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I agree Israel ought to be able to prevent similar ground invasions, but what about rockets?

The Iron Dome has been relatively effective so far, but the technological gap won't last forever. Hamas has already acquired rockets like the Fajr-5, despite the blockade. Once they start using guidance systems, the destruction will be much greater, and 90% interception rate won't be good enough.

Even if Israel could limit the damage in the long term, it doesn't seem politically viable to just tolerate repeated attacks with no response. So I think it's inevitable that Israel will have to remove Hamas from power, no matter the geopolitical cost.

How would guidance systems increase the destruction? If anything, history has shown that precision weapons tend to reduce civilian casualties - there isn't much of a point building a single precision guided missile, instead of 100 imprecise dumb rockets, when your goal is terror bombing (the calculus is slightly different for bombs, however).

> Even if Israel could limit the damage in the long term, it doesn't seem politically viable to just tolerate repeated attacks with no response. So I think it's inevitable that Israel will have to remove Hamas from power, no matter the geopolitical cost.

This is an odd gripe. Israel is perpetrating repeated attacks in the West Bank, every single day, and the Palestinian Authority as well as the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank have been tolerating repeated attacks for decades now. In fact, it is perfectly possible to tolerate repeated attacks with limited response, and there are many examples of countries tolerating low-impact attacks for a very long time with little response.

Preventing Hamas or a Hamas-like group from existing is not possible as a matter of reality, not as a matter of geopolitical cost. Israel already tried the whole occupation thing, and it only meant more attacks. The only way to remove Hamas from power, without them being replaced by not-Hamas-in-name-only, is to convince Gazans, for a second time, that peaceful coexistence is possible, and to actually give it a shot this time.

> the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank have been tolerating repeated attacks for decades now

I’m fairly certain it’s more an inability to respond in any effective way.

Hamas doesn't have an ability to respond in an effective way either, yet here we are. If anything, it's far easier to get supplies and engage in terrorism in the West Bank than it is in Gaza.

> precision weapons tend to reduce civilian casualties

Yes, but normally the user is targeting military assets and trying to minimize collateral damage. I think it's clear that Hamas has the opposite goal, since they typically lob unguided rockets in the general direction of population centers.

If all you have are unguided rockets, you're going to point them wherever they're most likely to hit something. If/when you have guidance systems, you can afford to be selective and concentrate on high value targets. That's how it goes in asymmetric warfare.

Given Hamas' explicit genocidal goals, I think we can expect some portion of their strikes will simply aim to maximize Jewish deaths, even as others may target specific military assets.

See for example Russia's recent Hroza strike (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hroza_missile_attack), which killed 59 at a memorial service. Hamas can't really do strikes like that today; they would just miss with overwhelming probability. I think that will change soon if they remain in power.

The Iskander missile has a 1500lb warhead. Compare the number of deaths it causes to the number of deaths a single unguided Israeli bomb causes in Gaza when it hits a populated building, and you will soon realize that the guidance is not the determining factor here, it's just the mass of explosives.

24000 bombs dropped and hamas says 20000 dead. That's less than 1 bomb per death.

Because people left. Of course, if you bomb an empty building few will die. We're not looking at averages here, we're looking at single incidents that caused many deaths.

>high value targets

Such as places with a lot of civilians yes

No. In asymmetric warfare civilians are targeted partly for animus but mostly because of accessibility. Poorer security places extra pressure on the enemy government which makes it easier to destabilize over time, in theory. In the case of unguided missiles it's natural to point them at wherever the infrastructure is dense.

If you have the resources to be selective, it's much more attractive to hit specific targets like military facilities or political figures/institutions. Terrorist attacks are more often perpetrated against civilians nowadays because political/military targets are so hardened that assassinations are difficult.

That makes no sense. If all you had were unguided rockets, where else could you possibly aim them? There is no other target where they would have any effect at all, because all high value targets are too small to be hit a +/- 500m weapon.

If your goal was just to hit a population center, I fail to understand the point of guided rockets. Seems much more effective to just make more dumb rockets. Even compared to targets like hospitals, you'd still do more damage with more dumb rockets, especially due to saturation.

I disagree that dumb rockets are more effective. Hamas, PIJ, etc. have only managed to kill 28 after launching something like 20k dumb rockets. There are many examples of modern precision weapons causing more deaths with a single strike.

That is mostly because the rockets are small and largely intercepted. The examples you have of modern weapons causing mass casualty events are of weapons with warheads 50+ times the size of those in a Hamas rocket, and there's plenty of examples of comparable unguided weapons causing similar casualties numbers when fired at cities.

Also, you need compare the deaths with the number of rockets that aren't intercepted to get a baseline of effect.

ChatGPT estimates around the total warhead sizes of rockets from Gaza to Israel at around 200,000 kg. Maybe that's off but let's say 100,000 kg, and say 10,000 kg of that wasn't intercepted. Still seems like significantly more than the 500~700 kg warhead which killed 59 in Hroza, for example.

Looking at this another way, if Hamas could target things like nightclubs, wouldn't those have something like 50x the population density of the general area?

> there's plenty of examples of comparable unguided weapons causing similar casualties numbers when fired at cities

Even when fired from distances on the order of 70km (the distance from Gaza to Tel Aviv)? Aircraft using dumb bombs tend to get a lot closer to their targets.

> Ultimately Israelis don't have to suffer serious attacks from Hamas. Hamas doesn't have that power, militarily - only gross incompetence from the IDF allows that kind of attack.

While there were gigantic failures that no one denies, possibly to the level of gross incompetence, Israel is also fighting against a real enemy, not some cartoon. Hamas is also smart, is increasingly well-armed, and can wait many years until the next attack. It's not clear that Israel can defend against every conceivable attack that Hamas can mount, and staying completely vigilant all the time is very costly economically, too. (I'll note that Hamas puts a lot of money and labor into these attacks, but they are pretty freely stealing from their people; the Israeli government can't do the same.)

It's true that, on its own, Hamas can't actually conquer Israel. But it can clearly carry out massive attacks that kill thousands and completely upend all life in Israel, and it's possible that they can keep doing this every couple of years.

> So Israel desperately needs to make amends with its Arab neighbors, and it can stop any real attack from Hamas. That makes the situation pretty different and assymetrical.

Actually, Israel is on relatively good terms with all its Arab neighbors (relative to the past), and was on the verge of formalizing those good relations with Saudi Arabia. That's one of the reasons for this Hamas attack - to try and stop the Israeli-Arab peace process, because they feel (very likely correctly) that it leaves the Palestinians in a worse situation.

> It also bears note that, if you judge Gaza as a country, it would not be able to cause any act of agression, as the Israeli blockade alone constitutes an act of war and a casus belli.

Well, they did elect Hamas and fairly quickly start to shoot rockets at Israel. And by that token they are also at war with Egypt.

Gaza isn't a fully independent country, obviously, but it's also not under full military occupation like it was before. People insisting on one or the other usually have a point that it helps them prove, but reality is more complicated.

I do believe that it is directionally true that Gazans could've made far more of their situation once Israel withdrew, and Hamas has basically squandered that opportunity by turning to violence.

>in the not so distant future, the US won't be able to intercept all the missiles of Israel's enemies on its behalf, and Israel will have to contend with the threat of a total blockade.

The US + Israel + allies can/will absolutely level these countries if necessary. Both history and current events demonstrate that. Do you really think they are at the mercy of what Yemen does?

Life is not a video game. The US and Saudi Arabia already spent 7 years trying to level Yemen to stop them from firing cruise missiles everywhere in the region, and failed. The US didn't managed to stop Iraq from launching ballistic missiles until over a year after the decision to invade was made, and now look at Iraq right now, various militias are still firing missiles at US military bases and getting away with it.

Yemen is just a proxy of Iran, ultimately, and the US has already lost multiple proxy wars against Iran. Invading Iran itself is not a workable proposition, either.