World At War-Battlefront Levant: Israel/Hamas Ceasefire

Killjoy

Killjoy

Propelling The Farce!!
Valued Senior Member
Holy Cow, sports fans !
Looks like the more than year-long holocaustic Hell-on-Earth for the Gaza strip might be coming to an end at last.
One can only wonder at this point if the peace can be anything like permanent, and if a certain old song lyric will prove prophetic for the ravaged region -
The pain of war cannot exceed
The woe of aftermath.

Israel approves a ceasefire with Hamas with the first set of hostages due out Sunday
The Israeli government has approved a ceasefire and hostage deal with the Palestinian militant group Hamas, leading to a possible end to 15 months of a devastating war in Gaza that spread to other parts of the Middle East.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's full cabinet voted in favor of the U.S.-backed deal late Friday, according to The Associated Press and Israeli news outlets, following earlier approval by his security cabinet.

The full approval comes two days after mediators Qatar and the United States announced both Israel and Hamas agreed to the multiphase deal, which includes the staggered release of hostages held in Gaza in exchange for the freeing of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Netanyahu's office said Hamas would release a first group of hostages on Sunday...

...Announcing the deal, President Biden said it would unfold in multiple phases, based on the framework he had proposed in May 2024.

First, Israel and Hamas will implement a six-week ceasefire and Israel would partially withdraw its troops from populated areas of the Gaza Strip.

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Hamas is expected to release 33 hostages as part of the first phase. Biden said they will include U.S. citizens, women and the elderly. As NPR has reported, U.S. citizens Sagui Dekel-Chen and Keith Siegel are among the hostages expected to be released from Gaza in the first phase. French President Emmanuel Macron has said two French citizens are also among the initial 33 to be released.

Israel will free 1,000 Palestinians from its prisons. On Friday, the Justice Ministry shared what said was a partial list of detainees Israel will release. A preliminary review of the list by NPR shows it includes both men primarily under age 21 and women of a range of ages, many of them arrested since the beginning of the war in Gaza and accused of inciting terrorism.

This phase will allow Palestinians to return to areas they evacuated from in the Gaza Strip, and see a surge of humanitarian aid going into the besieged coastal enclave.
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A truly titanic task looms in the reconstruction effort.
This was the UN post-war plan as of April, 2024:

Planning the post-war reconstruction and recovery of Gaza

It is too early to say how much it will cost to rebuild Gaza as the destruction is continuing.

However, according to Rami Alazzeh of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), “it will take decades and the will of the international community to fund tens of billions of dollars of investments to reconstruct Gaza.”

The World Bank calculates the figure at $18.5 billion, but that only accounts for damage up until the end of January 2024. Housing will be most costly to rebuild (taking up 72 per cent of the overall costs) followed by public service infrastructure such as water, health and education (19 per cent). 

That figure obviously does not include the costs of keeping people alive with humanitarian assistance over the next several years. And deadly unexploded bombs will also have to be cleared across the enclave which, according to the UN’s Mine Action Service, “will take years”.
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Killjoy said:
A truly titanic task looms in the reconstruction effort. This was the UN post-war plan as of April, 2024: Planning the post-war reconstruction and recovery of Gaza

[...] "That figure obviously does not include the costs of keeping people alive with humanitarian assistance over the next several years. And deadly unexploded bombs will also have to be cleared across the enclave which, according to the UN’s Mine Action Service, 'will take years'."
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Given that lengthy timeline, there will surely be another Hamas provocation that incites Israeli wrath, before Gaza is is halfway close to being rebuilt and beyond need of constant aid. From Hamas' perspective, the more it can provoke the "Zionist colonials" to attack them -- with innocent Gazans caught in the crossfire -- the more demonic they make the "EuroCulture-adjacent occupiers" appear to the world. (Despite that approach never ending or significantly mitigating US support for Israel, not the least due to how that philosophy in turn stigmatizes the character of Hamas.)

How Much of a Threat Does Hamas Still Pose to Israel?: Hamas has suffered a grievous but not a crushing blow as a result of Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip. American officials are reported to believe that Hamas now has between 9,000 and 12,000 fighters—about half of the number at the start of the war. That means that the Palestinian militant group can field some twelve to fifteen battalions, a considerably larger number than the handful of remaining battalions that Israel said there was to justify its ongoing operations in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. For its part, Hamas claims to have lost no more than six thousand men. And, for a movement that depends on tunnels for its survival, perhaps as many as 80 percent of Hamas’s tunnels remained intact as of January 2024.
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C C said:
Given that lengthy timeline, there will surely be another Hamas provocation that incites Israeli wrath, before Gaza is is halfway close to being rebuilt and beyond need of constant aid. From Hamas' perspective, the more it can provoke the "Zionist colonials" to attack them -- with innocent Gazans caught in the crossfire -- the more demonic they make the "EuroCulture-adjacent occupiers" appear to the world. (Despite that approach never ending or significantly mitigating US support for Israel, not the least due to how that philosophy in turn stigmatizes the character of Hamas.)

How Much of a Threat Does Hamas Still Pose to Israel?: Hamas has suffered a grievous but not a crushing blow as a result of Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip. American officials are reported to believe that Hamas now has between 9,000 and 12,000 fighters—about half of the number at the start of the war. That means that the Palestinian militant group can field some twelve to fifteen battalions, a considerably larger number than the handful of remaining battalions that Israel said there was to justify its ongoing operations in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. For its part, Hamas claims to have lost no more than six thousand men. And, for a movement that depends on tunnels for its survival, perhaps as many as 80 percent of Hamas’s tunnels remained intact as of January 2024.
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Once again the altar of Baal drips with the blood of tens of thousands of the innocents while the people who put them up there, and the people who completed the bloody sacrifice, claim 'victory'. Why let this happen in any gods name!
 
Pinball1970 said:
This is what the prisoners will be returning to.

View attachment 6463
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Two thirds of all structures in Gaza damaged or destroyed.

Gaza in rubble and ruin

Israel’s military campaign since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack has devastated the Gaza Strip, leaving an estimated 42 million tonnes of debris piled where houses, mosques, schools and shops used to stand. In April a U.N. estimate reckoned that this would take 14 years to dispose of, while the U.N. official overseeing the problem said the clean-up would cost at least $1.2 billion...


...According to a damage assessment from UNOSAT, 163,778 structures were damaged in the Gaza Strip based on images taken on Sept. 3 and Sept. 6 amounting to 66% of the total. Of these, 78% were completely destroyed or severely or moderately damaged.
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