I always thought that the official casualty numbers from Israel, both for their own soldiers and for how many Hamas they’ve killed were dubious. But now we’re getting confirmation. Likewise against Hezbollah.
Sure they have:
IDF killed 2,000 Hamas fighters this month, 8,000 since war outbreak, spokesman sayshttps://t.co/Qm1DHWkudi
— The Times of Israel (@TimesofIsrael) December 21, 2023
Against Hezbollah:
Israeli admit their failure to Hezbollah
Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronot:
"Israel's deputy foreign minister admitted in a press conference that they had failed in the face of Hezbollah's military tactics : 'We thought Hezbollah would retreat north of the Litani, but what… pic.twitter.com/EiZD0D2Cgt
— S p r i n t e r (@Sprinter99800) December 22, 2023
And (actually only one battalion.)
Israeli channel 13:
The Israeli army has decided to withdraw the famous Golani Brigade from the Gaza Strip due to the large number of casualties among its soldiers pic.twitter.com/DtKF1XCOnr
— S p r i n t e r (@Sprinter99800) December 22, 2023
And
Israeli political and military analyst Ronen Bergman describes the conditions of Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip in a Yedioth Ahronot article: “Soldiers are dying in a lumbering army that stands still, exposed to Palestinian fighters who have reorganized. » pic.twitter.com/wbuvDywiIc
— S p r i n t e r (@Sprinter99800) December 22, 2023
x
Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported on 27 November that the Israeli army dismissed two officers – one of them a commander – for withdrawing from the battlefield after being ambushed by dozens of Palestinian resistance fighters. The report noted that half of the soldiers… pic.twitter.com/HXodffed8L
— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) November 27, 2023
None of this is definitive, of course. But I just as am not seeing evidence suggesting Israel is winning the military fight. Yes, they’ve grabbed some territory, leveled a lot of buildings and killed a ton of civilians, but a guerilla resistance doesn’t fight hard for territory, and reports are that they don’t have solid control of areas they’ve taken.
Israel’s army is just crap, and Hamas is far more motivated and seems more skilled. Videos of Hamas ambushing tanks which didn’t have infantry screens are numerous, for example. What’s holding Hamas back is that, in fact, they don’t have a lot of Iranian equipment: their equipment is basic and a lot of it seems to be home made.
Truly embarrassing.
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Raad
You should post some hasbara hate mail in a digestive format like you do your quick takes; it would be a funny reprieve from time to time
As you say, we are now in collapse so it’d be cool to break up depressing stuff
bruce wilder
I would not know how to have confidence in any opinion I might form about the military performance per se of the IDF in Gaza on the basis of impressions informed by the propaganda. What I do have confidence in is my opinion that the IDF has been handed a despicable set of missions.
Usually, in a fight against “guerilla insurgents”, we are told that the real contest is for “hearts and minds”. That silly cliche is not even a pretense here. The Israeli “military” strategy is a siege operation against an already long besieged population with the apparent objectives of obliterating any political entity capable of surrendering and destroying the infrastructure that would allow any surviving population to continue to survive in the territory.
In that “strategic frame”, what could ever qualify as good military performance?
Even the propaganda meant to show the Israelis in a “good light” must of necessity appear pathetically false at best, given the strategic context created by Israel’s ill-chosen objectives of collective punishment and annihilation or displacement. Maybe some Israeli generals think they are engaged in a surgical excision of Hamas fighters, but they are not using the military equivalent of scalpels to accomplish that putative objective. They do not appear to have any scalpels to hand, lacking perhaps both the intelligence information as well as sufficient special forces for operations in a fiercely hostile, mostly extremely dense urban environment. This is just speculation on my part to rationalize why Israel behaves as it reportedly does: targeting hospitals and journalists.
Carborundum
In my view, if HAMAS was that great, they would be inflicting far higher casualties than they have. The scale of the action is that there are tens of thousands of IDF forces in their reach, they have SATCOM, media is clearly a huge part of their strategy, but the scale of actions depicted is in the low dozens, not the high hundreds it should be 8 weeks into ground operations. My view, these are directed illustrative operations to sell a perception, not representative depictions of what’s happening at scale.
It looks to me like the IDF is able to move anywhere in the territory they want to and stay for fairly long periods of time while the Sayaret and engineers carry out clearance and anti-infrastructure operations. That doesn’t speak to huge combat power on the part of HAMAS, particularly given that their strategy hyped their preparation for this type of conflict and they chose the timing. If the reporting on the fraction of IDF wounded with hands and feet injuries is accurate, this sounds a lot more dominated by boobytraps than hit and run engagements or stand-up fights.
As a technical note, relative lack of screening infantry is actually be be expected from the IDF – I don’t read Hebrew, but I’ve been told it’s part of their doctrine, based on their experiences from 2006 and Cast Lead. They’ll definitely still dismount, but they are apparently less reflexive about putting out their dismounts than many other forces. Like everything else in warfare, it’s a set of tradeoffs – and those tradeoffs have a way of being very different on the ground than they appear to distant observers commenting on social media.
different clue
Here is a link to a twitterX-thread which shows a running Gazans’-eye-view and interpretation of ongoing events. I hope the link works. I guess we will see.
https://twitter.com/IbnRiad
I do not offer this link in a spirit of either cheerleading or booleading. I offer it in my best effort to show that I learned what Colonel Lang tried to teach us readers of his blog . . . that information or data-bits from whatever source should be dispassionately analyzed as information without regard to the source. ( Though I as a mere layman and member of the Great Uncleared would suggest that the source of any information is itself a piece of information)
Curt Kastens
It is really not at all relevent that things are going much worse for the Israelis is Gaza than is being reported, even if it is true. If Half of Palestinians are starving now, and the other half soon will be, the Palestinians will run out of people much sooner than the Israelis.
And if hundreds if not thosuands of Palestinian children and women are being killed by Israeli bombs each day even if Hamas fighters save their tunnels they will have lost their families.
The Islamic and Arab world have abandon the Palestinians. The suffering of the Palestinians was a test for these countries that these countries did not want to deal with.
Test Test Test Test Test Test Test the test is being failed.