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February 02, 2007
Gaza Explodes
The Palestinans are having fun in Gaza terrorizing each other. Ibrahim Barzak, Canadian Press, Published: Friday, February 02, 2007I see this as democracy in action, where the rule is: be careful who you vote for. Your life may depend on it. In a symbol that the two sides had returned to open warfare, their respective radio stations stopped playing songs of national unity and broadcast songs about armed struggle and fighting the enemy.Man, this is way worse than the talk radio wars in America where we trust Arbitron to tell us who the winners and losers are. In Gaza, if your station is still on the air you haven't lost yet. On Friday morning, 50 officers from Abbas' presidential guard surrounded the Hamas-led Interior Ministry and exchanged fire with Hamas gunmen guarding the building. Outside of Gaza City, Hamas militants launched mortar shells at a Fatah training base in an attack that wounded 30 recruits, security officials said.It is now about 1 PM local time (GMT +2) so the day is not over yet. Mortars, heavy machine guns and RPGs. Whew. You really have to keep your head down in conditions like that. Late Thursday, hundreds of Fatah gunmen raided a Hamas stronghold, the Islamic University in Gaza City. Flames were seen leaping from two of the university buildings.Destroying an Islamic University? How irreligious. The violent Islamic Jihad called for an urgent meeting to resume truce talks. The mufti of Gaza called for a truce, saying Muslims shedding Muslim blood is "taboo."Evidently neither Hamas nor Fatah has much respect for religion. Truce talks? They have been doing those for months. Always with the same results. Agreements are reached and then fighting resumes. Whatever.
It is now about 3 PM local time in Gaza and the body count is up to eight. Another two hours until dark. Eight Palestinians were killed, including two children, in ferocios fighting Friday between Hamas and Fatah gunmen.The last round of fighting killed 50 or 60 people in five days. So I'd say they have restored the previous intensity. What you want to watch for is the number of deaths per day (or hour depending). The greater the death rate the more intense the fight. That is obvious. The more intense the fight the longer it goes on. Not so obvious. Various estimates can be made based on the size of the forces involved. The greater the numbers in a fight the longer it goes on. I don't have a metric yet for the proportions. What we can expect from the current rate is at least five days of fighting. Update: 03 Feb '07 0030z Reporst as of 19:30 02 Feb local time say 11 were killed today. A Hamas spokesman announced late Friday afternoon that a new Gaza cease-fire agreement has been reached following violent battles between Hamas and Fatah gunmen which left 11 dead over the course of the day.Other accounts have a higher number. Web posted at: 2/3/2007 2:53:11Yep this is going to go on for a while. If 17 is the true number let us estimate how long the fighting might last. If the equation for time of fighting is Casualty Rate (CR) times a Days of War constant (DW) to some exponential factor N then an equation for days of fighting might look like Days of Fighting (DF) = D*CRN. If N = 1.5 then for 10 casualties/day = 5 days of fighting - Dw would equal 0.158114. DF = DW1.5*CRN. If N = 2 then DW = 0.050000. If N = 2.5 then DW = 0.015811. So let us plug in some numbers and see what happens. With a casualty rate - CR - of 17 we can make some estimates. N = 1.5 DF = .158114 * (17)1.5 = 11.0 days (aprox) So if any of this makes any sense we could see 11 to 19 more days of fighting based on the latest casualties. BTW the above exercise is an example of what operations reserarch people do.
posted by Simon on 02.02.07 at 06:16 AM |
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