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Israel-Hamas war thread


Brisketexan

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13 hours ago, statsman said:

Here’s a question, and if it’s better suited for CR, I can take it there-

Hamas’ military is funded by Iran. Shortly after 10-7, the WSJ reported that Iran helped plan 10-7. What was Iran’s plan? Was it tied into the other ME activities? Was it a favor to their Russian allies, to take attention and pressure from them?

 Also- was Hamas expecting Hezbollah to join in, from the north? I know Israel has been wary of Hezbollah this whole time, keeping forces in place near them.  
 
In conclusion, what exactly was the plan?

This? The war is going swimmingly for Hamas and Iran:

- Israel’s normalization paths with other Arab states are on ice

- Iran and its proxies are emboldened to launch strikes at American targets and disrupt shipping

- World opinion shifted in a big way against Israel and its friends, disrupting what we can do on other fronts

- We have a whole fucking CSG tied down wasting munitions on the gotdam Houthis 

- An entire generation of Palestinians and Israelis will never be able to even make an overture at serious peace and reconciliation talk

- Not to go full CR, but what IF the presidency comes down to the wire and the Michigan Arab-American vote loses it for Biden? These dipshits basically tilted the course of U.S. history in a big way

I can’t emphasize enough that “winning” would be terrible for Hamas. Killing half the country and destroying every building is much better.  Peace and calm leaves little use for a terrorist government that can’t do anything, the latter is actually the optimum environment for them. 
 

Truly intolerable that the global hegemon is so entwined in this squalid quarrel.  We really need to tell everyone that we are done except for leveling any shithead that dares strike a ship.  With dumb bombs and not the expensive stuff.  

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1 hour ago, Anastasis said:

AIPAC running with the aggy-like Wyner piece now from Tablet. This is how propaganda and atrocity denial work together. 

 

Let’s try an experiment. Try to counter or criticize the Tablet article without resorting to these logic fallacies:

Appeal to Authority- “The Hamas numbers have been accepted before by the UN(RWA)”

Ad Hominem- “The author has written for conservatives and is Jewish”

In other words, if you don’t like the conclusion, try to counter the analysis, and find errors 

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2 hours ago, statsman said:

 

Let’s try an experiment. Try to counter or criticize the Tablet article without resorting to these logic fallacies:

Appeal to Authority- “The Hamas numbers have been accepted before by the UN(RWA)”

Ad Hominem- “The author has written for conservatives and is Jewish”

In other words, if you don’t like the conclusion, try to counter the analysis, and find errors 

It's aggy data analysis. His primary argument is that the data lack the variance that would be expected in real world data. To demonstrate, the author uses a highly selected timeframe constraining the observations included from the larger dataset to reduce variance. The sleight of hand here should be pretty obvious. We don't even have to jump into a discussion of modelling complex real world phenomena here.

 

Quote

 

Here’s the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.

If Hamas’ numbers are faked or fraudulent in some way, there may be evidence in the numbers themselves that can demonstrate it. While there is not much data available, there is a little, and it is enough: From Oct. 26 until Nov. 10, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry released daily casualty figures that include both a total number and a specific number of women and children.

The first place to look is the reported “total” number of deaths. The graph of total deaths by date is increasing with almost metronomical linearity, as the graph in Figure 1 reveals.

This regularity is almost surely not real. One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less. Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers. Unfortunately, verified control data is not available to formally test this conclusion, but the details of the daily counts render the numbers suspicious.

image.thumb.png.b07218764eb62c502731d76a0801c78a.png 

 

Laying aside the absolute absurdity of using figure 1 in this way, let's look at the actual data. The author selected data ranging from 10/27-11/10. Note that he did not justify this date range in his article dated Mar 6. Why throw out the reported deaths prior to 10/27? Why not consider any of the deaths after 11/10? These are pretty obvious questions, right?  The is no acknowledgement nor justification for the selection of this particular time frame. 

Here is the dataset that Wyner used, linked directly from the Tablet piece (note that he appears to have a data entry error in the cumulative death total for 10/27, amateur hour shit easily quality checked by reference to the OCHA data here: https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-21

Quote

ef1bd6044cc680ac1ba75baddfbb1b0985293191

 Here is a link to a far more robust dataset that reports cumulative deaths from 10/7/23 to 03/17/24 in csv format: https://data.techforpalestine.org/api/v2/casualties_daily.csv

 Wyner's cumulative death data correspond with the cumulative death data in the csv (with the exception of the one that the fat fingered 7362 instead of 7326. 

Here is the full time daily death totals. Wyner's time frame is represented by the overlapping blue bars. Do you see how obviously ridiculous this is? The variance is highly sensitive to the timeframe that was selected. It's more than ridiculous. It looks to me like straight up attempt to deceive with cherry picked data.  

wyner.jpg

 

 

Edited by Anastasis
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So, I just read a tech nerd discussion of the data, which argues there really is a reasonable daily variance in the data, if you assume a Poisson distribution rather than a normal distribution. 
 
There hasn’t been a rebuttal of Wyner’s noting lack of correlation in reported daily deaths of women and children (you would expect them to be highly correlated). The best explanation (other than the data being invented) is that there is a lag in the data being tabulated, and that Hamas Ministry of Health really shouldn’t try to provide daily totals. 

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6 hours ago, Anastasis said:

AIPAC running with the aggy-like Wyner piece now from Tablet. This is how propaganda and atrocity denial work together. 

 

 

I don't need to dispute your numbers, I simply don't think they are relevant to the moral evaluation of Israeli conduct.

Reference was made above to attacking a hospital is a war crime. Well, Hamas know the PR value of that kind of thing. So way before 7 OCT, they built out a network of hospitals across Gaza. Real hospitals, they get the PR for taking care of folks. But, they were ALL OF THEM colocated with military assets. This was a deliberate strategy by Hamas. Some call it the Dead Baby Strategy. It's kind of what they do.

Prior to the D-Day landings on Normandy, we bombed the ever living shit out of the countryside. the French countryside. Populated by French citizens, who presumably, hated the Germans and wanted us to invade. And we blew up those French civilians who were on our side. With our bombs, dropped from our airplanes. For all intensive porpoises, it was a deliberate act. It was not even close to a war crime.

America then decided that a critical vulnerability of the German war machine was ball bearings. In the plants we bombed, they weren't staffed by military, probably by mostly women. The hospitals and grocery stores and nursery schools we destroyed when our bombs missed their targets, well that was a casualty of war. Still not a war crime. 

The scenario you are proposing seems to indicate Israel should not fire back when shot at, if there are civilians at risk. I assure you, America would shoot back. And so should the Israelis. It's not much more complicated than self defense. Hamas's war crimes (using human shields) are on them, not Israel. Realistically, this is black letter law. It's not my opinion, it's how war works.  The right to fire back when attacked is God given, few people actually debate the truth of it.

The military mission of Israel is to kick Hamas out of power. How do you do that without killing their soldiers? Hamas is embedded with civilians, aiming to sacrifice as many innocents as they can. I don't know what you can do about that.

I feel for the Palestinians. I don't know what else to say. Nothing can be done, innocent lives will be lost. It is a tragedy. 

Edited by Thetexashammer
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I am torn on this issue. My simple take is this. Israel needs to hit back, but not like this. They have a strong Special Forces and Intel group. use them to take out the Hamas leaders, not level buildings. Would it be painful for both sides? Yes, but Hamas is not Gaza. Gaza is not Hamas.

Use the IDF to move aid, not block it. Set up hospitals, don't raid them.

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1 hour ago, Thetexashammer said:

The scenario you are proposing seems to indicate Israel should not fire back when shot at, if there are civilians at risk. I assure you, America would shoot back. And so should the Israelis. It's not much more complicated than self defense. Hamas's war crimes (using human shields) are on them, not Israel. Realistically, this is black letter law. It's not my opinion, it's how war works.  The right to fire back when attacked is God given, few people actually debate the truth of it.

 

1 hour ago, InkaUtexas said:

I am torn on this issue. My simple take is this. Israel needs to hit back, but not like this. They have a strong Special Forces and Intel group. use them to take out the Hamas leaders, not level buildings. Would it be painful for both sides? Yes, but Hamas is not Gaza. Gaza is not Hamas.

Use the IDF to move aid, not block it. Set up hospitals, don't raid them.

 

I always find it interesting how this logic is always applied to Israel but never to Palestinians. They have been the victims of constant Israeli-backed terror in the West Bank, a place where by all rights they have absolutely no right to be (legally or morally), with thousands being killed or forcibly displaced from their homes and no one bats an eye. When an Israeli sniper takes out unarmed protestors on the other side of the Gaza fence and then cheers about it before uploading it to social media, or they use peacefully protesting Gazans as target practice and then brag to reporters about how many knees they took out that day, no one bats an eye. When an Israeli sniper (who again, should not even be where he is) domes a 9 year old kid from 300 yards away after he was simply near a protest that had already dispersed, no no bats an eye.

Those people don't have the right to self defense. Only Israelis have that right. If they fight back they're branded terrorists and their lives are subsequently forfeit. In other words, Israelis are killed. Palestinians just die. An unfortunate casualty of "war".

 

1 hour ago, Thetexashammer said:

The military mission of Israel is to kick Hamas out of power. How do you do that without killing their soldiers? Hamas is embedded with civilians, aiming to sacrifice as many innocents as they can. I don't know what you can do about that.

 

The military mission of Israel is to cleanse Gaza of Palestinians, one way or another. @Anastasis has said this before, but not one single motherfucker would flinch if Israel Mossad'd the fuck out of every Hamas leader in Gaza and elsewhere in the world. Hell, I'd fucking cheer. But there's no evidence they're even trying to do that. I can tell you one thing you absolutely do not need to do in order to take out Hamas, and that is destroy Gaza's civilian structure entirely, and make the place unlivable. Funny thing is, though, that's exactly what's happening.

It's great how the goalposts have shifted from "No WAY is Israel deliberately targeting civilians" to "Well they HAVE to deliberately target civilians". But we all knew that was coming.

Do they need to get rid of Hamas? Of course, I wish Hamas would wither and die and never come back, but that's not the fucking goal. Bibi needs Hamas in order to justify retaining power. If there is no enemy to provide that justification, he and his bloodthirsty Likud brethren lose power and he likely enjoys a significant part of the rest of his life in prison. He's now gone too far and has to either back off or finish the job by killing them all or ejecting them all from Gaza somehow.

 

2 hours ago, Thetexashammer said:

I feel for the Palestinians. I don't know what else to say. Nothing can be done, innocent lives will be lost. It is a tragedy. 

 

Yeah no, you clearly don't. All the weird, Christofascist bullshit about how scary Muslims are you got run off from the CR thread for posting clearly illustrates that. Let's not dabble in lies, just say what you really feel. "Nothing can be done" is a bullshit sentiment, you just don't want anything to be done.

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Faiq Mabhouh, the head of the Operations Directorate of Hamas' Internal Security has been liquidated by the IDF in his headquarter at the Shifa hospital.

 

This is interesting since we don't want the IDF to target hospitals. That is quite a dilemma.

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1 minute ago, Bevo said:

 

This is interesting since we don't want the IDF to target hospitals. That is quite a dilemma.

I think we'd just like them not to obliterate them. Going in and killing a terrorist while leaving the hospital intact/usable seems like fair game to me. Seems like what happened here.

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Just now, Brian Fantana said:

I think we'd just like them not to obliterate them. Going in and killing a terrorist while leaving the hospital intact/usable seems like fair game to me. Seems like what happened here.

I seriously doubt it. Going into a hospital and targeting individuals while ignoring non-combatants works well in video games, though.

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6 minutes ago, Bevo said:

I seriously doubt it. Going into a hospital and targeting individuals while ignoring non-combatants works well in video games, though.

From what I'm reading it seems like a raid and a gunfight, nothing was bombed. They killed some Hamas combatants and this guy. I imagine the hospital is still usable after everything is cleaned up.

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16 minutes ago, Brian Fantana said:

From what I'm reading it seems like a raid and a gunfight, nothing was bombed. They killed some Hamas combatants and this guy. I imagine the hospital is still usable after everything is cleaned up.

It's possible when the majority of Hamas has been eliminated. However, those kind of operations are extremely dangerous - as in the enemy has many advantages so it is likely more of your forces are killed and injured than enemy forces. So expecting Israel to have operated in this manned from the beginning is asking more than what any other country would do. We generally would just leave those guys alone or target them later. Rarely and I can't think of an instance where we alone had to eliminate so many combatants in the middle of large groups of non-combatants. In Vietnam, we had issues with asymmetric warfare.

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5 minutes ago, Parliament said:

Is that possible?

Yes, but would cause some issues for sure. Mossad has done hits across the Middle East, not all successful. That is why I said Lebanon. Kill Hamas there and what? Piss of Hezbollah? Well they don't really like you.

A hit in Qatar would also piss off the US.

Also, notice Hamas is not in exile in Saudi Arabia and Egypt?

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8 hours ago, statsman said:

So, I just read a tech nerd discussion of the data, which argues there really is a reasonable daily variance in the data, if you assume a Poisson distribution rather than a normal distribution. 
 
There hasn’t been a rebuttal of Wyner’s noting lack of correlation in reported daily deaths of women and children (you would expect them to be highly correlated). The best explanation (other than the data being invented) is that there is a lag in the data being tabulated, and that Hamas Ministry of Health really shouldn’t try to provide daily totals. 

Yes, even in the cherry-picked data, I think the argument would be that they are over-dispersed for a poisson distribution. The actual distribution is probably far more complex, for many of the reasons that @Laxtonto alludes to. These are very complex things to model. 

But that gives Wyner far too easy of a pass.  From his write up:

This regularity is almost surely not real. One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less.

This is EXACTLY what you see if you only look only two or three days before the timeframe he selected, and in fact occurs on numerous other days both before and after. So a few explanations to things here. Either 1) Wyner did like absolutely no vetting of the available data on the subject (basic incompetence); 2) was unable to appreciate the implications of the time frame he selected from the dataset(basic statistical incompetence); 3) did not understand how to analyze the data (maybe more advanced statistical incompetence); or 4) there was purposive selection and a kicker of insulting the intelligence of his readership (malign intent and hubris). Maybe some combination of above. 

WRT to the daily breakdown by age/sex, there is lag and adjudication obvious in the raw data. I don't think that there is anything wrong with reporting the breakdowns as available and further updating as they are adjudicated. The problem is when someone that is either incompetent or has malign intent (or both!) tries to torture those data using a faulty analytical framework to generate talking points, and then those talking points are circulated by groups such as AIPAC and others to influence American perception and foreign policy. 

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News: U.S. State Department declares 100% of Gaza’s population is at risk of acute food level insecurity.

unfamiliar with the link, but wanted a source quote.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/blinken-says-all-of-gaza-facing-unprecedented-food-insecurity/
 

Quote

“According to the most respected measure of these things, 100 percent of the population in Gaza is at severe levels of acute food insecurity. That’s the first time an entire population has been so classified,” Blinken told a press conference in the Philippines, where he is on an official visit.


 

 

 

 

 

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20 hours ago, Anastasis said:

Yes, even in the cherry-picked data, I think the argument would be that they are over-dispersed for a poisson distribution. The actual distribution is probably far more complex, for many of the reasons that @Laxtonto alludes to. These are very complex things to model. 

But that gives Wyner far too easy of a pass.  From his write up:

This regularity is almost surely not real. One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less.

This is EXACTLY what you see if you only look only two or three days before the timeframe he selected, and in fact occurs on numerous other days both before and after. So a few explanations to things here. Either 1) Wyner did like absolutely no vetting of the available data on the subject (basic incompetence); 2) was unable to appreciate the implications of the time frame he selected from the dataset(basic statistical incompetence); 3) did not understand how to analyze the data (maybe more advanced statistical incompetence); or 4) there was purposive selection and a kicker of insulting the intelligence of his readership (malign intent and hubris). Maybe some combination of above. 

WRT to the daily breakdown by age/sex, there is lag and adjudication obvious in the raw data. I don't think that there is anything wrong with reporting the breakdowns as available and further updating as they are adjudicated. The problem is when someone that is either incompetent or has malign intent (or both!) tries to torture those data using a faulty analytical framework to generate talking points, and then those talking points are circulated by groups such as AIPAC and others to influence American perception and foreign policy. 

Explain this to me like I'm a lawyer.

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1 minute ago, DDD Dad said:

Explain this to me like I'm a lawyer.

A statistician said that Hamas death toll figures couldn't possibly be real because the daily variation of the deaths should be more randomly distributed. 

Both Anastasis and I have pointed out that this statistician's analysis (published a week ago) cherrypicked a ten-day period from the end of October where the daily numbers appear fairly constant. Still, the guy's analysis completely ignored all data before the ten-day snapshot and every day since. Those other, longer periods indeed show fluctuations in daily deaths.

So, the argument is that this statistician is purposefully misrepresenting the numbers to make a case that Hamas is releasing bullshit death counts, thereby minimizing Palestinian fatalities.

All the data are out there and available to be analyzed. The analysis is recent, so no one knows why he's only using a tiny dataset to make a much larger argument. His statistical analysis is not all that sophisticated, so it wasn't like he was running numbers through a Supercomputer or anything. Also, the graphical representation that he chose to display his analysis was purposely selected to make it look like a straight data line when there should be fluctuations.

Also, this particular statistician is a Professor of Statistics at the Wharton School of Business and should, therefore, know better than to publish this shit. I only took two semesters 25 years ago and could spot right away what he was doing, and I said so a few pages back when it was first brought up.

Statsman decided to bring it up again by saying that no one can criticize the guy without saying he's a conservative Jew, which is a lie because I said everything above in a previous post. But, as often happens, Statsman ignores, doesn't fully read, or can't retain information from other people's posts.

So, Anastasis came back to respond in a much more detailed way than I originally did by taking a deeper dive into the actual data. He came to the same conclusion but with more numbers.

In my previous post, I did also point out that this particular statistician was also recently called out for using bullshit stats in a wholly separate legal case that his side lost when they were trying to disprove increasingly warm temperatures related to climate change). I also pointed out that the publication in which the guy's article appeared had caused some waves within the Jewish community for some of its political stances, so I called into question why someone would choose to post an article using dubious statistics (one would think a poster named "Statsman" would've recognized the data flaws) from a politically biased publication in the Daily Texan "news" subforum.

That's all I can tell you for now, counselor.

 

 

 

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14 minutes ago, bolverk said:

A statistician said that Hamas death toll figures couldn't possibly be real because the daily variation of the deaths should be more randomly distributed. 

Both Anastasis and I have pointed out that this statistician's analysis (published a week ago) cherrypicked a ten-day period from the end of October where the daily numbers appear fairly constant. Still, the guy's analysis completely ignored all data before the ten-day snapshot and every day since. Those other, longer periods indeed show fluctuations in daily deaths.

So, the argument is that this statistician is purposefully misrepresenting the numbers to make a case that Hamas is releasing bullshit death counts, thereby minimizing Palestinian fatalities.

All the data are out there and available to be analyzed. The analysis is recent, so no one knows why he's only using a tiny dataset to make a much larger argument. His statistical analysis is not all that sophisticated, so it wasn't like he was running numbers through a Supercomputer or anything. Also, the graphical representation that he chose to display his analysis was purposely selected to make it look like a straight data line when there should be fluctuations.

Also, this particular statistician is a Professor of Statistics at the Wharton School of Business and should, therefore, know better than to publish this shit. I only took two semesters 25 years ago and could spot right away what he was doing, and I said so a few pages back when it was first brought up.

Statsman decided to bring it up again by saying that no one can criticize the guy without saying he's a conservative Jew, which is a lie because I said everything above in a previous post. But, as often happens, Statsman ignores, doesn't fully read, or can't retain information from other people's posts.

So, Anastasis came back to respond in a much more detailed way than I originally did by taking a deeper dive into the actual data. He came to the same conclusion but with more numbers.

In my previous post, I did also point out that this particular statistician was also recently called out for using bullshit stats in a wholly separate legal case that his side lost when they were trying to disprove increasingly warm temperatures related to climate change). I also pointed out that the publication in which the guy's article appeared had caused some waves within the Jewish community for some of its political stances, so I called into question why someone would choose to post an article using dubious statistics (one would think a poster named "Statsman" would've recognized the data flaws) from a politically biased publication in the Daily Texan "news" subforum.

That's all I can tell you for now, counselor.

 

 

 

Thank you. 

Now explain it to me like I’m Brisket. 
 

 

 

 

I kid, I kid. 
 

 

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1 hour ago, bolverk said:

A statistician said that Hamas death toll figures couldn't possibly be real because the daily variation of the deaths should be more randomly distributed. 

Both Anastasis and I have pointed out that this statistician's analysis (published a week ago) cherrypicked a ten-day period from the end of October where the daily numbers appear fairly constant. Still, the guy's analysis completely ignored all data before the ten-day snapshot and every day since. Those other, longer periods indeed show fluctuations in daily deaths.

So, the argument is that this statistician is purposefully misrepresenting the numbers to make a case that Hamas is releasing bullshit death counts, thereby minimizing Palestinian fatalities.

All the data are out there and available to be analyzed. The analysis is recent, so no one knows why he's only using a tiny dataset to make a much larger argument. His statistical analysis is not all that sophisticated, so it wasn't like he was running numbers through a Supercomputer or anything. Also, the graphical representation that he chose to display his analysis was purposely selected to make it look like a straight data line when there should be fluctuations.

Also, this particular statistician is a Professor of Statistics at the Wharton School of Business and should, therefore, know better than to publish this shit. I only took two semesters 25 years ago and could spot right away what he was doing, and I said so a few pages back when it was first brought up.

Statsman decided to bring it up again by saying that no one can criticize the guy without saying he's a conservative Jew, which is a lie because I said everything above in a previous post. But, as often happens, Statsman ignores, doesn't fully read, or can't retain information from other people's posts.

So, Anastasis came back to respond in a much more detailed way than I originally did by taking a deeper dive into the actual data. He came to the same conclusion but with more numbers.

In my previous post, I did also point out that this particular statistician was also recently called out for using bullshit stats in a wholly separate legal case that his side lost when they were trying to disprove increasingly warm temperatures related to climate change). I also pointed out that the publication in which the guy's article appeared had caused some waves within the Jewish community for some of its political stances, so I called into question why someone would choose to post an article using dubious statistics (one would think a poster named "Statsman" would've recognized the data flaws) from a politically biased publication in the Daily Texan "news" subforum.

That's all I can tell you for now, counselor.

 

 

 

This is why I have repeatedly called @statsman unserious on this topic. I have seen this pattern with him repeat itself like a dozen times on this topic alone.

He and so many posters on this board simply immediately take this kind of thing at face value, declare a win, and move on. After questions arise about the legitimacy of the information presented, they just go silent until the next piece of agitprop comes out they can glom onto.

A lot of the time it's posters that have shown good critical thinking ability with regard to other topics, as well, which only makes it that much more infuriating.

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https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-90-hamas-gunmen-killed-160-suspects-nabbed-in-raid-at-gazas-shifa-hospital/

 

IDF: 90 Hamas gunmen killed, over 300 nabbed in raid at Gaza’s Shifa Hospital

The Israel Defense Forces on Wednesday continued an operation against Hamas forces at Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, with the military saying troops had killed more than 90 gunmen so far.

The operation, which began early Monday morning, was being carried out by the Navy’s Shayetet 13 commando unit, the 401st Armored Brigade, and other forces.

Troops raided the hospital, the largest medical center in the Gaza Strip, after Israeli intelligence indicated that Hamas operatives, including commanders, had returned to the complex to use it as a command center for planning attacks against Israel and troops in Gaza. It was previously raided by the military in November.

“Over the past day, the troops have eliminated terrorists and located weapons in the hospital area, while preventing harm to civilians, patients, medical teams and medical equipment,” the IDF said in a statement Wednesday morning.

The IDF said that hundreds of terror suspects had so far been questioned at the hospital complex by field interrogators of the Military Intelligence Directorate’s Unit 504 and the Shin Bet security agency.

In a video statement from the hospital on Wednesday, IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said troops had detained between 250 and 300 terror operatives at the medical center during the ongoing operation.

He said another 300 suspects were also being questioned.

“We are talking about many [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] operatives, including battalion commanders, Hamas operatives, including political officials,” Hagari said.

“We will reach all the terrorists in this area. Our goal is to arrest the senior officials alive and bring them in for interrogation. Whoever fights against us will be killed,” he continued.

Photos circulating on social media on Wednesday showed IDF troops detaining suspected Hamas operatives at the hospital overnight.

Among those detained at Shifa and brought to Israel for further questioning was Mahmoud Qawasmeh, a senior Hamas operative involved in the planning of the 2014 kidnapping and murder of Eyal Yifrach, Gil-ad Shaer, and Naftali Fraenkel, the Shin Bet announced.

In a statement, the security agency said Qawasmeh was “one of the planners and financiers of the infrastructure that carried out the kidnapping and murder attack” in 2014.

AP752704328261-e1404160542281-640x400.jpg.d0eac730cc6fb35f237a5ee93f7eee0b.jpg

From left to right: Eyal Yifrach, 19, Gil-ad Shaer, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, 16, three Israeli teenagers who were seized and kiled by Palestinians on June 12, 2014 (photo credit: IDF/AP)

The Shin Bet said he had been exiled to the Gaza Strip as part of the 2011 Shalit deal, where he continued to advance attacks in the West Bank, including shooting attacks in recent years carried out by Hamas cells.

Hagari, in his statement, said the IDF was also providing food and water to the civilians sheltering at the hospital and brought in generators for Shifa’s ER.

He said the operation at Shifa would likely last several more days.

The IDF also released a video showing weapons recovered by troops at Shifa, and clips of the elite Duvdevan commando unit operating on the hospital’s premises.

Two Israeli soldiers have been killed in the operation at Shifa, and a senior Hamas commander was slain in an exchange of fire with troops seeking to detain him.

Israeli troops first entered the hospital early in the conflict, on November 5. The war was triggered on October 7 when some 3,000 terrorists stormed the border with Israel and unleashed an unprecedented attack on the country’s southern communities, killing some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking 253 hostages to Gaza, where more than half remain.

The IDF also said Wednesday it had struck a Hamas tunnel shaft in northern Gaza overnight. The site was identified after a rocket was fired toward the southern city of Sderot on Tuesday. It fell short and landed inside Gaza.

Also in northern Gaza, the IDF said it struck a six-man Hamas cell in the Jabaliya area.

In central Gaza, the Nahal Brigade continued to battle Hamas operatives over the past day, and in southern Gaza, the 98th Division was battling the terror group in the Khan Younis suburb of al-Qarara, the IDF said.

Also Wednesday, the IDF and Shin Bet announced that an airstrike in southern Gaza’s Rafah earlier in the week had killed senior officers in Hamas’s so-called Emergency Committee.

In the strike carried out by fighter jets on Monday, Sayyid Qutb Hashash, Osama Hamad Dhahir, and Hadi Abu al-Rous were killed, and Muhammad Awad al-Malalhi was apparently wounded, according to the IDF.

Hashash, Dhahir, and al-Malalhi were the heads of Hamas’s Emergency Committee in the north and east Rafah areas, and al-Rous was the operations officer of the Emergency Committee, the IDF said.

The committee is a Hamas body tasked with maintaining public order and civil control in the Strip’s municipalities.

The IDF said the officials were “responsible for organizing terror activity and communication with Hamas operatives on the ground” as well as aiding “the military wing of the terror organization to establish continued control.

“The senior officers were the emissaries of Hamas leadership in Rafah, concentrated Hamas’s activity in humanitarian zones and were responsible for coordination with Hamas operatives in the field,” it said.

The strike came after the IDF targeted Nidal al-Eid, the head of the Emergency Committee in Rafah last week, the military added.
An IDF handout from March 20, 2024, identifying senior Hamas operatives in in an airstrike in Rafah in the Gaza Strip (Israel Defense Forces)

More than a million Palestinians displaced by the five-month-old war between Israel and Hamas have been sheltering in Rafah, which abuts Gaza’s border with Egypt.

Israel says one-sixth of Hamas’s combat strength — four battalions of rifle- and rocket-wielding fighters — is in Rafah and must be crushed before the war can conclude. But the prospect of a spiraling civilian toll has raised alarm abroad.

With a new round of mediated talks underway in Qatar on a possible release of hostages, the White House said it would confer with Jerusalem before any troops or tanks move into Rafah.

The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said on Wednesday 104 Palestinians had been killed in fighting in the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours, bringing its official death toll since October 7 to 31,923.

These figures cannot be independently verified, and are believed to include both civilians and Hamas members killed in Gaza, including as a consequence of terror groups’ own rocket misfires. The IDF says it has killed over 13,000 operatives in Gaza, in addition to some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.

Agencies contributed to this report.

 

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8 minutes ago, Frank Drebin said:

There is no way of knowing from the footage whether these are civilians or combatants (Hamas fighters do not wear uniforms).

It’s clear to anyone that watched the video that they are an immediate threat in need of droning. 

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1 minute ago, Anastasis said:

It’s clear to anyone that watched the video that they are an immediate threat in need of droning. 

None of us have any idea what they were doing immediately before the droning.  If they were combatants who had just engaged the IDF, would your opinion be different?

Also, what was the secondary explosion?

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3 hours ago, Thetexashammer said:

I can explain your multiple errors in drawing that conclusion. But I would like to give you a shot at figuring them out yourself.

You want to just skip to the part where you get bodied and run away from the thread like you literally always do?

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19 minutes ago, Brian Fantana said:

You want to just skip to the part where you get bodied and run away from the thread like you literally always do?

There was discussion on earlier pages of this thread about how Hamas lies constantly. For example, the report where Israel supposedly bombed a hospital, but actually bombed a parking lot, and even then I don't think it ended being an Israeli bomb. The fake report was picked up by Reuters, NPR, NY Times, Washington Post etc. And of course it was all a lie. These are the same team of guys who save up women and chidren's bodies in the freezer, put them out of the street and then blow up a bomb and say Israel did it.

Now you post a video from them and say "See - TERRORISM". Do you not understand what you did wrong? 

We'll call this PROBLEM NUMBER ONE.

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16 minutes ago, Brian Fantana said:

You're an idiot. Just stop before you get embarrassed again. Or should I link to your CR posts on this subject again so you can run away sooner?

We have discussed, in this thread, examples of how civilians die in war. This an ordinary and normal part of war. It is expected. In ODS, half our casualties were friendly fire. I gave many examples of how the US targeted civilians, how schools were bombed, and there was no war crime, it was just war.

During war, bombs go astray. Soldiers might take a captive and decide to kill the unarmed captive because that guy killed his or her best friend. Controllers might receive incorrect coordinates. Intelligence can be wrong. There are a million reasons.

However, Israel is engaged in a moral and legal war of self defense. Our killing of civilians in WW2 didn't change the moral or legal argument. There is no conceivable way to frame this as terrorism. Terrorism is the opposite of a war of self defense.

We will call the PROBLEM NUMBER TWO.

My question is, do you even understand what I am saying?

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1 hour ago, Brian Fantana said:

You want to just skip to the part where you get bodied and run away from the thread like you literally always do?

 

So no comment or disagreement on the substance of what I said. You posted a piece of Hamas propaganda and then described it in a completely inaccurate manner.

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