Troubles in Israel are terrorism - Gaza strip doesn't have an army - no army supports them - conflict and counterterrorism - only a metaphorical war - Hamas are terrorist - Fatah renounces violence
This war is local to Israel not global. It is not an invasion like the Ukraine war. It is counterterrorism. This is not to minimize it in any way. I have written this blog post to help people who know nothing about Israel / Gaza / Hamas and worry that it will become a world war. No it can’t not even any kind of a war.
That depends how you use the word “war” but it usually means conflicts between countries and armies. That’s not happening here.
Israel has an army, Gaza strip doesn't. Israel isn’t fighting a war with an army. It is fighting a metaphorical “war” with terrorists in trucks firing guns at civilians.
Israel is vastly superior in capabilities to the Gaza strip which doesn’t have an army and is not supported by any army.
It is a conflict for sure but most wouldn’t call this a war.
Hamas had no military objective. They shot and killed or injured party goers at a festival, and took hostage of random innocent people, and they killed random civilians in the street. That is terrorism not usually called war.
It’s important to realize, many in Gaza strip are also opposed to Hamas. There are two main factions, Fatah who renounced violence three decades ago, and Hamas who are terrorist. Hamas has control over the Gaza strip, while Fatah are in control in Israel. That is why we don’t get similar terrorist actions within Israel itself. But many in Gaza are as opposed to the Hamas terrorism as anyone outside of Gaza - and they get the brunt of the bombing retaliations every time Hamas do terrorist actions in Israel.
See also my:
The Palestinians in Israel don’t have an army either. So they can’t go to war with Israel either. They are just refugees in their own country displaced by the settlement of Israel by Jews after WW2, like the Gaza strip refugees.
Iran will NOT join this fight. Iran is of course indirectly involved but only as a weapon supplier of small arms and similar to the terrorists. Iran is NOT going to attack Israel with its vastly superior fighter jets and other military equipment and its nukes.
Please click to unblur the image, it’s just a map. Quora often blurs all images in posts about war topics. I never post anything sensitive in any of my blog posts, everything is suitable for kids down to young teenagers.
Gaza strip
refugees from Israel
no army
not supported by any army
Israel
Most advanced army in the Middle East by far.
Fighter jets, tanks, everything a modern army has.
Graphic from: File:Gaza Strip map2.svg - Wikimedia Commons
The main issue for Israel is being too heavy-handed and causing civilian casualties with its response.
While with the Gaza Strip the challenge is to hit anything at all.
The Palestinian rockets are primitive and unguided.
And it's not that unusual to fire rockets. Infiltration isn’t unusual either.
The brutality of the terrorism is unusual this time. You can see it in this clip. Just firing randomly even towards the house where civilians were filming what happened out of a window. Nobody is killed in this clip or injured but you can see the terrorists firing their guns.
https://twitter.com/Faytuks/status/1710514152530211038
With the rockets it may be a larger one than there's been for some time. But that's about it.
It is a metaphorical war. Like "war on terror". It just means he will fight the terrorists inside Israel with shoot-to-kill as for a war. But nobody on the other side.
We have Israel with a big modern army and Hamas with not even a single tank or aircraft. From a military, not a political point of view, if Israel wanted to they could drive into the Gaza strip and take it over in a few days. That would be very repressive and even this right-wing government is not likely to do that so it probably won't extend to the Israeli forces entering the Gaza strip. They often fire missiles into the Gaza strip though.
QUOTE STARTS
Citizens of Israel we are at War not in an operation or in rounds but at War this morning Hamas launched a murderous surprise attack against the state of Israel and its citizens we have been in this since the early morning hours I convened the heads of security establishment and ordered first of all to clear out the communities that have been infiltrated by terrorists this currently is being carried out at the same time I have ordered an extensive mobilization of reserves and that we return fire of a magnitude that the enemy has not known the enemy will pay an unprecedented price in the meantime I call on the citizens of Israel to strictly adhere to the directives of the IDF and Home Front command we are at War and we will win it
From the simultaneous translation by an interpreter here:
Background here Gaza–Israel conflict - Wikipedia
The US won't get involved at all.
Nor will any other country. It won't lead to a war. Israel is not at war with any of its neighbours.
Egypt won't either (Gaza Strip has a 12-kilometer (7.5 miles) border with Egypt).
Iran may supply the militants in the Gaza Strip to some extent secretly along with other countries but they are not going to support them in a war either.
Gaza is a strip of land between Israel and the Mediterranean which is where many refugees were evacuated from Israel when they cleared out Palestinians to make space for a Jewish state so Israel is their ancestral land.
It is not a war and can't turn into a war because the tiny strip of Gaza doesn't have an army and no other country would support it in a war.
Some other countries are believed to supply terrorists in Gaza. But not with tanks or advanced missiles or anything like that. Just low-level supplies to terrorists.
It's low level a bit like the troubles in Northern Ireland. A bit larger scale because of the rockets but the rockets are small and primitive.
The Israeli government at present is too far right for much chance of genuine peace talks with the Palestinians.
The most that can happen is a pause where attacks on both sides stop. But they always start up again eventually, sometimes pauses for a long time.
The other main area where there are occasional incidents, but for a different reason is the Golan heights between Syria and Israel with sometimes Syria firing rockets at Israel. But that's not war either. It's a very local territorial local dispute over a thin strip of land only a few kilometres wide that Syria considers to be part of Syria and Israel considers to be part of Israel.
Israel has peaceful agreements with Jordan to manage the Mount, Jordan handles it all and Jews are not permitted to worship there. Muslim countries want Israel to go for a two-state solution with Jerusalem split in two and with regions that are permanently for Palestinians without the Israeli settlements in them. The current Israeli government is far right and wants Palestinians who remain in Israel to have minimal rights. So there is a lot of tension for that reason.
But there is no way any of the neighbours will attack Israel. It is militarily far too strong. It also has nukes, not declared but open secret, as a deterrent, but it would be impossible for any country to invade anyway even without nukes because it has modern technology supported by the US. Nobody else can match it, Iran gets closest but is not a patch on what Israel has.
So there isn't going to be any actual war involving Israel, it is just too powerful for that.
On its side Israel has no ambitions on any other territory except Israel which Jews see as their ancestral homeland which they think they were given by God.
Palestinians also see it as their ancestral homeland, Palestinians are Muslim. The Jews were settled there from around the world at the end of WW2 after the persecution by the Nazis forming the modern state of Israel.
But when they were settled there it wasn't an empty country, it was occupied by Palestinians and the Palestinians were evicted from their homes, farms and lands to make space for the Jews, which is the historical background that has led to all these issues to the present.
Before the end of WW2 there were hardly any Jews in what is now modern Israel.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
- PALESTINIANS AS REFUGEES FROM ISRAEL WHEN THE JEWS WERE RESETTLED THERE AFTER WW2
- FEWER RIGHTS THAN JEWS
- LOST THEIR LANDS
- WANT A TWO-STATE SOLUTION WITH PART OF HISTORICAL ISRAEL TO CALL THEIR OWN
- ISRAEL SWAPS BETWEEN MODERATE AND FAR RIGHT GOVERNMENT
- CURRENT FAR RIGHT ISRAELI GOVERNMENT IS RATHER OPPOSED TO A TWO STATE SOLUTION
The historical background here is that at the end of WW2, after the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany and their occupied territories, the Jews were resettled to Israel their historical homeland. However Israel wasn't empty. It was the home of millions of Palestinians at the time. They were forcefully evicted against their will to make room for the Jews. Palestinians want a two state solution where they have control over part of Israel as their own land to govern as they like and half of Jerusalem because they are Muslims and Jerusalem is sacred to them too. Israel swaps back and forth between hard right and moderate governments The hard right don't want a two state solution and they crowd the Paletinians into smaller and smaller regions of Israel by building Jewish settlements in areas the Palestinians were evacuated into when the state of Israel was created. The Gaza strip is a region formally part of Egypt where many Palestinian refugees moved. The Israelis control 6 out of 7 of the main highways out of Gaza strip and they control the Mediterranean sea on the sea side of Gaza. They also control the air over Gaza, which doesn't have an army or an airforce. Gaza is able to govern itself but it is a weak economy, and they are hemmed in by Israel in this way and limited in many things. Gaza wants to be more independent of Israel.
For more background see this blog post I did last time there was a major incident involving the Gaza strip:
HOW THE TERRORISTS GOT THROUGH THE FENCE
It is very serious for Israel and Gaza in the short term. It is not serious at a world level.
Gaza has no army and can't do more than terrorists in paragliders and riding in trucks and primitive rockets they make themselves which are unguided.
This time they added drones which they used to destroy the Israeli observation towers which is how they were able to break the barriers. The drones are the new capability that Israel will need to deal with.
They got through by first firing hundreds of rockets to try to overwhelm Israel's iron dome air defence. Simultaneously terrorists flew over in paragliders and drones attacked the observation towers along the fence. Then they used explosions to break through the fence and then the terrorists drove through the hole in fast motorcycles.
It was a holiday and so the Israelis were likely less alert. And it's a huge intelligence failure as the Israeli intelligence had no idea they were planning this.
QUOTE A compilation of Hamas clips shows how the terror group invaded southern Israel yesterday. First they bombed Israeli observation towers and weapons systems on the border, then fired hundreds of rockets as terrorists on paragliders flew over the border. Moments later, Hamas approached the border fence, blew up holes in it, and allowed hundreds of terrorists to infiltrate into Israel
https://twitter.com/manniefabian/status/1710980029977424295
NO WAY THIS CAN BECOME A WORLD WAR
US supplies Israel and so indirectly helps them with supply of weapons for Hamas. Not likely that US get directly involved as Israel can easily handle it themselves.
It is not Iranian territory in any way. Iran is not interested in attacking the US. When the US assassinated an Iranian general under Trump as president, Iran hit a US base in the MIddle East, it only cares about the US presence in the MIddle East.
There have been many Middle East conflicts. Including the US invasion of Iraq, the Syrian wars against ISIS, the Kuwaiti conflict, many wars involving Israel etc. None of them spread outside of the Middle East.
There is no way a Middle East conflict would become a world war despite Christians claiming it for 2000 years based on out of date religious reasons.
SECRETARY BLINKEN SAYING THIS IS A COUNTER-TERRORISM OPERATION NOT A WAR IN THE CONVENTIONAL SENSE
Transcript here
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, Dana, the first thing to say is this: This is the worst attack on Israel since the Yom Kippur War in 1973 – 50 years ago. But there’s a big difference. That was a conventional war between countries, between armies. This, a massive terrorist attack on Israeli civilians – indiscriminate firing of rockets against civilians, thousands of rockets; men and women and children dragged across the border into Gaza, including a Holocaust survivor in a wheelchair; people gunned down in the streets, civilians. So, you can imagine the impact this is having on Israel, and it should be something that revolts the entire world.
Right now, what we’re seeing is relative calm throughout most of Israel but intense fighting continuing to go on in the Gaza area. We immediately reached out – President Biden reached out to Prime Minister Netanyahu, spoke to him on the phone early yesterday. I spoke to the Israeli President Herzog, to the Foreign Minister Eli Cohen. We’ve been on the phones throughout our government over the last 24 hours, engaging everyone in the region and well beyond —
…
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, two things, Dana. First, what Jake Sullivan said was right. If you look at the relationship among countries in the Middle East, you saw – with a lot of work by the United States – countries coming together, the region integrating, hostilities diminishing. And we’ve been very engaged in pursuing, for example, normalization between Israel and its neighbors, building on what’s already been done, including with Saudi Arabia. And other conflicts, like the conflict in Yemen where we’ve had a truce now for almost two years, have made a huge difference.
What happened over the last 24 hours doesn’t go to state-to-state conflict, where Jake is exactly right – it’s diminished. This goes to a terrorist attack by a terrorist organization.
At the same time, we have been intensely focused on tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. That’s why we brought them together in Sharm el-Sheikh, in Aqaba, to try to get both sides not to engage in acts that could precipitate hostilities, violence. And that, unfortunately, does not include Hamas because it’s a terrorist organization. And it took action, as we’ve seen over the last 24 hours, that has had a terrible impact, but that’s what was going on.
HOW ISRAEL NEEDS TO WORK WITH FATAH AND NON VIOLENT PALESTINIANS AND MUSLIM COUNTRIES OPPOSED TO HAMAS - IT IS POSSIBLE TO BE ETHICAL WHILE RESPONDING TO TERRORIST UNETHICAL CONDUCT
It's terrorism and what Israel is doing is counterterrorism. It is not a war. The people at risk are Israelis and Palestinians not other countries.
However sadly unlike Ukraine who respond to war crimes by being extra careful not to conduct war crimes, Israel has cut of water, food and medicine to the Gaza strip.
This is against international law of armed conduct.
I think it is important to realize that the Palestinians in the Gaza strip are 90% without adequate drinking water, 50% poor, many are opposed to violence and to what Hamas is doing and they are at great risk of a humanitarian crisis as a result of what Israel is doing.
Ukraine has NEVER responded like this to Russia after all its atrocities.
Cutting off food, water and medicine from Gaza is as inhumane as Russia targeting Ukrainian infrastructure o or its grain blockade. Violation of international law of armed conduct
. Gaza 'soon without fuel, medicine and food' - Israel authorities
There are rules to armed conduct internationally agreed under the Geneva convention.
There are 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza. Many hate Hamas as much as you!
50% kids. 50% in poverty 90% without clean water. Bombed for no fault of their own.
https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1711190819799986216
It is possible to be ethical even when the people you are fighting are unethical.
There is a proposal for a way forward here. To work with Fatah, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other countries opposed to Hamas to overthrow Hamas in the Gaza strip and install Muslim peace-keepers (far more likely to succeed than Jewish peace-keepers) Opinion | Hamas’s Control of Gaza Must End Now
A far right Israeli government would be less likely to do this but I wonder if there is any possibility now as the "unity government"??
What Israel should do is to work with Fatah, Egypt, Saudi Arabia etc to get Muslim peace-keepers in the Gaza strip to counteract Hamas. They can't solve this with Jewish peace-keepers in Gaza - that would inflame it and make things worse.This is about how it is not a war. But I need to do a new post explaining about Fatah and the risk of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza strip. I don't know if the current unity government in Israel might moderate the risk for excesses of the far right, I hope so.Through all the atrocities of Russia's attacks, attacks against infrastructure, the torture and horrific acts against some of their civilians, the Ukrainians have never done anything like this. It is possible to respond to unethical conduct by being ethical. I hope Israel will do that.
See also my: