"Spying is not an option, because that would be a presence in the strip and would piss them off!"
"Oh okay, what are you going to do instead then?"
"Oh, not much. We're gonna send in a bunch of tanks and bomb the shit out of them."
...Just stop and think about that for a second, dude.
You are comparing two very different things here.
Israeli operations within Gaza would be justification for Hamas to conduct military operations against Israel, similar to those that
triggered this sort of offensive in the first place.
There are basically two states at the moment the conflict takes on the Gazan side;
1) Low level rockets attacks from non-Hamas or deniable forces, along with tunnel preparations and maybe isolated tunnel attacks.
2) Full scale, Hamas conducted rocket launches and the use of the complete tunnel network to conduct attacks whenever possible.
Your policy is that state 1 should be accepted by Israel, maybe with limited countermeasures. My point was that some of your proposed countermeasures would be enough to trigger a switch to state 2. Combine this with Hamas having access to better resources (a lifting the blockade) and you have a situation that Israel could never accept.
In your opinion. As it turns out, most of the nations in the UN human rights council disagree with you. As do I. Dunno what else to say to you if you're going to disagree on as fundamental of a level as "innocent lives are equally valuable"
In my opinion a government that takes action that will knowingly let it's own civilians die from an enemy military action is a government that has lost all moral authority. One of the core purposes of government is the national defence. Abandoning that purpose means the government has abandoned it's core purpose and should be replaced.
It's not saying that they should be free to kill as many people they are able to for that purpose, but that taking a policy approach that doesn't attempt to stop citizen deaths is a morally unacceptable position for any government.
Fair enough. But your article also includes:
By the end of 2010, [Egypt] claimed to have sabotaged some six hundred tunnels by various means, including plugging entrances with solid waste, sand, or explosives, and flooding passages with sewage. Use of tear gas and other crowd-control techniques inside the tunnels resulted in several deaths.
Even if I might be underestimating, you're OVERestimating their sophistication, invulnerability, and invisibility.
You ignored the part where it noted that they only took the oldest, most obvious tunnels, ignoring the more used and sophisticated ones. It's also talking about long term, smuggling tunnels, not ones that were kept concealed until immediately before a militant attack.
You seem to be trying to play gotcha with arguments and phrasing rather than actually trying to understand the conflict and situation any better. I've been trying to make you engage on a level a bit deeper than blanket condemnations of Israel.
The war crime stuff... I don't think there's any point continuing with that discussion. You have comprehensively ignored my points. I just want to point out that the 2009 Golstone report which accused Israel of war crimes was
largely regretted by it's author once he had access to more information. And that was a UN fact finding mission conducted months after the conflict, not some people reading articles posted hours and days after events.
Now, the question is, what is Israel's endgoal?
Honestly? De-facto occupation.
While they don't want to officially re-occupy the strip, the only way they can get out of this situation is to have Hamas either accept a ceasefire with no further concessions from Israel (eg, no lifting of the blockade, unacceptable to Israel and the final sticking point for Hamas) or to cripple Hamas so badly that they have a couple of years of security.
The latter would take months of military presence at least. Decapitating Hamas is unlikely to work; the leadership is too slippery and has too many levels to be effectively disabled that way. Rather the targets would be their infrastructure; their tunnels, weapon supplies and other resources. A comprehensive enough effort could set them back to a near 2007 state, before they managed to solidify their hold over the entire strip's infrastructure.
Honestly, the ground invasion was inevitable but a bad option.
This looks at the situation in Israel that lead to the operation. The pressure from within the Israeli government was to go even further, and at the same time;
But the more likely explanation is that Israel just didn’t have any other options. Israel could have continued its aerial and artillery exchanges with Hamas, but this campaign did not appear to be damaging either the will or the capability of Hamas. It could have loosened its rules of engagement and struck Hamas more effectively—but doing so would have inflicted unconscionably disproportionate civilian damage. It could have capitulated to Hamas’s ultimatums to release hundreds of security prisoners and reopened Gaza to shipments of arms- and tunnel-making materials. Apart from the moral implications of such a concession, doing so would simply have strengthened Hamas and ensured additional fighting. An extended cease-fire would be ideal. But so far, Egyptian attempts to broker such a cease-fire seem to have fallen on deaf ears. So Netanyahu was left with a choice that wasn’t really much of a choice.
The problem is how long the offensive can be maintained before they have to withdraw and declare victory. The longer they stay the more damage they can do to Hamas, but the more Israeli soldiers will die. It's very unlikely to me that there will be anything other than a unilateral end to the fighting - eg, Israel withdrawing - even if Hamas efforts end up tapering off due to lack of resources. Hamas gains political capital by killing Israelis and keeping the conflict going, even as they trade it for material losses and lives of Gazans.
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