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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1329 thread views

Transnational Thursday for October 17, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Yahya Sinwar, the military wing commander of Hamas in Gaza, and the planner of the October 7 attacks, has been killed.

Is this why negotiations dried up after Netanyahu refused to compromise on the Philadelphi Corridor? From the sound of his possessions, he seemed to be ready to try to flee across the border.

Yahya Sinwar

For orchestrating the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians he considered to be collaborators in 1989, Sinwar was sentenced to four life sentences by Israel, of which he served 22 years until his release among 1,026 others in a 2011 prisoner exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

This was the gift that keeps on giving. I hope governments everywhere are taking notes.

Edit: Some prior discussion on the Gilad Shalit exchange.

Not only has he been released, before that, while in jail, he was cured of brain cancer in Israeli hospital.

The reporting is very unclear. Apparently they just randomly came upon him trying to maneuver above ground yesterday? Strange.

Israeli soldiers on field training for a command course noticed some suspicious movement and called reinforcements. Once the forces were gathered, they engaged the terrorists (without knowing who that was) and reportedly wounded Sinwar. He was hiding on the second store of the building (there's a video clip of him trying to fight off IDF drone with a stick) and the IDF soldiers called in tank support (also a trainee on a tank commander course), still without knowing who exactly is there, the tank fired on the building and the building collapsed, taking three terrorists inside with it. During the cleanup, the soldiers noticed that one of the corpses in the rubble looks very familiar.

So yes, it was random, but also not so random - IDF established control over the area and methodically surveyed it and engaged enemy forces wherever they showed up. It's not random occurrence, it's the result of long and methodical work done by many people day to day, and that's exactly why forces on the ground in Rafah were necessary. The time and the numbers were on their side - Sinwar had to get less then perfectly lucky just once, and that's what happened today. Of course, the fact that if were not some elite force but regular bunch of trainees doing regular patrol, adds some pungency to the story.

Excellent. That shitheel's life was saved by the Israelis and look how he repaid them. They did brain surgery on him while he was imprisoned around a decade ago. The surgeon's nephew was killed on Oct 7.

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