Poll: Do you believe Israel is committing genocide against the population of Gaza?

[Jedi Guy]

133. Special forces really isn't a viable option here, as I pointed out.

We're talking a hostile urban area with house-to-house fighting, wherein any special forces team would almost certainly be vastly outnumbered with hostiles on all sides. Why send in a special forces team to take out a building full of Hamas fighters or a rocket launcher when an airstrike will yield the same result and not put valuable special forces personnel in danger?

Special forces troops are a resource any military commander will spend carefully, and only for maximum return on investment, to use a very distasteful term. If an IDF commander can drop a bomb and remove the Hamas personnel/equipment or put a Mossad team at enormous risk to achieve the same end, he's going to drop the bomb. You can buy more bombs. You can't buy more Mossad operators.

And I'd hardly agree that Israel is bombing Gaza back to the Stone Age. If they wanted to, they absolutely could turn the Gaza Strip into a gigantic parking lot. They're not doing that, though. Casualties in Gaza are what, around 10,000? And IDF has dropped fewer than 10,000 munitions. If they were just indiscriminately killing civilians, the casualty figures would be much higher. As horrifying as it is, this is what restraint looks like.

It's the ruthless calculus of war, unfortunately.