An Eye For an Eye

CROSSFIREARABIA – Israelis will not rest if the Palestinians don’t get their independent homeland and statehood to live free just as was the case before 1948 when Israel was forcibly created.

This present Israeli war on Gaza has shown that clearly.

While the Israeli war machine may have destroyed, nay, obliterated the whole of the enclave, the strip continues to be filled with resistance fighters who move above and below grounds with their weapons fighting their enemies.

Israel, its leaders, politicians and military, long propped up by American weapons have long known that but they continue to destroy rather than own up to Palestinian aspirations and the fact that the incessant conflict will not end otherwise.

In this war, slaughter, genocide – going into its second year now and shows no signs of stopping but on the contrary moving northwards to Lebanon – there developed a sense of equilibrium and proportionality although on a much smaller scale judging from the vast different of the protagonists.

Israel used massive bombs on civilians and sent them into a whirl of displacements, while Hamas continually fired rockets and missiles on the settlements and military bases surrounding Gaza and further beyond.

The immediate effect of that was the mass evacuation of the Israeli population from all these settlements, in effect as soon as the Israeli big guns started to ‘hammer’ the cities, town, villages and hamlets of northern Gaza soon after 7 October, 2023.

Displacement

Today, the Jewish settlements, more likely big towns and cities with high tech infrastructure stand empty; their populations have long been moved to hotels and guest houses by the extremist government of Benjamin Netanyahu, for their safety.

They still wait their return but there is no end in sight as to when will this happen. The late Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah, just before he was killed by Israel, said the occupation entity will not rest in peace, neither will the Jews return to their homes, until the bombs on Gaza stop.

Hezbollah had taken up the fight with Israel soon after 7 October as a support to Gaza through rocketing its northern parts with missiles. This process also set off a mass drove of Israelis to leave their homes, like their counterparts in the south, to be housed in a hotel accommodation away from the bombs and raging fires.

As the war genocide on Gaza continued in the following months, the return of these settler Israelis to their homes continued to be foggy, unknown. Many of these settlements and conurbations like Kiryat Shmona and Maalot today stand empty like ghost towns.

In Gaza around 2 million people out of a population of 2.2 million were forced into internal displacement, continually moving between areas from the north of Gaza to its southern border.

Likewise, the number of Israelis that were displaced was, initially estimated at 400,000 people with an extra 60,000 forced to leave when Hezbollah increased their missiles on the north after June 2024.

While they have been living in hotel accommodation many Israelis have been trying to get out of the country over the past months with the figures ranging from 500,000 up to a million.

Further to that about a quarter of Israelis polled by the Kan official channel, say they are truly thinking of leaving the country and 14 percent of them are supporters of Likud and the extremist rightwing parties. Indeed, soon after 7 October, the Ben Gurion Airport became filled with travelers as Hamas rockets started to land on Tel Aviv.

The airport is filled again today with travelers because of incoming missiles from Hezbollah from the north and the occasional ballistic missiles coming all the way from Yemen by the Houthis and/or the fright Israelis got from the recent incoming 200 missiles they saw in their skies from Iran.

There is no doubt that ordinary Israelis are under a lot of strain with sirens going off and on, all the time signaling for them, to go into the underground shelters. Video clips see them running asunder to the shelters, and who wouldn’t be scarred?

After all, the people of Gaza and now Lebanon are experiencing it all the time. For them however, there are no sirens, no warnings of 2000-pound bombs being dropped on their heads with no questions asked; their slaughter appear to be “manageable” foe western states who sell weapons to Israel.

The war can stop anytime. Hostages, around 110 from the original 250, can be returned anytime if there is a ceasefire but the Israeli prime minister is stuck on bringing them home by force, or so he says.

 Meanwhile Israelis are literally running. One videoclip in a Tel Aviv mall show people moving hastily to ahead, no doubt, to the underground shelters as the sirens blast all over.

Thus, there is a military equation that is being played out here: ‘You bomb us we will bomb you’. The Israeli army must realize that this is what is happening, and the stakes of the war game just keep getting higher and higher with Israel headed by Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, being lead to the abyss.  

CrossFireArabia

CrossFireArabia

Dr. Marwan Asmar holds a PhD from Leeds University and is a freelance writer specializing on the Middle East. He has worked as a journalist since the early 1990s in Jordan and the Gulf countries, and been widely published, including at Albawaba, Gulf News, Al Ghad, World Press Review and others.

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Trump’s Twist With The Houthis

By Dr Khairi Janbek

During his meeting with the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, US President Trump interrupted the proceedings and declared that the American bombing campaign against the Houthis has stopped. He said, they don’t want to fight us so we respect that.

Now, what does that translate to, is not really very clear. Does it mean that the Houthis will not attack US ships only, or will they cease their actions which threaten maritime movement in the Red Sea including Israeli ships? And will the fighting, for instance, end British bombardment and/or Israeli bombardment. I suppose it remains to be seen.

It is said by observers that the Trump decision was a surprise to the international community and even to some in his administration, though one would argue there are no more surprises with president Trump since his definition of the “America First” policy has come to mean either extracting himself out of the problems he makes as if nothing happened or alternatively stick his nose in already existing mess here and there, then extracting himself out of it without having either solved or achieved anything.

What went on and still goes on in the Red Sea area seems to be closely tied to the big red apple or the big prize, and that is the nuclear negotiations with Iran. Otherwise what would make the Houthis stop fighting, they have been bombed for such a long time without any tangible results?

On the one hand, one would assume that Iran is sending positive signals to the Americans by clearly restraining their proxies in Yemen, while at the same time the Saudis are urging both the Americans and the Iranians to reach an agreement over the issue, while in the mean time, in the background, Israel is lurking behind the scenes being restrained in the name of a successful nuclear agreement.

Indeed, the success of the nuclear agreement will mean that Iran can have a civilian nuclear program subject to periodic inspection, and that by itself, should bolden Saudi Arabia to have its own civilian nuclear program and enrich uranium on its own territory independent of the usual American demand that Saudia should sign first a peace agreement with Israel.

I suppose someone must give in, after all President Trump will be returning back from his coming trip to the Gulf with almost $3 trillion, and calling the Persian Gulf, the Arab Gulf in America; which would be just as meaningless as calling the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America.

As for Israel, well the Houthis declare clearly that their soul stand with Gaza will not refrain from bombing the Zionist state?

Now, to what extent can Mr Netanyahu, the prime minister, whom till now has managed to disguise his political survival in the garment of a regional strategy, will be allowed to upset the American plans, especially, first of all, in counter bombing the Houthis, or even emboldened enough to bomb Iran as the sponsors of the Houthis.

If Israel is to be kept out of the Gulf currently, it will work on exacting a price somewhere else.

Dr Khairi Janbek is a Jordanian writer based in Paris, France.

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The Gaza Death Trap

While everyone waits for the full-blast war on Gaza which Israel promises to continue, Tel Aviv must know this will not be an easy matter not least of all by the Benjamin Netanyahu government whose ministers are split over allowing the army to resume its “fighting” position in Gaza.

Not everyone holds the view of extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. He wants to resume, or continue, a large scale offensive on Gaza and reoccupy the enclave forever! For these opposing ministers as well as a large number of army soldiers and officers are not in favor of going back to fighting in Gaza because (a) of the bloody situation and danger soldiers were subjected to since 7 October, 2023, and because they want the rest of the remaining hostages – 59 and about 24 still thought to be alive – to be returned.

They fear – and reflecting major sections of society who have been demonstrating daily in Tel Aviv and other major Israeli cities under the of banner “bring them home,” – that increasing the wheels of war on Gaza would be signing the death warrants of the remaining hostages, originally marked at 250 and over 40 of them killed by indiscriminate Israeli bombing of the different areas of enclave over the past 17 months or so of fighting.

In the eyes of Smotrich, and he doesn’t mince his words, the return of the hostages is now secondary and what is crucial is to destroy Hamas and end its presence in the Gaza Strip.

But this is not happening. Since the resumption of the Israeli war on Gaza on 19 March, 2025 the resistance led by the Islamic organization and the other Palestinian factions have also resumed their fighting. While it is true, Hamas was slow in getting back to the war, preferring to give the ceasefire and peace talks a chance, and which led many to say the resistance are finished, this was far further from the truth.

Fighting again

Exactly one month later after 19 March, the Palestinian resistance led by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, re-started their fight against the Israeli army and the targeting of its soldiers; the Zionist army had maintained an active presence in the different areas of the Gaza Strip since the ceasefire took effect on 19 January, 2025 when the newly-elected US president was installed in the White House.

After much waiting and the gradual realization that Israel was no longer interested in the ceasefire nor in ongoing talks in Doha and Cairo, Hamas and Islamic Jihad reignited their war tactics on the Gaza battlefield. They realized Netanyahu, as prime minister of an extreme right-wing government, was no longer interested in maintaining a ceasefire.

Analysts maintained that Netanyahu was encouraged by Trump’s conflicting and dangerous stance on Gaza on top of which was the dramatic and subsequently abhorred idea of expelling the 2.1 million population of Gaza to build the Strip as the newly-plushed Middle East Riviera.

Although he quickly backed down due to Palestinian, Arab and even world pressure, Netanyahu interpreted this hugely-wrongful idea as greenlight to continue to hammer Gaza from the air and reimpose the starvation policy of its population.

Although the people got the backend of the Israeli willful mad firepower while shutting down the curtain on aid entering the 364-kilometer enclave, Hamas and the other Palestinian groups begun to regroup and re-started its military operations against the Israeli army in Biet Hanoon in the northern Gaza Strip to Gaza City in the center, Shujaiyia to the west, Khan Younis lower down and Refah, further south on the border with Egypt.

Like before, since 7 October, 2023, the resistance has now embarked on the increasing use of ambushes and booby-trap operations of luring Israeli soldiers and targeting Israeli tanks, armored vehicles and bulldozers while firing at them through locally-made, cheap but effective and deadly missiles that resulted in many of these soldiers being killed and badly-injured – numbers in the thousands – while many of the tanks and bulldozers either blown up and/or put out of action.

Towards the end of April onwards, this strategy was reactivated at full length and on different days sniping Israeli soldiers and targeting armoury would rise in multiple and different operations through the Gaza Strip. What is today of major worry to the Israeli army is that these geographical areas which were supposed to be “cleaned up” from Palestinian operatives are becoming active once again which means that for the Israeli army its back to square one.

The Israeli army had literally destroyed many of the major cities, towns, neighborhoods, villages of Gaza not once but many times. They entered places like Khan Younis, Jabalia, Shujaiyia, Nuseirat, Rafah and many more multiple times and declared them free from Palestinian resistance groups but these fighters just continue to emerge as seen recently and to the chagrin and frustration of the Israeli army.

Such frustration has led Israeli politicians like Netanyhu, and arch anti-Palestinian politicians like Itamar Ben-Gvir, Minister of National Security and hated by some Israelis for his extreme rightwing views to call for the re-occupation of Gaza, something that Netanyahu is actively contemplating. The prevailing view that once the army gets into Gaza once again, and on a mass scale, they can never leave! There are many in the army who have long rejected such an idea because they know of the “bloody situation” their soldiers would face.

However, the Israeli government and its army continues to operate under a set of illusions it is refusing to budge away from simply because Hamas and the Palestinian resistance presence is still operating in Gaza and in a robust mode to fight and kill Israeli soldiers and destroy their tanks and military hardware.

This is in addition to the fact the Israel and its army is getting nowhere near to freeing the rest of the hostages and who are likely to die if Israel embarks on a bigger war on Gaza and which Netanyahu and his extremist government are determined to do despite the warnings of the Israeli army which admits the rest of the hostages could die in any bigger military offensive.

Trump in region

Throughout this war there was always one external factor that played a permanent role in fuelling the Israeli genocide of Gaza and that was the United States through its provision of military support to Tel Aviv first under the Joe Biden administration and now under Trump.

If he could be persuaded to stop the supply of weapons to Israel, Netanyahu will finally stop the war on Gaza. Trump is on record, especially when he was running for the White House he would stop the war in Ukraine and Gaza. But will he? First of all, the Israeli lobby is entrenched in the US government.

However, there is one important factor that can pressure the Trump administration and that is the Arab countries. Trump is soon visiting Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. If enough pressure can be applied from these quarters then surely the US president can move on the Gaza issue and halt any plans that Netanyahu is concocting for the enclave.

The Trump visit is being made in mid-May and its already played as a “bilateral” tour between the United States and these states whilest focusing on investment. And this is where their influence can be made with investment, economics and politics moving on one pedestal.

So the ball at the present time is in the hands of the Arab Gulf countries!

This comment is written by Dr Marwan Asmar, chief editor of the crossfirearabia.com website. 

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