Well, this is what I pointed out would be the problem the minute Israel cut off all water and electricity then went and bombed the power and water infrastructure.
Also have widespread diarrhea. This is just what WHO has seen in their shelters, w/o the internet and with all the bombs they don’t know what’s going on with everyone else.
The current disease trends are very concerning. Since mid-October 2023, over 33,551 cases of diarrhea have been reported. Over half of these are among children under age five—a significant increase compared to an average of 2000 cases monthly in children under five throughout 2021 and 2022. 8944 cases of scabies and lice, 1005 cases of chickenpox, 12635 cases of skin rash, and 54,866 cases of upper respiratory infections have also been reported.
It’s just going to get worse, a lot worse:
Lack of fuel has led to the shutting down of desalination plants, significantly increasing the risk of bacterial infections like diarrhea spreading as people consume contaminated water. Lack of fuel has also disrupted all solid waste collection, creating an environment conducive to the rapid and widespread proliferation of insects, rodents that can carry and transmit diseases.
Meanwhile, most people are living on almost no water. They can’t make bread any more, even if they had flour, so there’s very little food. Stories of people not eating so that what little food they have can go to their children are common. Lines for what food there is can take all day, and fights are becoming common.
None of this is unexpected. Netanyahu and Genocide Joe are responsible.
If Turkish President Erdogan is sincere about wanting to help, there’s a simple way to do it. Send a squad of military cargo planes with pallets to drop (ie. with parachutes) into Gaza. Tell Israel that if they are shot down, it’s an automatic declaration of war: pass a bill saying that before the planes go.
Meanwhile, the real part of the genocide has begun. It was never about killing them all with explosives, most will die from disease, hunger and lack of water.
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Steven Schmidt
Why doesn’t Hezbollah intervene? Again, what the fuck are they waiting for? This is a god-damned extermination of all life in Gaza. That will end Hamas. Wasn’t that the reddest of red lines for Hezbollah? This will erupt into a region-wide war, likely triggering World War 3 in earnest, but that’s where we’re at. What venal, miserable, corrupt cowards most Arab regimes are.
Why isn’t Hezbollah intervening? They’re the only hope for Gaza now, absent any action by Turkey. They will lose all credibility if they let this happen. What the Hell are they waiting for? Their red lines have been crossed. Somebody fucking do something.
DMC
Celine, both a combat veteran and a physician, speculated that it was cholera, at least as much fighting, that brought the end to the two World Wars. It took disease to really kill and incapacitate masses of men otherwise fit for duty. Enough of that and one quickly loses the capacity to carry on with any sort of military operations, beyond guerilla resistance.
Stu
I don’t think Erdogan would risk a war with Israel over the Palestinians. Neither do I think the other Authoritarian countries in the region would.
Israel *has* nukes, and the Samson Option. There are US “NATO” shared nukes in Turkey @ Incirlik. Which does bring another dynamic into this shitshow.
As for Hezbollah, while they could probably inflict some substantial damage, the response from Israel would be to destroy what remains of Lebanon.
Or
dov zakheim's planes
Israel will use nukes. That is the answer to why Iran/Hezbollah aren’t responding with more force.
American nurse who got out of Gaza describes desperation she saw:
https://piped.video/watch?v=gk7iWgCk14U
Kids everywhere with burns, open wounds and lost limbs.
I wonder if they’ll add this as an exhibit in the “never again” holocaust museum near you.
The following audio/video is very powerful. I cry…and get very, very angry when I watch it:
https://piped.video/watch?v=hVJRegoC2Os
Ian Welsh
The US isn’t going to go to war with Turkey, not even for Israel.
Tallifer
One problem is that Hamas is imbedded throughout Gaza, and no government except Iran’s wants any supplies to go to Hamas.
Carborundum
The IDF is going to use hunger and thirst as ways to get people out of the combat zone so they can make unrestrained use of direct and indirect fires. Keeping casualties low is their number one concern and their people simply aren’t good enough to be surgical in a complex urban environment. Look to see things like throttling of supply and periodic corridors to help siphon off the civvies. Large scale death from these and disease is a bad outcome for them because it will spark real international resistance (as opposed to the tut-tutting we’re seeing).
As for Hezbollah, it is a Lebanese resistance movement – that’s the worldview. Don’t assume that means dancing to an Iranian tune or unrestrained support for other aligned movements. If they intensify too much, international opinion will continue to give Israel carte-blanche and ultimately that’s the only thing that’s going to bring about conflict termination. None of the resistance movements have sufficient combat power, alone or in unison, and the state actors are going to stay out of direct within-AO kinetics.
subtle hasbara
Keeping casualties low is their number one concern
Ah yes, the world’s most moral army. Through deception they wage war.
The Israelis celebrate dead Arabs. “Keeping casualties low” is not a concern at all. In fact, more dead and dismembered bodies are a purim of sorts to these crazed supremacists.
Carborundum
Keeping casualties low means primarily keeping IDF losses low. Palestinian civilians aren’t a concern unless and until they kill enough that international *government* opinion begins to shift.
Feral Finster
Erdogan would note dare anger his American masters that way. This one they would not forgive.
Better to rely on Hezbullah.
Feral Finster
“Ian Welsh
The US isn’t going to go to war with Turkey, not even for Israel.”
The US won’t have to. It has enough other ways to exert leverage and keep Erdogan all bark and no bite.
GrimJim
At this point dead civilians are a feature, not a bug.
Genocide is not limited to combatants. And what we are seeing is genocide, pure and simple.
That they are reluctant to take a break in bombing shows that their intentions have moved from simple ethnic cleansing to genocide.
Move and you die. Stay put and you die.
Just die, already, is what they are telling the Palestinians.
That is their plan. That has always been their plan. From day one, the Irgun told them, stay on land we claim and we will kill you.
Now, when the West is falling apart, they figure it is now or never, one last shot. Soon the US will no longer be able to be their sugar daddy, even if the Evangelicals want it to be.
Of course, the Evangelical Revelations Project aka Operation Maximum Hubris, is well underway, so they are all waiting with bated breath for the Jews to be destroyed, as that is part of the Magic Ritual to summon the Invisible Sky Wizard so he can Rapture them all home to Celestial Disneyland and leave the rest of us to burn…
Dan
@subtle hasbara
I think @Carborundum probably meant “keeping *IDF* casualties low is their number one concern”.
Yes, most modern militaries don’t rely on cannon fodder and attrition like it’s Verdun anymore…but the IDF is super casualty-averse even by modern military standards. One big reason why is that, unlike the all-volunteer US military, the IDF is still largely a conscript army full of young people who don’t necessarily *want* to be there. They have to worry about homefront support a lot more and avoid draft riots and that sort of thing; the media being full of stories of scores of dead young soldiers and their grieving mothers isn’t conducive to that. Hence why they’re especially keen to just bomb everything and anyone to hell from miles away.
Willy
One tale being told, is that selected Palestinian apartment building dwellers are being called by IDF agents and told their building is on the hit list, and they have one hour to make sure it’s evacuated.
If true, then it’s the plausible deniability aspect of “keeping casualties low” which Bibi’s warboys are operating under. That term’s an abstraction anyways. To an elite, you always, always make sure that it’s all the other poor dumb bastards who get killed/injured/starved/maimed/dehydrated.
Hamas screwed up when they didn’t successfully target Netanyoohoo. As it is, they’re sacrificing tens of thousands of their innocent own for this latest chapter in their cause.
NR
This is coming from someone who is appalled at what Israel is doing in Gaza:
Hezbollah doesn’t care about the Palestinians. The Arab governments in the region don’t care about the Palestinians. The Palestinians are just pawns to them, to be used and sacrificed as needed to further their own goals.
This is a trap that I’ve seen many people here fall into: thinking that just because the West is bad (which it is), the forces opposing them must be good. I’ve seen it with Russia and now it’s happening with Hezbollah, Iran, etc. And it’s just not true. All these countries and state actors are bad as well, just in different ways. (Well, some different and some very similar ways).
There are no good guys out there. At least, not any with any power.
Forecasting Intelligence
Ian, you are sooooooo naïve
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/10/27/ehgq-o27.html.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/11/11/oxes-n11.html
As the WSWS highlight in the above articles, Erdogan is a de facto ally of Israel despite his relations with the Muslim Brotherhood. Your proposal is a fantasy.
The other inconvenient fact is Israeli army operations have proved far more successful than they or Washington anticipated and top Hamas leadership are being killed.
Assuming the top leadership get wiped out soon – and Isreali miltary forces are preparing to take out their underground centres below the hospitals (a perfectly sensible place to place your HQ as its the safest place in Gaza), the war will be nearly over.
Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and has few friends in the region (although Qatar and Turkey maintain relations with the MB). Egypt, the Gulf States despise Hamas who are part of the wider MB network.
Soredemos
@Forecasting Intelligence
It’s weird to see someone calling anyone else naive while parroting obvious hasbara about Hamas bases under hospitals.
Raad
@Soredemos
Thank you
So much for “forecasting intelligence”