Will Blogging Manage to Destroy Hamas?

Israel's stated goal in this genocide is to "destroy Hamas". Let's see how that's going.

The IDF claims to have killed 5,000 Hamas fighters. They did this while also admitting that the "Hamas run" Gaza Ministry of Health death toll is accurate and conceding that they are killing two civilians for every Hamas fighter. Firstly, as with anything the IDF says, we have to take into account that the IDF lies.  The vast majority of those killed were killed in airstrikes - which were indiscriminate in the pre-truce portion of the war, and indiscriminate now as well. No one looking at the carnage wrought by Israel  can believe that the efforts were |targeted" without lying to themselves. Secondly, we also know that the "Hamas run" Ministry of Health death count is an  undercount. Two civilians killed for every actual target is Israel's best case scenario and it is almost certainly a lot worse than that.

But even accepting it as "only" 2:1, this is horrific. Try to imagine if this were anything else - "we stopped the murderer but had to kill a pair of innocent people to do it". This actually paints Israel in a much better light than the actual situation. The October 7 attack killed fewer than a tenth of what Israel has inflicted on Gaza.

What does this have to do with Hamas' strength? It's the outrage at Israel which fuels Hamas. The death toll, the absolute destruction of entire towns and large fractions of cities - this creates the animosity and desire for vengeance that results in more Hamas fighters. Will Hamas be able to replace the lost 5,000 (and again - it is almost certainly a lot less than that)? Easily. 

That's in Gaza. What about the West Bank, where Israel is stealing land and disappearing thousands of Palestinians into "administrative detention"? Where released prisoners have been telling their stories of the torture they endured in Israeli jails. Pretty sure that Hamas' standing in the West Bank has improved and the feelings towards Israel - a state imposing apartheid rules on them - have actually gotten worse.

So quite clearly - Hamas is in a stronger position than they were on October 6. They will be able to recruit new fighters to replace their losses. And their stated goal of eradicating the state of Israel has more support than ever before.

But maybe Israel is still somehow safer despite Hamas gaining support? The loss of 5,000 fighters (lol) must have at least reduced Hamas' current capabilities. Right? No, it hasn't. Before the truce was signed, Hamas fired one of their largest volleys of rockets into Israel (they say as retaliation for the IDF raids on hospitals). And after the truce ended, Hamas fired rockets into Israel - setting off alarms in settlements further north than they have ever reached before.

Moreover, the IDF still does not have control of northern Gaza. Some of those rockets were fired from areas the IDF had already rolled through. Rockets were launched from Gaza City despite the pounding it has received in the past two months. So all evidence says that Hamas has not been slowed down or hampered by its losses.

So "destroying Hamas" as a goal - seems pretty much completely out of Israel's ability. On the plus side for Israel though, this is the better outcome for them. If they did manage to "destroy Hamas" through just massive bombing and psychotic levels of collateral damage - the anger towards Israel would be immense and completely unguided. In the power vacuum to follow - someone will harness that rage and create a new group sedeking revenge against Israel. Like when the US spent twenty years and some trillion dollars trying to dismantle Al Qaeda and as a result created an opening for ISIS to rise to prominence.

The final piece of why this whole thing is so stupid - the attack of October 7th was only as successful as it was because Israel's response to it was farcically bad. We may never know how many Israelis were killed by IDF "friendly fire" that day - but it's starting to look more and more like it is a lot. And this is despite the fact that Israel should have known the attack was coming. Israel had copies of the actual Hamas battle plan for that day - a plan which Hamas basically followed exactly. They knew that Hamas had been doing dry runs in the months before the attack. Again, referencing the battle plan that Israel had copies of. They even should have been able to guess the time of the attack - on the 50th anniversary of the attack which kicked off the Yom Kippur War. It's frankly mind blowing how badly Israeli intelligence failed here. The terrorist attack of October 7 - it wasn't prevented despite Israel knowing that it was coming and having over a year to thwart it. In fact, Israel's actions in that time was to shift forces away from Gaza and to the West Bank. They made themselves less capable of responding to it.

This is really the only hope that Israel has of emerging "safer" from all of this. If at least they fixed their intelligence agencies and their military decision making. If they eradicate whatever it was in their decision making levels that resulted in such bone-headed mistakes as this was.

They haven't. The attack of October 7 was as bad as it was (and it was indeed horrific with hundreds of civilians killed and hundreds more violently kidnapped) - because the guys running Israeli defense and intelligence had decided that Gaza was "under control" and then ignored everything that contradicted that opinion. They ignored reality so that they could continue believing that their theory was solid and that they are never wrong. Those guys are still in charge. And the actual plan that Israel is going with - of mass destruction and killing in the hopes that maybe you get some bad guys too, they have doubled down on. Here's the fucking staggering thing - even though October 7th happened, <b>those stupid fuckers still think they are right</b>.