A lot of these settlements have either contracters or the IDF directly providing security. So the idea that Hamas could have broken out of Gaza and just found all the soldiers neatly in their bases seems unbelievable. The IDF is an occupying force, not a European military where it's just some dudes with their thumbs up their asses in a barracks near some nature reserve.

Ultimately we can't know how Hamas leadership told their soldiers to behave. But they do have a clear incentives not to condone the killing of civilians: they want to capture hostages and use them as leverage. They need to create the expectation that these hostages are treated fairly and can be returned safely so that it is entirely up to Israel whether it wants those civilians to die.

Tragically, civilians always die in wars. Both sides always propagandise this to claim that it is the other side that is just killing civilians as policy. The facts however, are abundantly clear when it comes to the question of which side shows the greater disregard for civilian casualties.

Supposedly training will take 6 months. So maybe somewhere next year, but not unlikely near the end of that year, or the beginning of the year after.

Doesn't seem likely that the war will be over by then. I still feel that it is a possibility the US will try for some sort of ceasefire and make Ukraine receiving F16s conditional on a ceasefire. At the same time, the problem remains of how to maintain an F16 fleet for Ukraine. Where are they going to fly from? Is NATO going to try for allowing Ukrainian F16s to take off in NATO territory and drop their payload in Ukrainian airspace? Especially if neither Russia or Ukraine feel much for negotiations.

My sense of the mood in Europe is that Russia has failed to escalate when Ukraine attacked Crimea, started droning Moscow, and now when it comes to testing the Russian blockade in the Black Sea. They are slowly escalating because they think Russia is unwilling or unable to respond.

Although there is more talk of a failed Ukrainian offensive, there is still an ambient sense that Ukraine is on the winning hand. Because they believe that Russia is running out of options.

I started following this site from the beginning, but somewhere along the way I just sorta lost interest. The content wasn't that engaging too me after a while. I remember it as being mostly dunking on American politics and culture war stuff.

The war in Ukraine brought me back because I wanted an online space that wasn't in complete denial about the Western role in the conflict and/or deeply reactionary. This site didn't let me down.

I much prefer engaging with discussions on (geo)political developments with people I disagree with as a matter of degrees, rather than the rabid liberalism on other sites. Eventhough people on this site still say some pretty silly things sometimes, I take it in good faith. As much as I love me some internet drama, it is a breath of fresh air to be able to talk about current events from a socialist perspective without it devolving into a discussion on which 20th century ideology is the real true socialism.