Israel moves into southern Gaza after a week-long truce — and its goals are murkier than ever
“The continued, widespread bombing of civilian buildings to get at the tunnels underneath, where Hamas protects fighters and its supplies, has already caused thousands of deaths, but Raphael Cohen, director of the strategy and doctrine program with RAND Project AIR FORCE, told Vox there’s no real alternative.
“Israel’s been seized with the tunnel issue since Operation Protective Edge, so at least since 2014, at least the past decade, and has invested a lot of time and energy into … how you detect these things, but hasn’t figured out a foolproof way of finding them, particularly without being there on the ground,” he said. “There’s no silver bullet to detect them, and once you find them, then you have to destroy the tunnel, and there’s no clean way to do it.”
But an investigation by the Israeli outlets +972 and Local Call this week indicates that in northern Gaza, the IDF was far less precise in its operations than necessary to keep from harming civilians — backing up what Israeli officials have already said about their approach being destructive rather than surgical. According to the investigation, based on interviews with current and former Israeli intelligence operatives, the military “has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target.”
Some of those targets, which the military calls “power targets” are “not distinctly military in nature,” according to the investigation, and “include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks.” The investigation found that the military has stepped up its attacks on power targets in the latest conflict, dubbed “Operation Swords of Iron.” That, in turn, has exponentially increased the number of civilian casualties, as has the use of artificial intelligence to generate Hamas targets, according to the report.
“When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target,” one source told the outlet. “We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
The IDF has destroyed much of northern Gaza’s infrastructure — around 98,000 buildings have been demolished or damaged in the north, according to a BBC review of satellite imagery. Throughout the region, about 60 percent of the housing stock has been damaged or destroyed, Al Jazeera reported.”
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/12/2/23985622/israel-goals-southern-gaza-truce-hamas