On the day after March 7 when was announced, US military brass said it would take approximately sixty days and that the goal date to open would be May 1.
Sounds like they'll be pretty close to that date. At least six ships have deployed to the Mediterranean with 1,000 troops and the Pentagon said yesterday "by the end of April or early May."
I don't know what's involved with the project enough to speculate as to how long it should take and whether the Army and Navy engineers are making good time or not.
The invasion of Rafah has been inevitable for months if you've heard anything Israel has said. The Hamas big whigs followed their own families and neighbors to Rafah, using them as human shields. The war is about ending Hamas and destroying the tunnel system. The tunnels go to Rafah, therefore the IDF was going to Rafah.
Reminder that the existence of a local civilian population does not constitute a human shield. The Israelis seem to want Hamas to all line up in an empty field and unfurl a "strike here" sign, which is obviously unreasonable. Classically, a human shield is holding a guy physically in front of you. It can be extended a bit, like if you operate a missile battery from a declared POW camp, but I don't think they'd be comfortable with their stated doctrine if it was extended to, say, the Warsaw uprising.
Other than that, yeah, I'm pretty sure the pier is still in the works, even if Israel is going to use it as an excuse to permit even less aid-wise.
When Hamas is encouraging people to ignore the evacuation warnings, or telling people the warnings are a hoax, in order to increase the body count, I call it human shields. Either way, it's a war crime for soldiers to dress up like civilians and hide with them. Hamas is literally trying to get as many Palestinians killed as possible. It's great publicity for the pan-Islamist/Hamas cause. And it blows my mind that there's people here who seem to be about five Al Jazeera articles short of setting themselves on fire because of war crimes, cheering on an organization that literally gives cash prizes to war criminals for doing war crimes.
Nobody is expecting Hamas to line up, but they are expecting that when they call people on the phone and tell them to get out of the building because the tunnel underneath it is about to be blown up, innocent civilians will evacuate.
They are expecting that the people in charge in Gaza have an iota of decency with which they might surrender the tunnels and the hostages, maybe secure for themselves the rights of prisoners of war instead of terrorists. Seems reasonable to me. Even Japan surrendered for the benefit of its people, as did Germany, as did the Polish resistance in Warsaw.
Hamas thinks they found a lawfare loophole where, if they can muster up enough dead kids for the newspapers, the world powers are going to cede a democracy to Iran. I know it's super uncomfortable to say but that's not going to happen in any foreseeable future.
Maybe you think Hamas is right, that if they can follow the civilian population around long enough, and get the body count up high enough, the western world will turn on Israel, and Iran will come in like Gandalf at dawn on the fifth day to save Gaza (while trying to for real genocide the Jews (in a way comparable to the mass summary executions of 150,000 civilians in 60 days by the Nazis in Warsaw). I don't think the West would stand for that. So, the only way to avoid total war in the middle east as I see is it to deter and contain Iran, and that means neither Hamas nor any other Iranian proxy get to have its own country on Israel's front doorstep. Hamas can and should end the war tomorrow. I like to imagine how Gaza might prosper without a religious psychopaths stealing all the money and food to build tunnels, which after blowing their load on October 7, are proving to be essentially useless against Israel.
Edit: The human shield argument is bullshit though. Gaza is one of the most populated places on Earth. There are civilians everywhere. There's no option for not being around civilians.
Gaza could try using their national resources for something other than terrorism, they might find the West more agreeable to their plans for the neighborhood.
Gaza use their national resources, lol. You mean the apartheid that Israel has imposed on the Palestinian people all the while stealing land using illegal settlement building? That Gaza? Killing women and children, literally headshots to Palestinian children. Mass graves, famine...
Mass graves. Yes. 33,000 have died. What did you think happened to their bodies?
What's the line? "Famine is imminent." I"ve seen it repeated every day basically since December. But aid is flowing. Daily death tolls have continued trending down, not up. That's how these sensational claims work, like kids being intentionally shot in the head. Did a whole breakdown in my post history with a dude who insisted Israel was sniping little kids on purpose and the person posted about ten links and everyone of them fell apart under the slightest scrutiny.
Sorry, the usual dehumanization tactics that have worked to give cover for decades of crimes against Palestinians has fallen apart. Israel is its own worst enemy. You can try to cover and smother the horror in Gaza, you can try to suppress voices that reject your slaughter but now that only brings more attention to that very slaughter of civilians, women and children. What's been seen can't be unseen no matter how desperately you try to control the narrative.
Want to add any facts to your argument or just gonna go with "Jews are evil and always have been?"
I think you should check your emotions and reevaluate the stories you've seen. Especially ones shared by people who are collecting donations and by people who get their orders and their money from Qatar and Iran.
And there goes the paint them all anti-semitic if they disagree with anything, literally anything Israel does. Even Jewish people who are protesting Israel's actions must be anti-semitic.
Sorry to tell you, but the world cannot unsee the horrors in Gaza, no matter how hard you try to control the narrative.
It's like a small town worth of people that died, and they didn't die for no reason, there's a war on, and someone built weapons of war under their houses and then told them "nah don't evacuate, you'll be fine!"
You realize wars sometimes kill hundreds of thousands of people, or millions of people, right? God damn, how sad and horrified you are right now, how sad will you be if a wider war with Iran breaks out and kills 30,000,000 people?
Maybe if the horrors of Gaza is too much, Hamas and should stop starting wars it can't finish. You are as short sighted as they are.
The war is about ending Hamas and destroying the tunnel system
That may have been arguable on Oct. 8th, but no one with eyes and a brain buys that anymore. It is a war of annihilation, they are destroying all of Gaza and crushing hopes of a Palestinian nation. The Israeli establishment has made it clear they don't support a Palestinian state of any kind.
Even during this current escalation they have continued to annex land in the West Bank, what does that have to do with Hamas or tunnels?
There are between 300 to 450 miles of tunnels, from Hamas's own mouth, built up over fifty years, in an area only 25 miles wide. To build them they used billions in funding, from such beacons of humanity and civil rights as Iran, Qatar, and North Korea. Hamas turned the very foundation of the most populated areas of Gaza into Swiss cheese that isn't fit to hold up a paper hat. And to achieve what? A mass shooting of 1,300 people? That's why millions of Gazans had to live and die in a constant state of malnourishment and dependence on foreign charity with zero hope for prosperity for decadesnas Hamas diverted all public resources toward war crimes?
I get it, extremists sincerely don't like the idea of a Jewish state in the Levant. That doesn't mean they get to have patent and willful disregard for all international laws to try and blow it up. Arabs think it was their land first because the Ottoman empire had been murdering and taking as slaves the indigenous Hebrew-speaking Israelites, Semitic people, for so long, that they held all the deeds and Jews became foreigners on their own land. But the archeological record, recorded history, remembers, and Hamas surely knows this, too, what with all that digging. Regardless, I don't think that's really what motivates people to live and die for such spiteful resentment.
The truth of the matter is that religious tyrants run the middle-east, and the idea that government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the people over whom is governs and to whom it is subservient--to the exclusion of religious "law"--is an existential threat to the established power dynamic, which, again, is based on mysticism and superstition. Law that can be changed on the whim or fantasy of one or two church muckity mucks is not a system that is capable of granting, let alone protecting human or civil rights.
The West Bank is somehow more complicated than Gaza, IMO. Expansion should stop indefinitely and sectarian violence should be dealt with harshly by Israel and by the West, via sanctions, carrots and sticks. I have hope Israel and America will deal with its own tyrants peacefully at the ballot box; we will know soon enough. I'm not opposed to a Palestinian state in the West Bank if its got its shit together. Could start by denouncing Hamas for what it is and demanding its surrender, calling for release of hostages, etc.
Is the UN official saying that the pier is enabling the Israeli invasion of Rafah, as though it wouldn't happen otherwise? Or is he saying that but for the pier, Israel will open more land crossing to aid?
And what is the corrective action? Should the pier be built somewhere else, or not at all? Are their any factors about where to locate the pier besides political? Like the depth of the water or existing infrastructure?
And if the problem with the aid is that it's a meaningless PR gesture, then does PR medicine not heal? Dose PR food not nourish?
Please help me understand why delivering food and medicine to Gaza is bad.
The US military is building the floating pier with materials they get from the US taxpayer. If you're trying to argue it's a waste of tax dollars, its not.
A crucial part of warfighting? They are building a port purportedly to feed the people that their closest ally is deliberately starving by denying aid that Israelis have engineered to be necessary for their subsistence.
Do you think the ships will not be docking in Israel and that nothing will be transported by land through crossings? The same crossing that Israel uses to move their armed forces, weaponry and supplies through on a daily basis. Somehow those crossings will be completely off limits for the same US military that helps Israel coordinate a lot of their military operations and logistics.
I don't understand how you can fail to see the absurdity of this situation. It's been 7 weeks since they announced their plans and so far no construction has begun and a ship has had to return to the US due to a fire. Even if they do get something built, there will still be the need to operate and deliver the aid from the pier to the interior of the enclave with.... trucks.
Yes, building floating piers and bridges are basic Army functions and the US military has been doing it for hundreds of years since inception, literally back to the Revolutionary war.
Yes, the same roads the IDF uses will connect to the pier, and they will use trucks to distribute the supplies, obviously. How else would they do it? What other roads would they use?
Yes, it has been seven weeks of a plan they said would take at least eight weeks.
Man, you really should approach your news diet more rationally.
The same roads they can use to let in aid trucks without any of these theatrics. Should the UN officials also "approach their news diet more rationally"? Please realize that outside of your western bubble you are completely isolated in your viewpoints on the ongoing ethnic cleansing.
Apolitical UN employees and everyone else should stop reblogging every single unattributed report from Hamas members and sympathizers no matter how sensational and unbelievable the claim is.
The UN officials aren't saying any of those things. Here's a tldr of the issue
The platform is meant to be in Northern Gaza where the worst of the starvation is
Israel wants it to be moved south to an Israeli choke point
Israel is about to close the crossings in South Gaza so it can attack Rafah
If the tiny amount of aid that can come in is able to be diverted to South Gaza then Israel may face less international condemnation over this phase of the Gaza genocide.
Please help me understand why delivering food and medicine to Gaza is bad.
If there is a starving child and you can choose to deliver them the nutrients they need but instead you choose to give them half a peanut instead, in a really theatrical way, that's obviously bad right?
At no point was a pier planned for north Gaza, the first place to be evacuated, six months ago.
Israel will be inspecting every delivery since Hamas has proved again and again that if it takes part in international commerce, it will be in the business of killing Jews. That's why they didn't have their own port to begin with. It's not a choke point, it's a highway interchange. That's generally where you want to build the port. It's literally the opposite of a choke point.
Egypt is in charge of the southern border crossing not Israel. Egypt doesn't want terrorists moving weapons and fighters over its border, either.
Biden does not care at all for the people of Gaza, that’s very clear with the money/ weapons he sends to Israel.
EDIT: you can keep downvoting since it doesn’t mean much on Lemmy. However, it is true. If he actually cared about the lives of the Palestinian people, he wouldn’t send so much to Israel due to the very fact, he knows that it will be used for the genocide on Palestinian people.
Or you know, he does care but internal US politics as well as international geopolitics are actually more complicated than you think and Biden can't just do whatever the fuck he wants just because he's president.
A democracies value is that (in theory) the government needs to reflect what its people want.
And if large parts of the country support Israel. like basically all republicans and large swaths of democrats do, then the government will unfortunately reflect that.
No, he does not care at all. Biden said lots of times, he fully supports Israel. When someone says that while the particular state is committing genocide - the person truly does not care about the lives of the people who are being brutally murdered.
At some point the geopolitics and internal US politics needs to setback and you need to take a hard look and think about the more than 33 000 lives that have been taken away.
This is not about “doing anything he wants just because, he’s president”. Despite the fact Biden cannot do ‘everything he wants’ - he certainly has a great influence of what happens (he’s president after all). The US refused to agree to a ceasefire multiple times.
He could for example put pressure on not giving the money to Israel until ceasefire happens and pressure to not give any weapons and such if they (Israel) decide to continue.
Also this is just me probably nitpicking but why can’t you write without rude words?
You should take a hard look at the millions of lives that are preserved by an alliance that keeps Iran from invading Israel. You're this sad over 33,000, Imagine 3 million, or 33 million! You'll might shit yourself crying. Biden doesn't get time to cry. He's got to think of the 33 million right now.
