[NOT A JOKE] Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz said that Hamas fighters “are eliminated or in hiding” declares Hamas defeated, but sees years of fighting ahead
https://tass.com/world/1773319
TEL AVIV, April 10. /TASS/. While Hamas has been defeated on the battleground, Israel will need to send soldiers to fight Palestinian radicals in the Gaza Strip for years to come, Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz said.
“From a military point of view Hamas is defeated. Its fighters are eliminated or in hiding,” he said following a meeting of his National Unity party in the city of Sderot.
Still, it’s not the end of the battle for Israel, the minister said.
“Fighting against Hamas will take time. Boys who are now in middle school will still fight in the Gaza Strip, like in Judea and Samaria and against Lebanon,” he went on to say.
The situation in the Middle East sharply escalated following an incursion of Hamas militants from the Gaza Strip into Israel on October 7, accompanied by killings of residents of Israeli settlements near the border and taking more than 200 hostages, including children, women and elderly people. Hamas cast the attack as a response to Israeli actions against the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Israel declared a complete siege of the Gaza Strip and started striking the enclave and parts of Lebanon and Syria. Clashes are also taking place in the West Bank.
The US kill-death ratio is also telling.
During the Global War on Terror less than ten thousand US citizens killed in the conflict but around a million Afghans and Iraqis directly killed along with around 4 million people across the region indirectedly killed. Even the Vietnam war was something like 40,000 US citizens killed in exchange for around 3 million killed on the Vietnamese side. Hell… the US kill-death ratio in the World War 2 Pacific theater, some of the most brutal fighting the US has engaged in, was only 70,000 US citizens killed in exchange for 2.5 million Japanese soliders and somewhere around 1 million Japanese civilians killed.
The US has amazing kill-death ratios across all its wars excluding its civil war when busy fighting among itself. It’s disgusting really. The US will lose a few thousand while killing millions on the other side. Even in total war engagements the US loses thousands while the other combatants lose many millions. Since 1775 the US has only lost around 650,000 even when including both the US civil war and World War 2.
People always make the mistake of assuming during colonial adventures the US is doing anything other than smashing everything up (immediately wiping out the opposing military) then sitting back and milking any insurgency for as long as it is profitable to maintain a low intensity conflict. The US has really only ever fought two conflicts on a total-war footing (Civil War, World War 2) but managed to have hundreds of colonial adventures and so-called police actions throughout its entire history. For most of its history the US has been fighting one or more military actions somewhere, starting with westward expansion across North American then the so-called banana-wars advancing US corporate interests across Latin America and various colonial or cold war adventures across the entirety of the eastern hemisphere.
Someday, that kill-death ratio will come back to haunt the west- because it exposes them for what they are, nothing more than terrorists, bloodthirsty murderers. IMO it shows that there cannot be peace, till the west is decolonized- denazified- till the seeds (ideology) of empire are rooted out entirely; it is necessary for the rest of the world to ever be secure.
Josip Borrell’s talk about “the garden having to invade the jungle” (in which he was referring to Nuland’s husband’s, Kagan’s book “the Jungle Grows Back”) had it wrong. The west has always had it wrong- they are the threat to civilization, to humanity, to any notion of decency. IMO someday, eventually, there is a high chance that the global south, the “jungle,” will find themselves having to intervene in the genocidal “gardens” of the west; certainly, if there is no revolutionary change within the west, it will be necessary.