This announcement by the IDF certainly says that a ground offensive in Gaza is beginning.
Read the whole announcement.
IDF announcement sent to civilians of Gaza City:
The IDF calls for the evacuation of all civilians of Gaza City from their homes southwards for their own safety and protection and move to the area south of the Wadi Gaza, as shown on the map.
The Hamas terrorist organization…
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) October 13, 2023
The IDF is calling for the evacuation of all civilians of Gaza City from their homes southward for their own safety and protection.
Hamas is telling Gaza residents to ignore our safety instructions. pic.twitter.com/hKUkSJ5p0g
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) October 13, 2023
My view: there should not be a siege of Gaza, particularly in view of an impending ground invasion.
Second, the ground invasion should explicitly target terrorists—in line with Israel’s goal of eliminating Hamas—and avoid civilians as far as humanly possible.
Third, somehow there must be an escape route for displaced and fleeing Gazans. Egypt is the only possibility now, and Israel, the U.S., and Egypt should be negotiating for an exit route. I have no idea if this is happening.
First, Vadi Gaza was s roughly in center of the strip, so they have enough space to evacuate to.
Second, according to reports in Israel, Egypt will not allow a significant number of Palestinians to evacuate to Its own territory.
Third, Hamas told Palestinian civilians to stay in their places. For them, it’s a win-win. Either it stops Israel from attacking Hamas or they get photos of dead civilians for their propaganda. For comparison, Israel is evacuating its own communities close to the fighting zone.
I am not personally involved in the current operation, but based on my experience in all previous operations of the IDF in the last 25 years, I can say that Israel does not target civilians and it takes serious measures to minimize collateral damage.
Hamas wanting civilians as shields again. I hope the Palestinians in Gaza are smart enough to ignore Hamas and head to the south of Gaza. And Egypt doesn’t want the refugees because they fear if the they enter Egypt they will never leave.
I the past, Hamas used force to stop civilians from leaving fighting areas. I don’t know if this is happening now, but they did ordered the population to stay in its place.
Also, according to Israeli news, Egypt is worried about the consequences for their own security of letting in masses of Gazans, among whom could be terrorists.
HAMAS is a spin-off from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is a multi-million member transnational group that was founded in Egypt and that opposes the authoritarian, military based, Egyptian government. So it is to be expected that the Egypt government will not want a large and sudden influx of people from Gaza. Any expectation otherwise is unrealistic.
And, BTW, they are murderous barbarians.
My gut feeling is that if one side adopts a “no holds barred” rule, they can’t complain if the other side does too.
Since the IDF is calling for people to evacuate to the south of Gaza, it appears that establishment of an exit corridor out of the region is not imminent (despite negotiations to establish one). I hope that civilians take the IDF warning and move south. I wonder if there are buses or organized efforts to move people. I have not read of any such efforts. With Hamas in power, none may be possible.
There are about 1 million people in the area to be evacuated. That many people can’t be evacuated in 24 hours (even assuming bombardment stops for the period – not that I know whether it is or not), even if Hamas did not work to stop evacuation.
I don’t think the IDF said anything about people having only 24 hours to evacuate, as is reported by the NYT. But I may be wrong.
At least the people in Gaza have 24 hours (perhaps more) more than the Israelis were given to get out of the war zone.
Most of those 1 million people live <<10 km from Wadi Gaza. If you live in Manhattan this is like evacuating from Harlem to the Financial District. If Hamas left those poor people in Gaza alone they could just walk out of the evacuation zone.
I happened to look that up last night using the Apple Maps app, and it showed a similar distance: 6.7 mi. from the center of Gaza City to Nusayrat, the first town south of Wadi Gaza.
Hamas is trying to prevent Palestinian civilians from heeding this warning, then when civilians are killed, parades the dead bodies to support the lie that Israel also targets civilians. Sam Harris proposed a thought experiment for those folks who still think Hamas has the moral high ground in this conflict because their land was “stolen”: Imagine an Israeli soldier resting his rifle on the shoulder of an Israeli teenage girl kneeling in front of him, using her as a human shield. Does anyone believe a Hamas fighter would hesitate one nanosecond before shooting her? Does anyone not believe that Israeli soldiers are deterred and reluctant to kill non-combatants? Hamas knows that their use of children and schools for human shields does work as a deterrent for Israelis and Israel knows that their enemies have no ethical qualms about randomly murdering innocent non-combatants because of their fanatical belief that “there are no innocents” in Israel.
They target Israeli civilians regularly. Of course an Israeli human shield wouldn’t stop them. But they are fine with actively killing their own people. This will s not a guess. Would be suicide bombers told in their interrogations that they had been sent to
Their “missions” when it was clear that many Arabs would be killed as well. That was fine, so long as Jews would be killed as well.
Are you ready for WW3… 🙁