Space Marines out of the rubble yet ?
Are you just constructing fan-fic out of clickbait news headlines ?
I guess Israel is just trying to create the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities. How else to do that other than killing them all?
“…they make a wasteland and call it peace.” – Tacitus
It’s the WW2 scenario the NeoCons have been repeatedly braying about forthe last 3 decades. Except this time it really is and the US Federal Government is on the side of the Nazis.
It is Hamas that learned Nazism from the “Brotherhood”
Did the Israelis just give the Americans the finger? Again?
That truly tickled my funny bone! 😉
They are simpatico except for PR purposes.
They don’t need to as they control all levers of power in America.
nonsense.
Does the fact that Hamas is hiding amongst civilians give Israelis the right to indiscriminately kill those civilians? Not in my book! I am honestly not sure what the solution is, but that ain’t it.
What would you do in this case? You are an IDF commander, you troops are pinned down by fire coming from an apartment building containing civilians and your troops are running out of ammo. Do yo (A) call in an air strike and flatten the building thus killings the civilians or (B) let your troops die?
Slaughtering 20,000 civilians is not the answer!
Right on, right on!!!
Civilians get killed in large number in this type of warfare. Israel did not choose the battle space, Hamas did. As long as Hamas fighter hide among civilian structures and civilians bad things will happen. What is Israel options? The only options Israel has to avoid civilians casualties is to not fight Hamas.
Committing genocide is never an option.
Civilians getting killed in Urban combat is not the same as genocide.
Ther are lot of options. Here’s one for starters.
The bomb shipments have included over 5,000 Mk84 2,000-pound warhead bombs, which Israel has been dropping on densely populated areas of Gaza. According to an analysis from The New York Times, during the first six weeks of the war, Israel routinely dropped 2,000-pound bombs on areas in south Gaza designated safe for civilians.
https://news.antiwar.com/2023/12/26/us-has-delivered-over-10000-tons-of-weapons-to-israel-since-october-7/
You rock!
Replacing Hamas with a government that cares more about helping its own people than killing Jews.
You are a pragmatist Tim, you truly are. Yet, the best way to deal with this situation is by truly implementing Peace, for ALL PEOPLE!
I agree with the need for peace. Sadly, like it or not, neither side is interested in peace.
Hi Tim, sometimes I feel inclined toward that line of thinking. Yet, somehow, we must make them all realize that peace is the only answer. There is no compromise…
(C) Go home and stop being part of an invasion/occupation force.
Bingo!
Option C would be great if Oct 7 did not occur. But it did and thus the mess in Gaza.
At some point, there are two remaining possibilities:
1) Option C; or
2) Israel ceases to exist.
Option C may be a lot more difficult to get to than the second one, but I suspect many Israelis and supporters of Israel would prefer it.
Tom, care to clarify? Exactly what do you mean by “go home”?
By “go home” I mean “go home” to Israel.
Israelis wanted a state. The UN gave them one with particular borders in UNR 181. The Israelis agreed to adhere to those borders as a condition of UN membership. And it has been breaking that promise for decades now.
Israeli troops should go home to within those borders and ask the UN to provide a peacekeeping force to administer the international city of Jerusalem and maintain security along the borders between the state of Israel and the state of Palestine.
Tom, thanks for the follow up. The UNR 181 boarders are history. That plan did not work in 1948 and there is no reason to think it would work now. Israel will never leave their survival as a nation depending on UN peacekeeping troops. Would you if you were them?
The UN could revoke Israel conditional membership if the want to, but they won’t. I not an expert on the UN but that is not going to happen. And if they did so what? Taiwan has been very successful not UN entity.
“Israel will never leave their survival as a nation depending on UN peacekeeping troops.”
Then Israel is unlikely to survive.
There were no Israelis in Gaza when the Gazans attacked Israel. Israels were home in Israel’now they are draining the mess in Gaza.
“draining the mess”. Is that a new euphemism for genocide?
There is much suffering-there is no genocide. Hamas launched a pogrom,they taught their youth hate,spread Jew-hating cartoons,used cement that could have built infrastructure to build tunnel fortifications,oppresses women, kills gays on site,stole funds,raped and mutilated.I call that a mess.
It’s OK, everyone, Sully insists there’s “no genocide”, we can all relax. If he’s wrong it’s no skin off his nose, so, you know he’s sure on this.
What do you call an asshole that won’t acknowledge 20,000 (8,000 children) dead and 500,000 on the verge of starvation? I call that a jake. Or vice-versa.
The Israelis were in someone else’s home.
That’s the fundamental problem.
The vast majority of buildings leveled in Gaza didn’t happen because of the scenario you described. Israel started indiscriminately flattening buildings, and killing people, long before there would have been any firefights. The vast majority of civilian deaths didn’t occur when the IDF was pinned down, in one of those firefights with little ammo, and just had no choice but to call in airstrikes. That’s just distortion. Using five thousand 2,000 lb. “dumb” bombs on a very small densely populated area(largely woman and children) tells you all you want to know.
What I was illustrating that in urban combat civilians get killed in a cross fire. They get killed when they are near a military target that is being hit by 2000 pound bombs. Remember, Hamas choose the battle space, not Israel. As I said and will continue to say, no Oct 7 attack, no counter attack and Gaza would be a better place today.
Military target? Now that is rich. Israel has made it known that every inch of Gaza is a “military target” And Hamas “choosing” the “battle space” doesn’t exonerate Israel for their cold-blooded disregard for civilian life. Please tell me where one hides from the five thousand 2,000 lb. bombs that Israel has dropped on a 141 square mile area populated with over 2 million people. Especially when they are even dropped on an area they were told to flee to. And as I said, and will continue to say, history didn’t start on October 7th. Do I need to post (again) Netanyahu telling us how Israel preferred Hamas over the PA as to drive a stake between Gaza and the West Bank which would ensure there would be NO Palestinian state? He even bragged about the fact that he made that happen.
Yes history did not start on Oct 7, it started maybe 5000 years ago. However, this battle did start on Oct 7. Even if Netanyahu supported Hamas at one point in time it does not justified Hamas’s attack. Remember Hitler and Stalin were buddies at one time,
The dead of civilians which sad is on Hamas. The simple fact is in such a density populated area full of an estimated 30,000 Hamas fighters, civilians will get killed in a large numbers If Hamas wants to kill IDF soldiers and avoid getting their own civilians killed, they should keeping attacking Israel directly. Move the the battle space to Israel.
“Yes history did not start on Oct 7, it started maybe 5000 years ago.”
Sarcasm? God (pun intended) I hope so.
I have yet to say the Hamas’ attack was justified. It’s irrelevant to Israel’s genocidal response. Nothing justifies that.
Hamas isn’t dropping those 2,000 lb “dumb” bombs on Gaza. That would be Israel. But keep ignoring that fact since it somehow justifies the blatant disregard for civilian life that you keep insisting Israel just can’t avoid. And you have got to be joking about Hamas “moving the battle space to Israel”. Maybe if they were supported by the superpower on the other side of the world and they actually had a comparable military.
Why isn’t “pull back, rearm, rethink” an option ? It’s the most sensible option and among the more obvious.
“Why isn’t “pull back, rearm, rethink” an option” You can’t pull back when pin down. That is the definition of being pin down.
How about sitting down and having a discussion?
Nobody would be shooting anybody if people sat down and talked and listened to each other.
Hamas refuses to negotiate-they opposed Oslo.Facts.
Nonsense. Hamas as the latest boogeyman is an excuse to appropriate the Palestinian territory.
Hamas is no “bogeyman”.they are a 50,000 man band of terrorists.
No Jake, that is an army.
Yes, Donna, it is an army. An army that attack Israel and now being counter attacked.
Where you sleeping on Oct 7?
And how would one have such a conversation with Hamas after Oct 7? Tell me how that would work?
The WAR may not be finished, Mr. N. But the Palestinian people may be, if this onslaught continues…
“US officials have said…”
That’s called “CYA” where I come from. It’s a total lie. There can be no doubt the neocons wants the war continued – and expanded to Lebanon, Syria and Iran. And Biden will accommodate them.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2d2d31dff5db2a1db60a0970c7859220ccd4fbfecd43e92da4c30f83da73e61e.jpg
The Netanyahu government has, to the very least, facilitated the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip to bomb it into oblivion. Netanyahu’s goals, with Joe Biden’s active support, are to steal Palestinian lands for Eastern European settlers and take over Gaza’s gas reserves off the coast.
It is a multiple-faced crime, and for this, Netanyahu needed a genocide to clear Palestinians from Gaza, killing them or pushing them outside.
It would seem that Netanyahu’s Zionists don’t give a damn about the Jewish tenth commandment, (Exodus ch. 20: Thou shalt not covet anything that belongs to thy neighbor).
It is a shame that the US government is associated with such a criminal project.
Who are the Israeli refuseniks picking jail over the Gaza war?
“ He’s a baby-faced 18-year-old with a heart full of idealism. When Tel Aviv teen Tal Mitnick refused to enlist in the Israeli army, he was put on trial: on Tuesday, he was taken to military prison to serve a 30-day sentence.
Standing alone in a country on a determined war footing is an agonising decision. But, speaking at Tel Hashomer, a base near the Gaza fence in central Israel, Mitnick staunchly defended his decision.
“I believe that slaughter cannot solve slaughter,” he said. “The criminal attack on Gaza won’t solve the atrocious slaughter that Hamas executed. Violence won’t solve violence. And that is why I refuse.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/27/who-are-the-israeli-refuseniks-picking-jail-over-the-gaza-war
That happens in every country with a draft in a war.