Israeli attacks HUGE ‘colleteral’ damage reports….
Israel has cast the deaths of civilians in the Gaza Strip as a regrettable but unavoidable part of modern conflict, pointing to the heavy human toll from military campaigns the United States itself once waged in Iraq and Syria.
But a review of past conflicts and interviews with casualty and weapons experts suggest that Israel’s assault is different.
While wartime death tolls will never be exact, experts say that even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza shows that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century.
People are being killed in Gaza more quickly, they say, than in even the deadliest moments of U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups.
Precise comparisons of war dead are impossible, but conflict-casualty experts have been taken aback at just how many people have been reported killed in Gaza — most of them women and children — and how rapidly.
It is not just the scale of the strikes — Israel said it had engaged more than 15,000 targets before reaching a brief cease-fire in recent days. It is also the nature of the weaponry itself.
Israel’s liberal use of very large weapons in dense urban areas, including U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs that can flatten an apartment tower, is surprising, some experts say.
“It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career,” said Marc Garlasco, a military adviser for the Dutch organization PAX and a former senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon. To find a historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area, he said, we may “have to go back to Vietnam, or the Second World War.”…
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These comparisons are based on the thousands of deaths directly attributed to U.S. coalition forces over decades in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Far more people — hundreds of thousands in total — are estimated to have been killed in these conflicts by other groups, including the Syrian government and its allies, local militias, the Islamic State and the Iraqi security forces.
But while the overall death tolls in those wars were larger, the number of people killed in Gaza “in a very short period of time is higher than in other conflicts,” said Professor Crawford, who has extensively researched modern wars….
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Israeli’s JUST want more hostages released…
They HAVE come out in force to make their point to their Prime Minister….
A day after an initial successful exchange of hostages and prisoners between Israel and Hamas, thousands of Israelis gathered in front of the central military headquarters in Tel Aviv on Saturday to keep pressure on the government to prioritize the return of all the hostages over resuming military action in Gaza.
“Even if Hamas isn’t destroyed, I just want everyone to return,” said Sitar Kires, 27, who said she had traveled to Tel Aviv with 19 others to participate in the rally. It was the fourth week in a row of demonstrations calling for the government to make the freeing of the hostages its top priority.
On Friday, 13 Israeli hostages were released from Gaza in exchange for 39 Palestinians. Ten Thai citizens and one Filipino were also freed by Hamas. Another group of hostages was expected to be released Saturday evening after a delay.
A temporary cease-fire that took effect early Friday was scheduled to last until Tuesday morning. It calls for Israel to release around 150 Palestinian women and minors and for Hamas to release at least 50 women and children who were kidnapped in the Oct. 7 assault in which Hamas killed about 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials.
Israel has said that it was prepared to extend the deal to secure the release of more hostages. Roughly 240 people were abducted on Oct. 7, so scores would still be in captivity in Gaza after the first 50 are freed…
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A extended pause in the conflict for more hostages freedom’s?
The joy unleashed in Israel this weekend with the release of some Israeli hostages from Gaza has created a dilemma for Israel’s leaders, analysts say.
For now, Israel is set to continue its invasion of Gaza after a four-day truce that ends on Tuesday morning.
But the terms of the truce also allow for the cease-fire to be extended. Israel has said it was prepared to grant another day’s pause for every 10 hostages that Hamas releases beyond the 50 outlined in the agreement.
“The question is day five,” said Alon Pinkas, an Israeli political commentator and former senior diplomat. “Does Israel resume the war?”
An extension that allows for more hostage releases would give further relief to those Israelis who see the hostages’ freedom as Israel’s biggest immediate priority. That sentiment could spread more widely among the Israeli population as each day of the cease-fire passes, and more hostages are released.
“And Hamas knows this very well,” said Shira Efron, a senior researcher at Israel Policy Forum, a New York-based political research group. “They’re going to play with Israel and say, ‘Oh, we found another five kids. If you give us another day, there are a few in the north that we can find.’”
Dr. Efron said, “There’s a very high likelihood that on day five, on day six and on day seven, we’re going see an extension of this.”
But a longer pause could jeopardize the primary goal of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza: the destruction and dismantling of Hamas, the armed Gaza-based group that led the Oct. 7 raid that killed an estimated 1,200 people in southern Israel and led to the abduction of roughly 240 hostages….
image…Thousands of demonstrators rallied in front of the central military headquarters in Tel Aviv on Saturday to keep pressure on the Israeli government to secure the release of more hostages.Credit…Amit Elkayam for The New York Times