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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2

This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

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My priors are based on the fact that I've never heard of a rocket fired by Palestine doing any significant damage to a structure upon impact.

And the whole problem is that a rocket without a decent guidance system is probably not going to hit the loadbearing structural elements by chance.

I'm going to try to find a source on the lack of destruction from the rockets but uh, googling "Palestine Rocket" won't be helpful right now for obvious reasons.

Edit: Here's a source from 2009. Capabilities could have changed since then but I doubt it.

https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/08/06/rockets-gaza/harm-civilians-palestinian-armed-groups-rocket-attacks

Hamas has done some development over the last decade, both with newer and heavier variants of the homemade Qassam, and with more imports with much larger payloads. I don't know enough on the matter to say whether the larger payloads of a Fajir5 or M302 could take down a building without being a golden bb, but they're large enough to start hitting the 'evacuate nearby barricaded structures' part of the ATF bingo card.

My priors are based on the fact that I've never heard of a rocket fired by Palestine doing any significant damage to a structure upon impact.

Thanks for the link, and this is also a very good point. If buildings were as fragile as I'd believed, I would expect to hear about buildings being leveled all the time both by terrorists and by armies. The fact that such events are notable rather than banal was a sign that I could have noticed.

The best way to level a building, short of a nuke, is to fill it with an explosive mixture and ignite it. But that's hard to do with a missile, a bit more practical for a terrorist, and eminently achievable for someone working on natural gas lines without knowing what they're f---ing doing (usually trying to steal gas).