The Biden administration is urging Israel to rethink its plans for a major ground offensive in the Gaza Strip and instead to opt for a more “surgical” operation using aircraft and special operations forces carrying out precise, targeted raids on high-value Hamas targets and infrastructure, according to five U.S. officials familiar with the discussions.

Administration officials have become highly concerned about the potential repercussions of a full ground assault, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters, and they increasingly doubt that it would achieve Israel’s stated goal of eliminating Hamas. They also are concerned that it could derail negotiations to release nearly 200 hostages, particularly as diplomats think they have made “significant” advances in recent days to free a number of them, potentially including some Americans, one of the officials said.

The Biden administration also is worried that a ground invasion could result in numerous casualties among Palestinian civilians as well as Israeli soldiers, potentially triggering a dramatic escalation of hostilities in the region, the officials said. U.S. officials think a targeted operation would be more conducive to hostage negotiations, less likely to interrupt humanitarian aid deliveries, less deadly for people on both sides and less likely to provoke a wider war in the region, the officials said.

After weeks of declining to back growing international calls for “humanitarian pauses” in Israeli airstrikes to allow a steady flow of aid to enter Gaza, permit American and foreign citizens to exit into Egypt and facilitate the release of hostages, the Biden administration is now fully in favor of them and is pressing Israel to agree.

The abrupt policy shift comes as the humanitarian situation inside the enclave has become more dire and much of the world has declined to follow the U.S. lead in withholding public criticism of how Israel is conducting its war against Hamas.

David Satterfield, President Biden’s special envoy to the humanitarian situation in Gaza, has been in Israel this week seeking progress on both aid and egress to Egypt. But according to U.S., United Nations, Egyptian and Israeli officials, many of whom spoke only on the condition of anonymity amid a welter of finger-pointing among those involved, no substantive progress has been made.

The article has a soft paywall. Just put in an e-mail address to get access.

Here's a relevant excerpt:

Journalist Jacky Levi and his partner, whose five family members were abducted to Gaza, said last night in an interview that Netanyahu tried to create a divide between the families. "There's a deliberate intention here, we are sure of that, no one knew him," Levi said of one of the four family members who unexpectedly joined the meeting. "We're looking into who he is and who he represents, because it cannot be that he just showed up out of nowhere to a meeting with the prime minister."

Tzvika Mor, whose son Eitan has been missing since the attack, said on Monday in an interview with Kol Barama Radio Station that he was the one who participated in the meeting. "I want to debunk the lie that we arrived out of nowhere, it's a lie."

"No one can just opportunely come in and meet the Prime Minister. We represent four families whose loved ones were abducted, and we wanted to convey a national message to Netanyahu. We need to stop this whiny behavior. We need to win the war. In a time of war the people of Israel have to make sacrifices, even when our children are there, and prevail," Mor added.

So basically, a Netanyahu lackey who has a child missing, comes "uninvited" into a prearranged meeting with families of hostages drawn from an organization set up by these families, gasses up Netanyahu, and argues against hostage negotiations and calls for the families to prepare to sacrifice their family members taken hostage.

Hi all,

One of the things that bugged me the most about Reddit was how people never used it to organize at scale large enough to make a difference (other than to protest Victoria Taylor's firing and the demise of the third party apps), and by the time I thought to make subreddits designed to do it, Reddit was too huge and I had no real hope of making any sort of traction. I feel like lemmy.world is at the right stage where something like this can take off, but I have no idea what I'm doing. How do I go about getting mods? What sort of guidelines and tutorials are there to making, respectfully advertising the community around Lemmy, and moderating and guiding one's community into a thriving one? How do I make sure I know what good etiquette is and that I'm following it?

I made two different communities: !movement@lemmy.world and !organize@lemmy.world. I figure you gather people at let's start a movement and then move over to Organize! to organize action.

The spiel for !movement community is:

Come here to gather like minded individuals to ignite a movement. If you already have a movement in mind, post it and let’s go!

If you don’t have a particular movement in mind, you should still join this community if you want to be alerted to somebody organizing a movement on something you might end up being passionate about. Don’t you get tired of feeling like you’re all alone in wanting to make a change in the world? This is the place to alleviate that. Let’s figure out what we can team up together on and accomplish!

Once you’ve gathered people and started a movement, you can head over to our sister organization !organize@lemmy.world to organize and coordinate action to accomplish your goals.

Here is the spiel to the !organize community is:

The place to organize together on the internet.

Do you want to team up with a group of people and organize some sort of action? Get it started here!

Examples:

Organize to clean up a local or national or international spot.

Organize to create the next NAACP.

Organize to canvas for a referendum you are in favor of.

Organize a protest in coordination with the community over in !protest@lemmy.world

This is the place to work with your community to discuss and organize action. You can gather people over on our sister community !movement@lemmy.world and bring them over here to strategize organize the movement into action!

So I made https://lemmy.world/c/movement and https://lemmy.world/c/organize

I figure people can gather like minded individuals on https://lemmy.world/c/movement and then discuss and organize a ground game on https://lemmy.world/c/organize

Do you all have any tips on what sort of rules I need to set up, where to get help leading and modding the communities, and how I can go about respectfully advertise the communities?

An example of a movement that would be great to start and organize, led by people from Lemmy who know what they're doing like lawyers andfor people who know browser and web technology really well, is filing well thought out antitrust complaints as members of the Lemmy community about Google's forceful implementation of ManifestV3 and how it would disadvantage users of other browsers and reduce their market share and people's options. I made a post about it on c/technology: https://lemmy.world/post/2060683

So as I understand it, Google’s using it’s monopoly market position to force web “standards” unilaterally (without an independent/conglomerate web specification standards where Google is only one of many voices) that will disadvantage its competitors and force people to leave its competitors.

I'm not a lawyer, and I'm a fledgling tech guy, but this sounds like abuse of a monopoly. Google which serves 75% of the world's ads and has 75% of the browser market share seems to want to use its market power to annihilate people's privacy and control over their web experience.

So we can file a complaint with FTC led by Lina Khan who has been the biggest warrior against abuse by big tech in the US.

https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation

We can also file a complaint with the DOJ:

https://www.justice.gov/atr/citizen-complaint-center

And there have to be EU, UK, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese organizations that we can file antitrust complaints to.