What it would take is for the US to grow some balls and stop Israel from dictating the terms.
Secondly, make Netanyahu resign. Regime changes aren’t new to the US. Actually blocking money / ammo to Israel would make a massive statement.
There needs to be a concerted effort made to get Hamas’s leadership to surrender. Easier said than done considering how entrenched Hamas are in Palestinian Society. I don’t see any peace lasting if Hamas continues in that vicious cycle.
Get rid of Netanyahu, get rid of Hamas and their leadership along with the arms. Let the UN or any multinational armed force maintain the border. Keep the UN/related troops inside the buffer area and make them police the land because Israel and Hamas won’t.
Israel won’t give up too much of the land they have seized but at this point , lives take precedence. Any agreement at this point of time won’t be according to the 1967 borders. It has to be reflective of the situation today. I don’t like it at all but I don’t see any other way out. Talks of land etc are secondary when children are being blown to bits.
Let the situation settle down for 5 years and then look to push forward on a permanent decision.
Couldn’t agree more with this, even if it sounds somewhat academical in these dark times. But before this happens, the situation will remain a cesspit, with a lot of suffering still to come.
If I’m not mistaken , the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan precludes any further Palestinian displacement. I’m guessing that Egypt has a similar deal.
The actions of the PLO and the later offshoots in Hamas and Fatah have ensured that the Palestinians don’t have much support with Jordan and Egypt too.
Egypt could have been forced to assimilate Gaza into their territory then. They clearly wanted nothing to do with that.
The pager attack is something every war laywer can probably easily defend even though one might find it distasteful. Very low collateral expected (compared to normal state military attacks, where civ cas is expected to be much higher than that in an urban setting). But the radios are far more questionable in terms of legality. You cannot expect Hezbollah members to have them on body and you could expect a far higher Civ Cas as a result.
Another aspect is if mere membership in Hezbollah’s political wing means that you are a legitimate military target. Of course, Hezbollah is an illegal organisation, has no state protection and Geneva Convention does not apply (but International Humanitarian Right absolutely does) and UN security resolution demands that it disarm long ago, but it’s still a bit grey and maybe too wide a net cast, to be technically legal. There is also the question as to where the targets are located.Hezbollah has doctors in hospitals (as evidenced by recent martyrdom notifications, not that such reccent evidence should be needed), you endanger other medical personal and patient etc. It can be perfectly legal to kill civilians in a military assault on military targets or infrastructure targets vital to war effort, but only if the military strategic benefit is proportionally significantly higher thant he cost of civilian lives, which is laywer areas I don’t like to venture into with confidence, since it is so difficult to navigate (the stuff happening in Gaza are more obvious crimes, because the military benefit is negligible in comparison to civilian suffering, evidenced by the IDF still failing to reach any sort of war goals after a year). If this is what it looks like, the precursor to war, then ironically, it is probably legal, since the attacks took out so many Hezbollah and has a clear military benefit in the context to an invasion. If Israel’s Casus Belli is good enough is another matter entirely, but I reckon it might, due to Hezbollah’s entry into the Gaza war and the steady slow burn escalation.
However, technicallities does not equal political wisdom and certainly not ethics or morality. This is a humanitarian disaster.
Anyway, I am not sure. But what looks to be happening now is dreadful and I find the IDF statements today horrifyingly scary as to what they may may in terms of expansion of the war.
Yes, there are reasons why they would not be absorbed, and would at best have constrained refuge areas. If Israel drives the population out of Gaza, that population ends up in Gaza, or refugee camps in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, or Lebanon - despite none of those governments wanting to take any more.
Even the radios are not that problematic. If you could bring down an artillery round on every radio operated by a hostile force, the fact that you did not know what else was at the location would not be considered problematic. Yes, some might be civilians, some might be your own PoWs. But you would be crippling their communications system, a legitimate military target. Hezbollah clearly meets the criterion of being a hostile force, regardless of how various powers might wish to characterize them in legal terms on other dimensions. You don’t need an argument of pre-emptive escalation, Hezbollah was firing on Israel, the radio attacks diminish their capacity to do that. The radio blasts themselves were not particularly large, especially not compared to an artillery round. Compared to some of the air missions happening today in areas with possible civilian populations in southern Lebanon, far more discriminate and targeted.
I don’t and will not contest, as I lack expertise. I know a bit, probably more than a bit more than the average person regarding humanitarian law and rules of war; but I have no expertise what so ever. I haven’t studied this at all, just read about it and heard academics and generals argue various points.
But I note that it’s controversial. Not that controversial means necessarilly illegal of course.
Omar doesn’t post disinformation (but is very opinionated, but that isn’t the same, as opinions differs from facts). I can’t remember he has posted misinformation either (but he probably might, as he posts preliminary stuff, but if so he has deleted it in the past). https://x.com/OALD24/status/1836859939865968667
ISR claims the entire command cadre of 20 officers of the Ridwan Group has been taken out in today’s earlier strike in Beirut, targeting a war meeting of Hezbollahs millitary leadership. Hezbollah admits many Hezbollah officers have died on their side.
The Israeli intelligence infiltration into Hezbollah is eye brow raising.
Hezbollahs carefully cultivated image of invincibility shattered in 2 days.
Also rumours of a general of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard killed in strike. Hezbollah is reeling.
I am too technically speaking in favour of Hezbollah getting wrecked, but on the other hand I don’t truly, because I fear the consequences and don’t want to see Lebanon destroyed (if it spirals out of control, which is possible if Israel invades), refugee waves and I also fear that when/if Iran enters, it might not stop as soon as one would like, since israel will say “thank you very much” and hit them back truly hard. That’s the problem with wars, they can be hard to stop if they really start. And it’s a catalogue of bad actors.
Ideally, of course, Lebanon would be free of Hezbollah tomorrow and Iran would be free of it’s dictatorship tomorrow as well, but it’s not going to happen like this.
It’s just that escalation is a thing. In Ukraine it isn’t anymore, it’s full war. But Israel and Hezbollah (and Iran) has had a “I hit you, you hit me, I hit you harder, I won because you now hit me less and cease firing for a few months” security political order, which obviously, as we can see, isn’t teneable in the long term. But there is a large difference between military clashes and war.
Lebanon is a very open state (Beirut is famous for having many spies and of being easy to infiltrate due to political tribal system of Lebanon) and Hezbollah is Israel’s main security concern apart from Iran. It’s not like Gaza, which is sealed off. So Israel will have very easy access in Lebanon compared to most places on earth, I would assume.
