"We're talking about people who don't realize there's a difference between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to begin with."
Tel Aviv, August 13 - Operational planners finalizing the details of Israel's impending offensive into one of the few remaining urban strongholds of Hamas acknowledged today that they face a significant challenge in the form of pundits, journalists, and commentators unaware that a difference exists between the city that gave its name to the 365-square-kilometer territory, and the territory itself.
Ministry of Defense and Israel Defense Force officials revealed several concerns in advance of operations to take control of Gaza City in the northern half of the Gaza Strip, prominent among them the ignorance of so-called experts regarding the layout, nomenclature, and geography of the Hamas-run territory.
"We're talking about people who don't realize there's a difference between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to begin with," observed a colonel, referring to two areas containing the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs, one to Israel's west and one to its east, that have no physical link.
Hamas and allied Islamist militias invaded southern Israel in October 2023 in an orgy of torture, murder, brutality, rape, kidnapping, vandalism, and theft, and still hold fifty hostages out of 250 taken that day. Israel has since conducted extensive operations in the air and both above and below ground to degrade Hamas's capacity to continue threatening Israel, either with its rocket arsenal or its threatened repeats of October 7th. Negotiations to end the fighting and secure the release of the remaining hostages have failed, as Hamas and its backers in Qatar refuse to relinquish the one piece of leverage they hold. Israel's cabinet determined last week that only military pressure will produce any concessions, or perhaps even rescue the hostages, only about twenty of whom are believed to still be alive.
To date, Israel has avoided seizing prolonged control of major population centers in the Gaza Strip, wary of the casualty toll for itself and the noncombatants in those locations. Part of that concern stems from international - and some local - media that reflexively parrot Hamas casualty and atrocity claims, despite continual, accumulating evidence that the Hamas-run and Hamas-allied sources for that information simply fabricate numbers and incidents to paint Israel as a perpetrator of war crimes. The compliant media, incapable of comprehending the difference between Gaza City and the Gaza Strip, let alone when the standalone term "Gaza" occurs, will create even bigger headaches in its reportage and commentary, and the IDF must account in its plans for that level of incompetence.
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