Billions and Billions: Israel’s Most Expensive War!
Hard-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich:
This is the most expensive war in Israel’s history, so far costing about 250 billion shekels. This will not end there.”
Hard-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich:
This is the most expensive war in Israel’s history, so far costing about 250 billion shekels. This will not end there.”
Today, Tuesday, there are media reports of dozens of Palestinian bodies lying in the streets of Jabalia refugee camp, with civil defense unable to reach them due to the Israeli forces besieging the area.
Israeli forces have entered Jabalia four days ago with the aim of forcing its residents to move to Al Mawasi and clear the area in a bid to start implementing the Generals’ Plan of evacuating the population of north Gaza in preparation of declaring it a security zone.
However, they are reports like as in previous incursions of the town and its camp the Israeli army is having a tough time with reports of at least one soldier being killed and a tank blown up from the Palestinian resistance groups who have regrouped in north Gaza.
The Israeli army had already reduced Jabalia into a pile of rubble and debris in early June, 2024, yet they couldn’t get rid of the stiff resistance there. In the first six days when Israeli soldiers started to enter Jabalia and the areas of northern Gaza that included Biet Lahia, Biet Hanoon and Al Zaitoun in Gaza City, the Israeli army reported it lost 95 soldiers between those killed and injured and with tanks, armed carriers and few bulldozers put out of action. The cost of one bulldozer is earmarked at $1 million.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has warned Israel “not to test” Tehran’s resolve amid reports of possible military strikes in response to the barrage of missiles Iran launched last week in retaliation to Israel’s assassinations of senior Hezbollah, Hamas and Iranian officials.
“Our missiles can reach all their targets. We will respond to any attack on our institutions or infrastructure,” Araghchi said during a conference discussing the impact of Hamas’s October 7 operation on Israel on the first anniversary according to the Quds News Network.
“We recommend the Zionist regime not to test the resolve of the Islamic Republic. If any attack against our country takes place, our response will be more powerful,” Araghchi said.
He added Iran will continue to support the Palestinian cause to establish their own state. Addressing the Israeli strike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Araghchi said the “resistance” to Israel is not based on a person.
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.
The Gaza Health Ministry announced, Sunday the Israeli occupation army killed 146 doctors of different specialties in its one-year of genocide in the Gaza Strip, Anadolu news agency reported.
In a statement, the ministry highlighted that in the past year the health system has been devastated whilst stressing most medical supplies and medications have been exhausted.
It emphasized that 83% of medical supplies and 60% of medications are unavailable in hospitals and health centers.
The ministry revealed there are 25,000 patients and injured Palestinians who require medical attention outside Gaza.
Targeting Medical Staff
In a report cited by the Quds News Network published 17 September, the Health Ministry said Israeli occupation forces killed 1,151 Palestinian health workers since 7 October, 2023.
A total of 986 were named in the new report, while personal data for the remaining 165 was still being verified.
The ministry said the delay in the verification process was due to Israeli authorities withholding the victims’ bodies or their remains being buried under rubble.
At least 165 of those killed were doctors, 260 nurses, 300 management and support personnel, 184 health associate professionals, 76 pharmacists, and 12 other health workers.
“The Palestinian sector has been subjected to a systematic attack by the occupation forces that has affected all its components,” the ministry noted.
Health facilities were the target of direct and repeated Israeli raids and air strikes, it added, which has crippled the health system and left hundreds of thousands of war victims facing “imminent death”.
More than 300 health workers have also been arrested by Israeli forces.
Flouting a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire, Israel has faced international condemnation amid its continued brutal offensive on Gaza.
Currently on trial before the International Court of Justice for genocide against Palestinians, Israel has been waging a devastating war on Gaza since October 7.
According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 41,870 Palestinians have been killed, and 97,166 wounded in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza starting on October 7, 2023.
Moreover, at least 11,000 people are unaccounted for, presumed dead under the rubble of their homes throughout the Strip.
Israel says that 1,200 soldiers and civilians were killed during the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7. Israeli media published reports suggesting that many Israelis were killed on that day by ‘friendly fire’.
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/live-blog-one-year-of-genocide-massacres-in-central-gaza-rocket-barrages-towards-israel-day-367/embed/#?secret=xh5pqP3eY2#?secret=MkAHUcDdzk Palestinian and international organizations say that the majority of those killed and wounded are women and children.
The Israeli war has resulted in an acute famine, mostly in northern Gaza, resulting in the death of many Palestinians, mostly children.
The Israeli aggression has also resulted in the forceful displacement of nearly two million people from all over the Gaza Strip, with the vast majority of the displaced forced into the densely crowded southern city of Rafah near the border with Egypt – in what has become Palestine’s largest mass exodus since the 1948 Nakba.
Later in the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians began moving from the south to central Gaza in a constant search for safety according to the Palestine Chronicle.