u/Chanan-Ben-Zev

Article link here

A few thoughts, with excerpts from the article:

>The conditions that gave rise to the organization—occupation, dispossession, and humiliation at the hands of Israel—are as severe as ever. And in the Gaza Strip, there is no comprehensive alternative to Hamas’s governance. . . . In fact, Hamas is so weak it can no longer suppress armed challengers in its own territory. Today, five militias, each made up of a few dozen to a few hundred men, are fighting Hamas for control over Gaza, including the Popular Forces led by Ghassan al-Dahini and the so-called Strike Force Against Terror led by Hussam al-Astal. Hamas is also up against several armed families, such as the Dughmush and Shuhaiber clans in Gaza City and the al-Majayda clan in Khan Younis. These groups will not develop into a Hamas 2.0 because they lack relationships with Iran or Arab governments and are openly backed by Israel, which has provided them with weapons, money, and aerial support. . . . Perhaps the most damning evidence of Hamas’s collapse is that the once zealously defiant group is starting to surrender. In January 2026, it said that it would abolish its administrative bodies in Gaza, and by May, Hazem Qasem, a spokesman for the organization in Gaza, had stated that the Hamas-run government was “ready to hand over administration” to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, the technocratic body overseen by U.S. President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace. Some analysts view Hamas’s willingness to transfer authority as a tactical concession. But it is better understood as a distress signal.

That sounds like an Israeli victory over Hamas as an institution can only be achieved by Israel holding the line and letting the conditions in Gaza that will enable Hamas' overthrow to continue.

>In fact, it appears that many Gazans have started to give up on the idea of armed resistance overall. In September 2023, according to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 51 percent of Gazans thought that armed struggle was the best way to end Israeli occupation and build a Palestinian state. By October 2025 (the latest month for which polling data is available), that share had fallen to 34 percent. That hardly means Gazans want an Israeli occupation, a government led by the Palestinian Authority, or any other externally imposed governing body. But they do want electricity, safety, freedom of movement, jobs, education, and, above all, to stop burying their children—outcomes that Hamas cannot deliver.

Everyone who here claimed that Hamas as an ideology cannot be defeated militarily is officially BTFO. An ideology can only be defeated by (1) removing the group promoting it from power and (2) showing the people that said idology cannot deliver on its promises. According to this article, an Israeli military victory is achieving both.

>Even though Hamas is fiscally, militarily, and politically ruined, its leaders are unwilling to completely give in. Some seem to be hoping that they will eventually stage a comeback akin to what followed Hamas’s wars against Israel in 2008–9 and in 2014, when the group rebuilt its tunnel network and replenished its rocket arsenal. Other Hamas leaders cling to the group’s survival to simply keep their jobs and stay relevant. Almost all of them want to avoid answering for a war that killed over 73,000 Palestinians and displaced almost the entire population.

If Israel withdraws and ends the war before Hamas is actually defeated, then Hamas may be able to pull it together and resurge. This is especially likely if America also follows through with Trump's TACO capitulation to Iran and enables the IRGC to secure $300b in funding.

>That Hamas wants to portray itself as strong makes intuitive sense. More surprising is Israel, which is likewise carrying on as if Hamas is still formidable. Yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a good reason for maintaining this charade: he needs a threat to justify his aggressive approach to security, his refusal to engage with Palestinian statehood, and his alliance with the far right, especially ahead of Israeli elections in October. He has said that Israel will not allow Gaza to begin reconstruction until Hamas is demilitarized. And it appears that Israel intends to control the enclave indefinitely. According to an investigation by Al Jazeera, Israel now has 40 military outposts in Gaza—eight of which have been built from scratch since the October 2025 cease-fire. A force on its way out would have no need for such permanent structures. If Netanyahu acknowledged that Hamas was in fact a phantom, he would come under mounting global pressure to stop occupying Gaza without offering its people political rights.

Bibi insisting "that Israel will not allow Gaza to begin reconstruction until Hamas is demilitarized" is the correct strategic move for Israel. What is the alternative?

The article argues very convincingly that Hamas is on the way out specifically because of the current material conditions of Gaza under Israeli occupation and blockade (and indirectly because of the Iran war and its consequences to Hamas' supporters in Iran and Qatar). If that is true, it would be an incredible strategic misstep for Israel to end those material conditions before Hamas either formally accepts that it has lost and demilitarizes or is violently overthrown by a rival group willing to work with Israel. Doing so risks enabling Hamas to do as it promises to do: consolidate, rebuild, and resecure power.

This process of gradually forcing Hamas to accept that is has lost will undoubtedly take some time - the ceasefire was signed in October 2025 and Hamas is still stubbornly not demilitarized or removed. Some "phantom". Israel is constructing "40 military outposts in Gaza" to enable the IDF to remain in Gaza until that is completed. Israeli entrenchment is the logical, tactically sound reaponse to Hamas' refusal to admit defeat.

The author is incorrect to argue that these "permanent structures" for are part of a nefarious secret plan for Israel "occupying Gaza without offering its people political rights" "indefinitely". I understand the objection that many have to the neo-Kahanists in Israel's coalition and the genuine fear that the current Israeli government will use the Gaza war as an opportunity to undo the 2006 disengagement. I share those same concerns!

But Bibi's own statements on Gaza in August 2025 before the October 2025 ceasefire explicitly states that Israel will only withdraw once Hamas is disarmed and removed from power. Further, as the Board of Peace reported to the UNSC in May 2026 (direct link to PBS news article about Mladenov's report here), Israel is required to withdraw from Gaza pursuant to the ceasefire and Trump's "20 Point Plan" only once Hamas has disarmed, and that Israeli withdrawal has stalled because Hamas' disarmament has not occurred.

>For Netanyahu, this cynicism is nothing new. His entire political career has been built on managing the Palestinian question, not resolving it, and he has been happy to indirectly partner with Hamas to do so. In the years leading up to October 7, Netanyahu encouraged Qatar to fund Hamas in order to keep the leaders of the West Bank and Gaza divided and thus less capable of negotiating on Palestinians’ behalf. The logic that produced the policy remains essentially the same: whereas Netanyahu once needed a strong Hamas to prevent a peace process, he now needs only its specter.

This is completely backwards.

Bibi's policy of permitting Hamas to exist and receive funding from Qatar was intended to "buy quiet" in the hope that Hamas would eventually normalize; and, because a ground invasion to remove Hamas was seen as politically impossible due to the anticipated international objections and the domestic costs measured in both money and soldiers' lives.

(See this 2023 NYT article and 2024 Washington Institute historian Martin Kramer thinkpiece; I also highly recommend listening to this podcast by Israeli reporter Haviv Rettig Gur summarizing the past 30 years of this history).

Moreover, the international community has for years advocated for Israel to permit Qatar's payments to Hamas, as the payments have been consistently framed as necessary to prevent humanitarian catastrophy in Gaza. The payments began after Hamas kicked out the Fatah-led PA and the PA decided to stop authorizing payment of civil salaries and aid transfers, as part of Fatah's long-term civil war against Hamas. It has been, quite literally, ongoing for as long as Hamas as ruled Gaza.

(See e.x. these 2018 articles from CNN and Reuters, and these 2016 articles from Reuters and Times of Israel, and this 2012 article from NYT. See also this 2013 Al Monitor article which notes that Qatar has been funneling money to Hamas since 2008, shortly after Hamas violently seized control over Gaza from the PA.)

At my table, the Fey and other First World related entities are flavored like the Faerie Others in Pact by J.C. McCrae / Wildbow: they don't eat or drink or sleep or breathe, but they live forever so long as they are entertained; boredom being literally fatal, their cruel tricks are done without malice and their boons given without love, since all they want is more drama.

I'm struggling a little on encounter ideas that are more than just "the fey are monsters." All my best ideas lean more towards horror and terror. My ideas so far, some of which my players have already gone through:

• A melixie spiking a giant beehive's honey supply with hallucinogens and laughing as the queen sickens and a local Awakened Bear Summoner, who tends to the hive, slowly goes insane and starts killing people as he becomes addicted to the honey? Fantastic!
• A toothfairy swarm attacking a pack of lycanthropes that have just taken down a unicorn, so they can take its horn and draw pictures in its blood, all to deprive the pack of food to promote infighting and drama? Horrifying!
• A group of angry dryads summon a Fire-and-Wood Kineticist Automaton Revenant to go all Freddy Kreuger on a logging town in revenge for their clear-cutting a portion of the forest? Yes!
• An archfey playing 5D political chess by radicalizing a young druid into violent anti-agriculture "return to naked monke" primitivism, so the youth starts a terrorist cell in his druidic circle just to piss off a different archfey who has a relationship with that same druidic circle? Absolutely!

But I'm missing any story beats where my table sees beneficial or benevolent Faerie. I want to really hammer home the blue-and-orange morality of the Fey and prevent my campaign from being derailed by an anti-Fey crusade. The best I have is "town is under a faerie spell that the townsfolk actually like, because they never sicken and their harvests are always good so long as they publicly air lots of telenovela-level interpersonal drama for the Fey that live among them in disguise to enjoy."

Can you help me with faerie-related encounter ideas that show the benevolent side of Fey drama-seeking behavior? I'll take anything, really.

(My table is traveling west through the deep interior woods of a homebrew magitech-steampunk North America on their way to the Wild West, level 4: a Dwarf Inventor with a heart of gold, a Ratfolk Alchemist snake-oil salesrat, an Elf Dromaar Starlit Span Magus / Starlit Sentinel looking for her lost family, and a Human Rogue Archaeologist on a hunt for ancient knowledge.)

Title. I think it would be pretty cool to have this as a Versatile Heritage. My speculative mock-up:

> You are a Hologram, a self-aware Hardlight projection made to resemble a humanoid or non-human ancestry, which has through some means been imbued with a soul. You gain the Hardlight trait, in addition to the trait associated with the ancestry you resemble. You gain low-light vision, or you gain darkvision if your ancestry already has low-light vision. You always have Basic Environmental Protections.

> Tethered Soul: your soul and memories, your very self, is located in your Mobile Projector. It is a delicage device (Tiny, 1 bulk, Tech) containing a power source, the computing hardware hosting your memory and your soul, and the many lenses & machinery necessary to project your Hardlight form into the world. Your Hardlight form and your Mobile Projector share the same pool of Hit Points. Your Mobile Projector has your AC, uses your Saves, and is considered part of your body in all respects. If your Hardlight form and Mobile Projector are both subject to the same effect that affects your Hit Points, you apply those effects only once (applying the greater effect, if applicable). You can place your Mobile Projector down, but cannot move your Hardlight form more than 100 feet from it and cannot be out of its Line of Effect. Due to its Tiny size, most Holograms choose to wear their Mobile Projectors by incorporating it into their clothes in some way. And, you can use the following actions:

>>Discorporate (3 actions): you release your Hardlight form and retreat your consciousness back into your Mobile Projector. While Discorporated, you are Blinded, Deafened, and Paralyzed, and are no longer considered to be wearing or holding any items.

>>Embody (3 actions): you project your image out of your Mobile Projector into the word. Your Hardlight form appears in the same square as your Mobile Projector. You can choose to be wearing it or to appear next to it.

> Holograms don’t need to eat, drink, or breathe, but they do need 4 hours of rest every day. Most Holograms choose to Discorporate and retreat into their Mobile Projector during this time.

> If you are reduced to 0 hit points, are pushed out of range of your Mobile Projector, or are removed from its Line of Effect, you are forcefully Discorporated.

Thesis: Malacath and Boethia are neighbor-twins just like Stendarr and Zenithar. All four are really mirrored reflections of one another.

We learn the concept of divine "neighboring" from Shor son of Shor, an obscure text describing the conflict between the two groups of et'Ada as they led opposing camps of Ehlnofey during the Dawn.

(YMMV as the text is from a forum post by one of the original lorewriters of Morrowind. I don't think that text has ever actually been present in any TES game.)

Note that Shor son of Shor was written from a Nordic perspective so the names of these spirits are different from the names most commonly used for the Divines and Aedra. Shor is Lorkhan. Ald is Auri-El, who is more-or-less also Akatosh.

We see that the greater spirits of the Mundus exhibited recursion and parallelism during the Untime of Dawn along the two fundamental axes of Time (represented by Shor/Lorkhan) and Space (represented by Ald/Auri-El/Lorkhan). We see this vertically down through Time with "Shor son of Shor" and "Shor father of Shor", and we see this horizontally across Space along the Shor/Ald split - see the parallels between "Shor son of Shor" and "Ald son of Ald":

>The Moot looked to the tribe of Ald son of Ald but he would break no oath of the Pact, saying “Shor has paid ransom now three times for the the sins we accused him of, and by that we will hold him as dead and shake not our spears against him or his kin. Of the below he speaks, he is confused by it, for under us is only a prologue, and under that still is only a scribe that hasn’t written anything yet. Shor as always forgets the above, and condemns himself and any other who would believe him into this cycle.” Ald’s shield thane Trinimac shook his head at this, for he was akin to Tsun and did not care much for logic-talk as much as he did only for his own standing. He told his chieftain that these words had been said before and Ald only sighed and said, “Yes, and always they will be ignored. As for the war you crave, bold Trinimac, and all of you assembled, do not worry. A spear will be thrown into this soon, from Shor’s own tribe, and the House of We will be allowed our vengeance.

>Shor found the alcove at the core of the world and spoke to his dead father. He said a prayer to remove any trickery of mirrors and the ghost of Shor father of Shor appeared, saying “Ald and the others have paid time and again for the the sins we accused them of, and by that you should hold them as dead and shake not the spears of your tribe against any of their kind again. Of the above he speaks, Ald is confused by it, for above us is only an ending, and above that still is only a scribe that hasn’t written anything yet. Ald as always forgets the ground below him, and condemns himself and any other who would believe him into this cycle.” But Shor shook his head at this, for he was akin to Ald and did not care much for logic-talk as much as he did only for his own standing. He told his father that these words had been said before and Shor only sighed and said, “Yes, and always they will be ignored. As for the counsel you crave, bold son, and in spite of all your other fathers here with me, that you create every time you spit out your doom, do not worry. You have again beat the drum of war, and perhaps this time you will win.” Shor son of Shor returned then to us on the mountaintop.

But we also see within the respective camps, as evidenced by Shor's shield-thanes Tsun and Stuhn:

>Tsun took her by the hair, for he was angered by her words and heavy with lust. He was a berserker despite his high station, and love followed battle to his kind. “You weren’t made for that kind of thinking,” Stuhn said, dragging Dibella towards a whaleskin tent, “Jhunal was. And no one should be speaking to him now.” Tsun eyed the Clever Man who had heard him. “Logic is dangerous in these days, in this place. To live in Skyrim is to change your mind ten times a day lest it freeze to death. And we can have none of that now.

>Kyne could have stopped all of this but did nothing but stare at the crowd of Nords around her. Stuhn and Tsun were shifting and it was still uncouth to prevent this kind of neighboring.

Tsun and Stuhn are Stendarr and Zenithar, Divines in the pantheon of Man, the descendants-cum-inheritors of Shor/Lorkhan's camp. But we also see a third party "neighbor" these twins: Trinimac. He is the Merethic parallel to Tsun, the shield thane of Ald, who is depicted as parallel to Tsun with wording identical to the parallel between Shor and Ald:

>Ald’s shield thane Trinimac shook his head at this, for he was akin to Tsun and did not care much for logic-talk as much as he did only for his own standing.

Trinimac also shifts with Tsun just as Stuhn does:

>He didn’t need to explain what he had learned, for we had been there with him. Trinimac left Dibella in his tent as we assembled, and he had not touched her, frozen in the manner of the Nords when we are unsure of our true place, and asked his brother to rearm him. Stuhn was confused for a moment, thinking this an odd shift ...

We also see a continuing inverse relationship between Zenithar and Malacath in the ESO quest "Z'en and Mauloch":

>>"Dalaneth told stories of these journals, and now you bring them to me. Hm. Since the earliest days, blood and toil have known no end in our hearts. Mauloch demands a blood price. Z'en's price is no different."

>Why do you say that?

>>"Our gods both demand payment in kind. Of course, that means each demands retribution against the other. In the valley, it has always been paid in blood."

>Do you think you'll ever stop fighting?

>>"Every tale has an end. Every end allows a beginning to set hold. It is a glance, tenuous though it seems to be. Z'en's presence fades from this world as Mauloch grows stronger. Perhaps these journals will give comfort to those who fear the end."

And yet, unlike Tsun and Stuhn (Stendarr and Zenithar), there is only one Trinimac in Ald's camp.

Or is there?

Historically most of the lorebooks agreed that the Aedric champion Trinimac, the god who cut out Lorkhan's heart atop Adamantine Tower at Convention on Auri-El's orders, was publicly mocked or impersonated and somehow consumed by Boethia, who metaphysically tortured and apparently "shat" him out as Malacath. See The Changed Ones, The Fall of Trinimac, and The True Nature of Orcs (which was banned by the Daggerfall Covenant as anti-Orc propaganda during the events of ESO).

But there are two other versions of this story.

In Mauloch, Orc-Father, Malacath was Trinimac and Boethia an imposter; Trinimac the Aedra ttransformed himself into a Daedra by "tearing the shame from his spirit."

And in From Exile to Exodus, Boethia was Trinimac and Malacath an imposter; Trinimac the Aedra transformed herself into a Daedra by "the burden of rending divinity from the one she loved."

I am reminded of Sermon 11

>The ruling king is armored head to toe in brilliant flame. He is redeemed by each act he undertakes. His death is only a diagram back to the waking world. He sleeps the second way. The Sharmat is his double, and therefore you wonder if you rule nothing. Hortator and Sharmat, one and one, eleven, an inelegant number. Which of the ones is the more important? Could you ever tell if they switched places? I can and that is why you will need me.

We see in the broad thrust of TES metaphysics a fractal and interweaving progression from One to Many. The Dreamer becomes Anu and Padomay, who fight over Nirni. These two individuals give rise to Ald son of Ald and Shor son of Shor and their respective clans - but Shor is a parallel of Ald and Ald of Shor. They lead the wandering Ehlnofey and the old (Ald) Ehlnofey. Auri-El is the son of Ald and Ald's shield thane (and Auri-El's right hand) is Trinimac; Lorkhan is the son of Shor and Shor's shield thanes are Stuhn/Stendarr and Tsun/Zenithar; they are parallels to one another. So Trinimac loves Auri-El and sunders Lorkhan by tearing out his heart; and Trinimac is exposed as a hypocrite who believes that weeping "tears were the best response to the Sundering" and tears out his shame from his own chest.

Trinimac hates Lorkhan and Trinimac loves Lorkhan. Malacath and Boethia. And Lorkhan lead the Aedra, including Auri-El, to become entrapped in the Mundus and was slain by Auri-El for it; Stendarr and Zenithar - Divines - are within the Mundus but Boethia and Malacath - Daedra - are not.

There's a balance, here, I think.