re: #230 jcm Yeah but jcm, really, how can you hope to even begin to “clean out Hamas” without doing a house by house search?
And even if you do, I’m pretty damn sure Israel doesn’t want to occupy Gaza and doesn’t want to station troops there on any kind of semi-permanent basis.
And, assuming that Venflon is correct about Hamas having mined all the roads (no doubt with those horrible tank killer mines Iran supplied to Hezbollah in ‘06) then what? I’ve never been there, but can Merkova tanks trundle across the desert there and avoid the roads? Without armor and close in air support (think Apache) house to house gets even bloodier and takes SO much longer.