I wasn’t claiming at all there’s a winning strategy here, quite the opposite in fact, there we strongly agree. (Maybe “the only winning strategy is not to play”, but of course that’s a losing strategy for Netenyahu, irrespective of how one might play that strategy to the benefit of the Israeli and other people).
I wasn’t referring to the overall volume of coverage, though, but rather coverage of realities on the ground, which is something we get fairly little of (even war journalists have limits). Embedded journalists generally only see really limited stuff (because no one wants an embedded journalist to die, so you limit where you bring them!), so I generally write them off entirely.
Rather the coverage I was referring to would be non-embedded journalists or UN reporting within its own formal channels. Non-embedded journalists have been hit a lot by Israeli troops, though of course it’s hard to tell whether they’re being hit more or less than the average person in active warzones in Gaza.
I wasn’t claiming any specific motivation here, just noting that you made a very large leap with the “well presumably intelligence said Hezbollah was using that site”, when there are many other reasons to strike a site.
Sadly, “just wait” isn’t a realistic approach in this conflict because basically no past event ever gets “resolved” - there’s what the IDF says and what Al Jazeera says and what Hamas says and I have yet to see any followup on anything. Even the “we’re launching an investigation” line we’ve heard from the IDF a handful of times appears to always result in internal investigations and no public comments (I believe with only one exception that I’ve seen). Sadly, public opinion is very much a battlefield in this conflict, much more so than in most others, so I don’t think that’s gonna change.
I agree there can be all sorts of reasons for the attack, but I was responding to the claim / suggestion that it was a deliberate attack on the UN by Israel. That's not a reasonable default assumption. Bad intel or some other misunderstanding is a good default assumption, until evidence shows up to suggest otherwise.
As for IDF investigations: the Dutch air-force accidentally killed 70 civilians in Iraq in 2015. It took almost a decade for that to come out. And because of a whistleblower. It was hidden from Parliament too. Militaries around the world are not known for transparency. So we may indeed never know. But stuff leaks, and whisleblowes are out there.
https://www.amnesty.nl/de-aanval-op-hawija
Given the only other observers to the incident are confident it was no accident (and it follows several related incidents), I would not carry a default judgement here. There are absolutely strategic reasons Israel would have to fire on a UN position, even if they’re a bit more tenuous than the reason of “bad intelligence”.
And, yea, I’m sure we’ll never know much more. https://image.nostr.build/c78e3554a1f5bd46ca946ed13dd0a5bad70242fb602154dc01d48daf647c4172.jpg
Not to mention it follows a week or more of Israel explicitly telling Unfil that they should leave, the idea that commanders may wish to ramp up pressure isn’t unreasonable.
Also apparently the IDF isn’t even claiming it was an intelligence error? https://image.nostr.build/110e17a8792ef0c9b437a4ffa26e8bb03c2d14baba57eab4884eaa0c98b55154.jpg
There are multiple meanings of "deliberate". All this says is that they hit the building intentionally, that they aimed at it and it wasn't a stray. The relevant question is why they did that. To bully the UN or because Hezbollah was handing out there and the UN didn't bother sending them away? Remember that for more than a decade now the UN has allowed Hezbollah to operate there.
I’m a bit puzzled by your claim here. The IDF has had ample opportunity to respond to these events, and has not claimed that they thought Hezbollah was present at the UN positions in this case. If it were the case that they thought that, by now they absolutely would have, yet you keep bringing it up as a likely reason?
More generally, Unfil has never had a mandate of removing Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon (that’s the Lebanese army/government’s job, of which there basically isn’t one of either). Their mandate is only to monitor. Their specific mandate is to “allow” everything and tell the UN about it.
I’m frankly puzzled about your arguments here.
The IDF rarely comments on things, so that's really not evidence for your hypothesis that they attacked the UN deliberately to chase them away. My default assumption is that they're doing what say the war goal is, or at least trying to: get rid of Hezbollah. There's just no evidence showing otherwise here, yet.
Hmm? The IDF comments on lots of specific cases. Not everything, certainly, but when things make big news headlines, I’ve generally seen comments.
Anyway, not sure arguing relative percentages is worth it - I’m still really confused why you are talking a *default* stance of “the IDF is right not the UN” rather than a default stance of “I dunno, could go either way, both stances have reasonable motivation”. I fear you are falling into the “all conflicts must have a good guy and because the other side are obviously not it, Israel must be it, and can do no wrong” fallacy that is all too common in conflicts.
The UN only says they were "affected by explosions", afaik they're not denying Hezbollah was (ab)using their facilities. https://image.nostr.build/00b9a234c56b4dddc9a44066d05da7171cc076d3a05d891553023c3c791eac2f.jpg
The Unifill website says they mainly attacked their camera's. That suggests another possible motive, to prevent Unifill from sharing or leaking intel about IDF troop movements.
> UNIFIL also came under criticism during the 2006 Lebanon War for broadcasting detailed reports of Israeli troop movements, numbers, and positions on their website which "could have exposed Israeli soldiers to grave danger", while making no such reports about Hezbollah.
I find that somewhat plausible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Interim_Force_in_Lebanon
Yea, that’s an entirely plausible argument for why they’re targeting the UN (but you’d think they’d ask them to stop, assuming they are, first). But you spent ten posts here arguing that “probably they’re sheltering Hezbollah” without any evidence and now jump to another argument because the first didn’t fit the facts.
I’d really strongly recommend you check your biases here.
All three intel gathering instruments.
nostr:note1zggm93fh9jgyvxkyrt83h0fq63vmfl3tvu2lv2xde8zgn97nu56s9kkl9m
I mean that’s literally Unfil’s mandate - to watch what happens so they can encourage both sides to reduce tensions and tell the UN who’s job is to do the same?
Sheltering Hezbollah or giving intel to Hezbollah are not that different. Both completely justify force and collateral damage, they asked nicely in 2006.
The reason I shifted my hypothesis is that they are hitting observation towers in combination with what happened in 2006.
As for bias, I prefer the term priors. Everyone has them, the question is if you can update them with new information.
Ugh, threading sucks. But, sure priors or bias whatever. My point is even given the history of that border and the current statements from the IDF, I don’t see why you take one possible reason as so much more likely that the other here.
nostr:nevent1qqs9rf3l98qskzz4f7c44t2tc4tc8k0qeqw679aty0gzuj4ct9hf8ccpzamhxue69uhkummnw3ezuendwsh8w6t69e3xj7spr3mhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt4w35ku7thv9kxcet59e3k7mgpp4mhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mqpz3mhxue69uhkummnw3ezummcw3ezuer9wcj0349r
The allegation last time wasn’t that they were specifically “sharing with Hezbollah”, but rather that they were putting it on their website, doing so indirectly. Same net outcome, of course, but I don’t see it on their website today.
You’re, again, assuming that Unfil is interacting directly with Hezbollah to assist them, which is a pretty major assumption. Given there are two perfectly reasonable assumptions here - that or that the IDF does not wish the UN to monitor their actions to prevent them from generating further war reports (given the “anti-Israel bias” the IDF has explicitly alleged the UN has), and given we have no other information or claims from the IDF, I’m still at a total loss for why you’re taking one assumption as almost certain and the other as almost impossible.
This is where proportionality comes in. Military action has to be proportional to the goal.
Attacking a UN camera risks death and injury. Now consider two goals:
1. Prevent negative reports
2. Prevent the death of IDF soldiers from leaked operational information
(2) seems proportional, at least defendable. (1) absolutely not.
And that's where priors come in: if you believe the IDF is fundamentally unethical and just a tool for Netanyalu shenanigans, you might think (1) is the most plausible explanation. I don't think they are, so I find (2) more plausible. Until more information comes in.
Ah, I think the disagreement is more on fundamental analysis of the conflict. I’m not suggesting any kind of ethics analysis, but rather that PR is a *major* component in this war, in a way that it isn’t in most other conflicts. Again, a key goal of organizations which seek to destroy Israel is to reduce their standing in the western world, making it less likely they receive lethal aid in the coming decades (and giving these organizations a bigger fighting chance in a decade). This makes negative PR more than just something that looks bad and much more a key part of this fight, strengthening a proportionality argument for shooting towards UN positions (especially when trying to avoid UN personnel). The IDF absolutely understands this, or at least its leadership does, and academic military analysis has given this some treatment.
This is also why I maintain that Israel has been resoundingly losing its war with Hamas since day one, but that’s a very different discussion.
I agree with you that PR is unusually important in this war. For comparison, the Nazis exploited civilian casualties (in occupied territories) of allied bombing in their propaganda. But that didn't have much effect in the scheme of things. In this conflict you see it has an effect on arms deliveries, etc, though not as substantial as Iran might have hoped.
But even is preventing bad UN reports is a covert war goal, bombing UN facilities is predictably counterproductive - it draws more attention than the reports themselves. So I'm skeptical that the IDF would bother spending the (reconnaissance) resources.
A short-term PR hit trying to force the UN to leave may or may not be worse for PR than the reports of actions in the field over the following months. One is very short-term and the other is very much not.
But really I guess that’s where we just agree to disagree on priors. Sadly, given the evidence of the last six months, I’m not very confident that the IDF is as conservative on decisions of proportionality or care as they were a decade (or two) ago. All evidence points to even close allies having very serious (non-public) questions on proportionality on a regular basis, and given the civilian leadership (who decide military leadership) for the last decade(ish) I don’t find that particularly surprising :(.
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