The Washington Post says it's unlikely Hamas used the tunnel network under Al-Shifa hospital to direct its attacks against Israel:
The evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center, according to a Washington Post analysis of open-source visuals, satellite imagery and all of the publicly released IDF materials.... The Post’s analysis shows:
- The rooms connected to the tunnel network discovered by IDF troops showed no immediate evidence of military use by Hamas.
- None of the five hospital buildings identified by Hagari appeared to be connected to the tunnel network.
- There is no evidence that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards.
This has obvious implications for the quality of Israeli intelligence as well as for its brutal attack on the hospital. It also raises the tunnel question again.
Israel has lately announced that it has discovered lots of Hamas tunnels, including one big enough to drive a car through. This continues to strike me as peculiar: were they discovered all at once? Or have they been discovered all along but Israel just didn't tell us? Neither seems quite plausible.
But put that aside. The big question is what these tunnels were used for. As with the Al-Shifa tunnels, there's apparently nothing there. No food, no fuel, no weapons, no people. Is Hamas clearing them out without the IDF catching them? All of them? That seems very unlikely, doesn't it?
So I continue to wonder just what the real deal is with the Vast Labyrinth™ of tunnels under Gaza. Obviously I don't doubt that they exist to some degree or another, but they seem to be (a) a lot less vast than we thought, and (b) mostly abandoned. What's really going on here?
Well, it seems Israel has discovered evidence of Vast Labyrinth program related activities.
+1 and lol!
The Vast Labyrinth connecting hospitals and any other places that the IDF wanted to bomb or bombed by accident is probably mostly a fairy tale.
Nevertheless Hamas has gotten a lot of weapons (rockets) into Gaza despite the blockade. Either that underground transportation network exists or the weapons were brought in above-ground and the Israeli blockade and intelligence have been ineffective.
If they're pumping them full of seawater before going into them they would seem pretty cleared out.
Logical, as always. Seems to me Israel is trying to cover their incompetence up.
More likely Hamas realized their tunnels weren't as defensible as they thought they were, stripped them and retreated as the IDF advanced.
Are you saying Israeli intelligence is outdated? Which requires a coverup?
No. I'm saying few people would sit there and wait to get shot.
People demanding the IDF should be providing real-time actionable information about an ongoing war are being thick or dishonest.
Please do not feed the troll.
Dense cities have tunnels. They have lots of them.
They are built for good practical reasons, and as things change some are quite often fallen into disuse.
In most dense cities, tunnels clearly have no terrorist function.
In Gaza cities, some do.
But finding a tunnel is not finding evidence of a vast terrorist network or conspiracy. And pretending to have done so is just ass-cover.
So far, the IDF has repeatedly confirmed that its tunnel claims were wrong. They provided an arguable military objective cover for attacks on civilians and civil infrastructure.
I heard on NPR last week (don't recall which program, and I tuned in midway) was from a Gaza resident. She said tunnels have always been part of the Gaza infrastructure. The geology is such that they're easy to dig and pretty stable. Over the centuries, tunnels have had many purposes: storage, refuge, quick transportation. And more recently, skipping the vicious Israeli checkpoints.
The truth is the first casualty of war.
Apocryphal yet true.
right on that one
You never corrected your last post suggesting the map you'd shown was that of Hamas' tunnel network.
You know, Hamas itself has claimed to have built 500KM of tunnels under Gaza.
So you tell me: Do you trust Hamas' numbers some of the time, all of the time, or none of the time?
500KM of tunnels is clearly utter BS. The entire Gaza strip is only 41km long and 10km wide. They would have to have 12 tunnels running the entire length of the strip .8 KM apart.
It sure sounds like you are (or at least should be) asking yourself that very relevant question.
You clearly rely on Hamas numbers here. Why do you trust it in this instance? What differences in other Hamas claims cause you choose to distrust them?
You want to demand it of others, let's see how your epistemology works, dude!
The explanation you're looking for is "propaganda". The tunnels are real, but all the specifics about them we hear from the IDF are propoganda.
The Al-Shifa hospital command centre was a naked lie, and pretty transparent to anyone listeing to UN personnel, NGOs and medical staff. It served as an effective distraction while they have done exactly the same to every other hospital in northern Gaza but without anyone paying attention.
https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6039/Urgent-int%E2%80%99l-investigation-needed-to-probe-Israeli-war-crimes-after-Palestinian-civilians-buried-alive-at-Gaza%E2%80%99s-Kamal-Adwan-Hospital
Netenyahu and the IDF pr machine laugh out loud as they piss on the US media's leg and the US media is the one insisting it is raining.
Yes. All this is consistent with what I've been hearing on NPR. Israel is taking full advantage of a chance to liquidate the Gaza ghetto, to kill or drive out every last Palestinian.
Older Americans have been stuffed full with a diet of Israeli propaganda (the plucky little nation making the desert bloom!! Anne Frank!! Yet another Holocaust Museum!) for nearly 70 years, and are unwilling to open their eyes to reality.
What they are is unwilling to admit they're wrong.
The intransigence of belief one or the other has me befuddled. I don't understand why people have problems seeing Hamas as murderous and completely beyond the pale meanwhile, I don't understand how people have problems understanding Israeli revenge and callousness. What is the problem here? This is good old fashioned savagery through and through.
Oh wait - nobody wants to be cancelled nowadays...
You're completely right. Both things are true at the same time. There's more than enough hate to go around.
Always has, always will. The trick is getting ourselves to believe we're still civilized (although imo we've become way less violent personally but as the comedian once said: never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups).
Who, specifically, has had problems with saying Hamas is murderous and completely beyond the paile? You sound as if you're trying to both sides away Isreal's colonialist history as simply Both Sides did Bad Things. Not. Gonna. Happen.
I
Didn't
Invite
One named scent of violets
To the conversation.
You don't have the authority to hand out invites, Bub[1]. And you didn't answer the question: Who are these people who have problems with saying Hamas is murderous and completely beyond the pale? Andybody here? If not, who?
[1] You aren't allowed to question what I say because I didn't hand you an invite as got to be one of the lamest attempts to deflect; it's certainly one of the weakest.
I think a key difference here is that the WaPo article relied only on publicly available information. Meanwhile, as the WaPo article also stated:
"Hours before IDF troops entered the complex, the Biden administration declassified U.S. intelligence assessments that it said bolstered Israel’s claims. In the aftermath of the raid, Israeli and U.S. officials have stood firm behind their initial statements."
I suspect that there is quite a bit of classified SIGINT analysis and sensitive HUMINT sources that the WaPo does not have access to. And if you read the article through, the Post seems to be TRYING to find problems in the Israeli narrative, as aggressive somewhat hostile to Israel newspapers will do. While there are many who are skeptical of anything Israel says, I think that the US Intel community's assessment is the gold standard and should be considered the most likely to be accurate.
And no, the WMD thing in Iraq does not disprove everything that the US Intel Community says ever again --- that was a couple decades and considerable reform ago and an odd case that had a lot to do with Dick Cheney and Saddam's cockamamie scheme to make it LOOK like Iraq had an active WMD program when it did not...
The NYT article cited below says the US also reduced its surveillance of Hamas in recent years, on the assumption that Israel had a handle on the situation ....
Clearly, Viet Nam, like Iraq, is also a special case.
60 years ago.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! You're an idiot. A rumdum. A numbskull. Soft in the head.
“I think a key difference here is that the WaPo article relied only on publicly available information.”
I read this and immediately thought of Lionel Hutz. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mtfToHhv1KU
Obviously, WaPo should’ve incorporated more publicly unavailable information in its assessment, to balance out the publicly available info…
The Israeli intelligence services appear to have failed on multiple levels -- first, by discounting reports and documents of a planned attack, then directing the IDF to a command-and-control center under al-Shifa Hospital which didn't exist. This has the appearance of the services believing they had a reliable source or sources, which in fact were feeding them disinformation. They were so confident in some source that they shut down one communications-monitoring operation more than a year ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/29/world/middleeast/israel-intelligence-hamas-attack.html
"The Israeli intelligence services appear to have failed on multiple levels"
This was my immediate thought on October 7 and nothing that's happened since then is making me think better of it. They were caught completely flatfooted that morning, and that colossal and total failure (which depended in large part on their willingness to be fooled) should have led them to discount and review absolutely everything they thought they knew about Gaza, if not to throw it all out and start over.
And now they're either working with old information that may have been designed over several years to misdirect them, or they have indeed thrown out all their old intel and decided to take no chances and raze everything and everyone. I really don't see a third possibility there.
There is a lot of evidence that Israel is pushing a lot of nonsense about the tunnels. But I am not seeing the reason for doubting that they are extensive. The evidence we have is that they have kept more than 200 hostages away from prying eyes by moving them around the tunnels. It also appears that Hamas has maintained a coherent fighting force in the tunnels in the face of an overwhelming invasion. The fact that so much tunnel space is empty suggests either that Hamas fighters and weapons don't exist, or that the tunnels are pretty vast.
I am more suspicious of the idea that the tunnels are not things that can be quickly, and cheaply, rebuilt. And for the reasons given, the presence of a tunnel by a hospital is not actually evidence that it is being used for military purposes.
But I don't see any reason to doubt that Hamas weapons and personnel are protecting themselves in the tunnels, and that that suggests they are pretty extensive.
Regardless of the quantity of tunnels, the bombardment has clearly been about vengeance, not defeating Hamas. The IDF has next to no idea who they are dropping bombs on, but they don't really care.
I mean, everyone on the TV says it is Israel’s 9/11 after all. What could be a more 9/11 response than warring against whomever is convenient to do so? “I learned it from watching you, Uncle Sam…” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VvPvnwbYEPU
It may be more systematic than this. Coverage by +972, based on interviews with serving intelligence and targeting personnel, indicates that in this current campaign, a significant part of the effort has been to destroy what are called "power targets," which are prominent high-rise buildings and important public structures like universities. The rationale is that this will make civilians exert pressure on Hamas for weakness and failure to protect these structures and the civil society they symbolize and support.
If you know anything about Giulio Douhet's theories on war, this will sound very familiar.
If you know anything about Giulio Douhet's theories on war, this will sound very familiar.
And, if you know anything about the post WWII bombing surveys, Douhet's theories on strategic bombing's effect on civilian pressure on their governments turned out to be complete bunk. Countries relying upon those theories today are either historically ignorant or deliberately engaged in war crimes.
IMO, if you accept the theory of strategic bombing's effects on civilian populations, you've decided those civilians are fundamentally different in kind from yourselves. You have to have contempt for them in order to believe bombing will affect them that way, because the other side of it is that you absolutely know that *of course* it wouldn't affect your own people the same way.
Regardless of the quantity of tunnels, the bombardment has clearly been about ethnic cleansing/genocide, not 'defeating Hamas'.
According to Wikipedia, "On 20 November, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, referring to Israeli built bunkers from decades ago, told CNN "It's already [been] known for many years that they [Hamas] have the bunkers that originally [were] built by Israeli constructors underneath Shifa [which] were used as a command post of Hamas. "
So isn't constructing military facilities under a hospital the thing that is supposed to be a war crime when Hamas does it? Barak seems to say that Hamas simply took over Israeli military facilities when Sharon pulled out of Gaza.
Perhaps Hamas has transferred all its weapons to Syria, where they are stored alongside Saddam's WMDs.
20,000 deaths in Gaza now. That's about as many deaths as the US suffered in Iwo Jima and Okinawa, combined.
except there are only 2 million Gazans- it’s 1% of the population. it’s like killing 3 million Americans.
Amidst all the confusion I arrived at a rule of thumb, which is that everything said by either the Israeli government or Hamas is a lie until proved otherwise (as sometimes happens e.g. the death toll of the Gaza Health Ministry). I'll trust Amnesty, HRW, the Red Cross and UN above those psychopaths any day.
Tunnels, schmunnels. Of course there are tunnels and basements in a city.