Meanwhile on the International front....

Terrorists always play the long game. They may be playing chess with opponents, but their board quite often is triple-tiered.

 

I have no problem with finding the people who did this and executing them. I don't have a problem with using a drone strike on a car they are in and killing a few extras who were hanging with the doer. Dropping a 500-1000 pound bomb on a refugee camp to get one is madness. It's the overreaction that terrorists count on to make their strikes much more effective.

 

I have my suspicions about "planners." I have no doubt Israel correctly identified this person as involved in the 10/7 attacks in some form of leadership position, but exactly what kind of leader. Was he a planner, or an operational leader on the ground that day, one responsible for implementing, not creating, plans? Like many other terror groups, Hamas has members ready and eager for martyrdom, and others very much not. My personal guess is the persons at the top of the 10/7 planning and command structure have been holed up in Damascus and/or Tehran since well before 10/7. The ones on the ground in Gaza are the ones so eager to kill they accepted the notion of a probable suicide mission.

 

The main answer to this is that they'd find it extremely difficult to hide within Israel.

 

You might want to slow your roll with the praise for Hamas, but yes Israel is handling this poorly and a lot of that is on Netanyahu.

 

Acknowledging the effectiveness of Hamas' tactics (and the ham handedness of Israel's response) is not praise for Hamas. Screw you, you know better.

What Hamas is doing to Israel is straight out of Terrorism 101. It's literally in the book. They know better than to respond in this way. It's been proven to be counterproductive over and over, and they still jumped into the beartrap with both feet.

 

Next is the tried and true "Why are you DEFENDING Hamas?!?!" followed by being called a "Hamas apologist!"

 

Israel is basically making exactly the same sorts of mistakes that the U.S. made in Iraq. Biden begged them not to. He sent them a SpecOps lieutenant general who was in Fallujah as a major and understood the reality of that kind of urban warfare to counsel against getting stuck in that position. Where things are now was very predictable. The only good news I'm hearing is that Israel does not intend to occupy the Gaza Strip once they finish breaking things there.

 

Master stroke was a bit much, so screw you, too, because you should know better.

You are not wrong about Israel's response. I wonder how much of this is Netanyahu's flawed leadership.

 

Keep making shit up, comrade. I wrote nothing of the kind. I know he isn't defending Hamas. It is possible to both criticize Israel's response and condemn Hamas as horrible. I just didn't care for how he phrased what he wrote. Perhaps you could show a little integrity and apologize for your false accusation, but I doubt you have it in you.

 

Might be, might not. Too early to say, really. OTOH, look at the PR response across the world excluding the Arab Street. Hamas is waging a PR war with guns and bombs. You can choose responses that are effective and less inflammatory, or you can drop napalm in response. Israel has chosen the latter, thankfully not literally. So far. That's about the only way they could make it worse.

In the PR war Israel has played into their hands.

 

No doubt about that. Just because I don't think they had any good options doesn't mean they didn't choose a really bad one.