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Saturday, December 09, 2023

U.S. vetoes UN resolution for a Gaza ceasefire.

 PBS. AP carry.

Neither outlet carries text of the resolution, nor links to it.

Israel is on the ground in Gaza, the initial Hamas action in Israel was a war crime and a provocation, with it unclear what Israeli decision makers did with a year's lead time on knowing of Hamas planning, either negligent or deliberately letting the incursion happen in order to ground the present mayhem upon it.

Gaza death toll, websearch, Reuters. From the Reuters Dec. 9, 2023 item:

At least 17,487 Palestinians have been killed since then, according to Gaza Health Ministry figures, while 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas incursion into Israel, according to Israeli tallies.

Aid agencies warn that a humanitarian disaster in Gaza is worsening by the hour with most of its 2.3 million people homeless and trapped in a tiny, embattled coastal enclave, with little food, water, medical care, fuel or secure shelter.

With basic infrastructure devastated, phone and internet services frequently disrupted, and a number of health statisticians having been killed or gone missing, there is increasing concern that Gaza health authorities will be unable to continue keeping an accurate count of the casualty toll.

HOW HAVE CASUALTY TOLLS BEEN COMPILED SO FAR?

In the first six weeks of the war, hospital morgues across Gaza sent figures to the health ministry's main collection centre at Al Shifa Hospital. Officials used Excel sheets to keep track of names, ages and ID card numbers of the dead and transmitted these to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Ramallah, part of the Palestinian Authority (PA) that exercises limited self-rule in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

But Omar Hussein Ali, director of the Ramallah ministry's emergency operations centre, said that of the four officials who ran the Shifa data centre, one died in an air strike that hit the hospital while the other three went missing when Israeli forces seized the premises as an alleged Hamas hideout.

"The kind of casualty recording required to understand what's going on is getting harder. Information infrastructure, the health systems that existed, are being systematically destroyed," said Hamit Dardagan of Iraq Body Count, set up during the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

With non-uniformed combatants, Israeli ground forces have difficulties, but the airstrikes are yet more indiscriminate; and there is the policy Israel has adopted where civilian death is not a compelling concern while infrastructure destruction is.

That policy is at fault for the death and mayhem, and it is disproportionate, deliberately so as a policy, in comparison to the impact of the beginning Hamas war crime incursion. 

What Israel can do is via ground action it can be more careful to limit civilian death. 

If it wants to. Wikipedia suggesting it wants otherwise:

 On 9 October 2023, following the beginning of the October 2023 Gaza−Israel conflict and attacks in Israel by Hamas militants, Gallant said that Israel would impose a "total siege" of the Gaza Strip while at the same time "fighting human animals" to refer to Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip.[25][26][27] A total blockade of the Gaza Strip was announced by Gallant, who stated: "There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly."[28][29]

see also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine

Little to no evidence suggests any change by Israel from that opening outlook. 

Departure from the Dahiya doctrine to be less dealth and destruction dealing to civilians would/might result in greater IDF ground war loss of life, so Israel has a motive to continue to do what it is doing, a motive consonant its policy set in 2006 against Hezbollah.

Two items with a long term outlook, here and here. As in wtf happens after active warfare ends. (Particularly, the second item suggests a policing and peace keeping role in Gaza after hostilities for neighboring Arab nations which presently decline to take Gazan refugees. That would serve in lieu of Israeli extended occupation of Gaza after hostilities cease, and all mischief such an occupation might entail.)

IDF control of the occupied territories suggests Israel is not the best of stewards over land belonging to others. In particular - Land belonging to Palestinian Arabs from which it keeps eating away via settlements while applying apartheid policy regarding East Jerusalem, etc.

Netanyahu's current coalition government being worse than predecessor conduct.


IN CLOSING: BBC on U.S. money going to Israel, and how it has been used by Israel.

_____________UPDATE_____________

While it is not going to happen, the international community, with the U.S. in the lead, should BDS things as a beginning step, the sanctioning including freezing bank assets, with a UN West Bank peacekeeping force in place, to evict settlers from settlement housing, moving displaced Gazans there to settlement housing in the occupied territory, (international policing in place), and the settlers would get Gaza, theirs to rebuild. Justice is one thing. Actuality another.

The above speculated situation would lead to far less hostility, between existent occupied territory villages, and new settlements, if the latter is populated with Gazans. 

With war crimes trials for perps on each side, those not already dead, justice along those lines could be served.