@Carwil The shift in Israeli deaths is the explanation. There's some public willingness to go to light bombing campaigns in response to a few tens of deaths from rockets; there's much more of it in response to 1,100 Israeli civilian casualties, including the two largest massacres of civilians committed by any side in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (the rave and Be'eri), for which Hamas is unrepentant. Hence the desire to reoccupy Gaza.
@Alon Without disputing the grieviously vicious nature of the Rave and Kibbutz massacres, the 1956 Khan Yunis massacre is somewhere in the three worst single episodes of violence list. And possibly the 1948 Lydda massacre as well.
The tendency for these events to have a cloud of dispute over them reflects so much on the ability of the conflict to subsume knowledge production itself.
@Alon
As in the US wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, the nature of the war doesn't owe so much to public enthusiasm as to official planners' vision and strategy.
The fact that the Gaza invasion is proving much deadlier to civilians than the Iraq war (even w/o adjusting for Gaza's much smaller population) strongly suggests that damage is part of the plan. https://twitter.com/iraqbodycount/status/1719417486133678413
@Carwil The IDF conduct in the war is "the usual but more." So it still warns people in a building before leveling it. This is why the death toll relative to the amount of ordnance dropped is so low - the IDF is destroying infrastructure (with the expectation that it will be rebuilt with Gulf or European money as always). The current tactic of trying to sever Gaza in half isn't what it would do if it wanted to expel people the way Gila Gamliel proposed. The strategy is more ??? than anything.
The IDF's structure of conscription + reserves means it fights short wars at very fast operational tempo. As a corollary of this, when IDF leaders say "it's likely to be a long war," what they actually mean is "we're not going to achieve the strategic objective of toppling Hamas."
IBC is an incredibly low-count system - it requires confirmation in two media sources, in an environment where nobody made an effort to count the dead.
@Carwil To expand on 1 a bit more: this structure of the IDF is not well-known outside Israel, but IDF leaders are saying "it's likely to be a long war" in Hebrew, to an Israeli audience; Israeli hasbara in English is different and focuses on humanizing the massacre victims and on the #HamasIsISIS hashtag campaign. The audience for that IDF statement has public appetite for a ground offensive with high IDF casualties now but is not willing to maintain this level of militarization for very long.
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