So last Friday Hamas announced that we don't have a ceasefire anymore, and there's been not infrequent rocket fire ever since.
I think I speak for most Israelis when I say - wait, what? Are we still doing this? I totally thought the summer war was over.
I mean really. Viggy is back home, the emergency supplies are in the process of being eaten, I even got the kids pool passes (non-refundable pool passes! Good thing the pool is just out of range). What gives? And Hamas - weren't you, like, just complaining about how Israel keeps bombing you two minutes ago??
Have you not noticed a pattern over the past few years of firing rockets at Israel not creating happy results in Gaza?
I seriously think Hamas suffers from some kind of mental disorder. Like really bad OCD, but with "bombing things" as the sole repetitive behavior.
******
Viggy was busy "playing snakes and ladders," as his commander put it. "We find the ladders, and make sure the snakes can't climb up them." (in American, that would be "chutes and ladders," but then the joke doesn't work.)
So it was all very stressful, and we're glad he's home. S in particular spent a while insisting on being with "ABBA SHEL ANI" ("Mine daddy") at every possible moment.
Viggy's brother (one of them) is still in reserves. While reserves anywhere outside the Gaza area has been considered "safe" in recent weeks, he actually has some pretty crazy stories. Like, there was one riot where soldiers were hurt and a Palestinian guy was killed.
Specifically, the soldiers were hit by tear gas fired by some overenthusiastic Border Police officers, and a Palestinian protester died after warning fire led him to drop his Molotov cocktail (you're supposed to throw them... ). But still. Scary stuff.
******
An update on my earlier remarks on the civilian casualty rate in Gaza:
The death figures have been updated. Assuming the new ones are accurate, the revised civilian casualty rate would be significantly higher than my initial estimate (over 40%, instead of under 30%), which was based on the first several hundred deaths.
I don't actually assume the latest figures are accurate. On the one hand, it's true that heavy fighting in Seijaya (only some of which was accounted for in the mid-war death toll) and (briefly) Rafiah probably meant more civilian casualties. On the other hand, the more serious ceasefire talks are, the more Hamas tries to bring pressure to bear on Israel, and it's lied about civilian deaths in the past.
My method was simple, and also obviously flawed: I just looked at the differences between how heavily represented various population groups are in Gaza as a whole, vs. in the list of dead (eg. children ages 0-14, men ages 45+, etc), and calculated how likely it would be to get that degree over overrepresentation/underrepresentation in a random sample (or a 50% random sample, or 30%, etc).
To be clear, I wasn't assuming that any particular group is more likely to be involved in terrorism, only checking how random vs. non-random the deaths seemed to be.
The main flaw is that there are reasons that certain groups of non-combatants might be overrepresented. For example, there was a fairly clear trend toward a higher death rate among 10-14 year old boys than among other children aged 14 or younger. I doubt that's due to actual involvement in armed combat; more likely, it indicates a certain approach to safety (that is, boys that age proving they're brave by being deliberately uncautious). Similarly, the disproportionately high death rate among women in their 20s (compared to other girls/women) could be due to the fact that wives and sisters of Hamas and Islamic Jihad commanders are in that age range, and are dying with their relatives in airstrikes.
So my method is flawed. OTOH, all the other methods I've heard of are equally flawed if not more so. (The worst: trusting Hamas to say whether a given person was a "militant" or not, because they tend not to lie about that sort of thing (remember after Operation Cast Lead, when they claimed for the better part of a year that only 50 Hamas members were killed in fighting? Only to later admit that it was around 600?... No? Only I remember these things, because I am the nerdiest of news nerds? Fine, be that way)).
I was glad to see the New York Times begin to somewhat address the issue. Albeit a couple weeks after everyone learned from the American media that Israel is killing Gazans at random, but still. It's something.
******
And now the chunky baby is asleep again, and my rant must end. After all, I might be taking the kids to the pool tomorrow.
I think I speak for most Israelis when I say - wait, what? Are we still doing this? I totally thought the summer war was over.
I mean really. Viggy is back home, the emergency supplies are in the process of being eaten, I even got the kids pool passes (non-refundable pool passes! Good thing the pool is just out of range). What gives? And Hamas - weren't you, like, just complaining about how Israel keeps bombing you two minutes ago??
Have you not noticed a pattern over the past few years of firing rockets at Israel not creating happy results in Gaza?
I seriously think Hamas suffers from some kind of mental disorder. Like really bad OCD, but with "bombing things" as the sole repetitive behavior.
******
Viggy was busy "playing snakes and ladders," as his commander put it. "We find the ladders, and make sure the snakes can't climb up them." (in American, that would be "chutes and ladders," but then the joke doesn't work.)
So it was all very stressful, and we're glad he's home. S in particular spent a while insisting on being with "ABBA SHEL ANI" ("Mine daddy") at every possible moment.
Viggy's brother (one of them) is still in reserves. While reserves anywhere outside the Gaza area has been considered "safe" in recent weeks, he actually has some pretty crazy stories. Like, there was one riot where soldiers were hurt and a Palestinian guy was killed.
Specifically, the soldiers were hit by tear gas fired by some overenthusiastic Border Police officers, and a Palestinian protester died after warning fire led him to drop his Molotov cocktail (you're supposed to throw them... ). But still. Scary stuff.
******
An update on my earlier remarks on the civilian casualty rate in Gaza:
The death figures have been updated. Assuming the new ones are accurate, the revised civilian casualty rate would be significantly higher than my initial estimate (over 40%, instead of under 30%), which was based on the first several hundred deaths.
I don't actually assume the latest figures are accurate. On the one hand, it's true that heavy fighting in Seijaya (only some of which was accounted for in the mid-war death toll) and (briefly) Rafiah probably meant more civilian casualties. On the other hand, the more serious ceasefire talks are, the more Hamas tries to bring pressure to bear on Israel, and it's lied about civilian deaths in the past.
My method was simple, and also obviously flawed: I just looked at the differences between how heavily represented various population groups are in Gaza as a whole, vs. in the list of dead (eg. children ages 0-14, men ages 45+, etc), and calculated how likely it would be to get that degree over overrepresentation/underrepresentation in a random sample (or a 50% random sample, or 30%, etc).
To be clear, I wasn't assuming that any particular group is more likely to be involved in terrorism, only checking how random vs. non-random the deaths seemed to be.
The main flaw is that there are reasons that certain groups of non-combatants might be overrepresented. For example, there was a fairly clear trend toward a higher death rate among 10-14 year old boys than among other children aged 14 or younger. I doubt that's due to actual involvement in armed combat; more likely, it indicates a certain approach to safety (that is, boys that age proving they're brave by being deliberately uncautious). Similarly, the disproportionately high death rate among women in their 20s (compared to other girls/women) could be due to the fact that wives and sisters of Hamas and Islamic Jihad commanders are in that age range, and are dying with their relatives in airstrikes.
So my method is flawed. OTOH, all the other methods I've heard of are equally flawed if not more so. (The worst: trusting Hamas to say whether a given person was a "militant" or not, because they tend not to lie about that sort of thing (remember after Operation Cast Lead, when they claimed for the better part of a year that only 50 Hamas members were killed in fighting? Only to later admit that it was around 600?... No? Only I remember these things, because I am the nerdiest of news nerds? Fine, be that way)).
I was glad to see the New York Times begin to somewhat address the issue. Albeit a couple weeks after everyone learned from the American media that Israel is killing Gazans at random, but still. It's something.
******
And now the chunky baby is asleep again, and my rant must end. After all, I might be taking the kids to the pool tomorrow.
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