Israel Can’t Win The War

Despite 11 months of fighting in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army is still trying to alter the military equation with the Palestinian resistance groups whom its fighting.

Gaza is proving a tough battle for Israeli officers who are using multiple tactics and strategies to show they are in command. In desperate moves, the Israeli army is bombing shelters and homes aimed at forcing the Palestinian people to leave Gaza according to military expert retired Major-General Mamoun Abu Nawar.

Civilians have always been a soft target in the war.  He noted that available statistics show since the beginning of the Israeli onslaught  on 7 October 2003, 30,000 Palestinians have left for Egypt in one way or another and the Israeli authorities will not allow these people to return.

Abu Nawar added to Jo24  throughout war the Israeli army’s main goal has been to force people to leave the Strip through the bombardment of their homes while at the same time encouraging their voluntary displacement.

This is because it knows full well it will not be able to win the war and defeat the resistance – having already fought four wars in Gaza and has not been able to destroy Hamas and the Palestinian resistance movenents and/or has not been able to reduce their capabilities.

Palestinian fighters continue to target Israeli tanks, snipe soldiers, ambushes  and booby-trap destroyed houses which Israeli soldiers seek to use for their military operations.

But the Israeli army keeps trying news ways to gain the strategic edge. Abu Mawar said today the Israeli army has switched to a new assassination strategy which is the killing of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders – Ismail Hanyah in Iran and Foad Shukr in Beirut – but this doesn’t seem to be working and has not been able to end the presence of Hamas either.

On the Gaza battlefield, the Israeli army leaders know they have fallen into a quagmire as their soldiers freely admit in letters they write to their superiors that victory is not within reach as claimed by extremist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Kill and displace

But here lies the problem as Netanyahu and other extremists in the government reject a truce with the Palestinians which is what the army want but instead are pushing for their original goal of killing as many Palestinians as possible and displace whatever they can despite their failure to achieve the declared goals of the war.

Abu Nawar explained that the absence of a plan for the so-called day after the war created leeway for extremists especially after they were provided with the latest types of American weapons to implement its plan of more massacres, displacement and genocide.

The killing rate in Gaza has reached 10 Palestinians for every Israeli soldier after the use of American smart and dumb bombs which Israel has been provided with.

But he says that on the ground, the Israeli army is having a hard time and the resistance still has the ability to deter, engage, set up ambushes and snipe at officers and soldiers, stressing regular armies like the Israeli fear guerrilla warfare due to its dangers and high rate of losses, which is what is happening now in Gaza and giving the resistance movement the maneuverability to keep fighting.

Continue reading
Stop The Gaza Holocaust

By Dr Marwan Asmar

Years from now academics from many different disciplines, will sit and examine what has now long become recognized as the Gaza Holocaust with its own dramatic features and tools, willingly and determinedly perpetrated by the Israeli military and political leaderships while the rest of Israeli society looked on and the world watched aghast, in complicity and helplessness.

Political scientists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists and economists will seek to examine every aspect of horror committed by the Israelis against the Palestinian people of Gaza, in terms of destroying and ruining a functional Palestinian society that once existed but no more.

As well as death and murder, Gaza has become a rubble heap and an enduring wreckage with former buildings, towers and skyscrapers raised to the ground.

The Gaza holocaust will become a new term and course taught in world universities alongside traditional courses of holocaust studies committed by the Nazis in World War II.

Only this time, the Gaza holocaust will focus on how the Jews – now in the form of an Israeli state, institutions and a powerful military and security apparatus – turned from being the victim of racist, fascist horror, to those committing the worst massacres against Palestinian people.

The Gaza holocaust will be real-time, modern sets of murders and heinous acts of killing and destructions committed by what is regarded as a professional Israeli army with one of the most sophisticated technological gadgets in the world committing unspeakable crimes against women, children and the old in a tiny geographical strip and an enclave called Gaza.

The Gaza holocaust will be about introducing new concepts, ideas, methods and methodologies about introducing new meaning to atrocities, extermination, destruction, elimination, eradication, genocide, slaughter, decimation, excision and obliteration.

All of the above words have become common currency in the new Israeli holocaust against Gaza plotted out by men in blue suits in Tel Aviv and occupied Jerusalem and willingly committed by officers and soldiers in uniform aided and abetted by a destructive machine of warplanes, tanks, missiles, artillery and naval ships.

Similar to the Nazis and Hitler, this Gaza Holocaust will be remembered for its external angle. Israel is committing murder with the help of the United States who are shipping the weapons – planes, tanks, artillery and mass bombs – to help the country bomb the Palestinian enclave to the ground.

History will show that the United States has been part-and-parcel of the Gaza holocaust, willingly arming Jewish state to the teeth and without it, Israel wouldn’t have been able to wage the war for so long, currently in its 11-month.  

Similarly, other world states including the UK, Britain, France Germany, Italy and more like India has been willing partners in the supply of weaponry to beat the people of Gaza with while at the same time – and like Washington – professing peace talks, ceasefire and two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

This Gaza holocaust, once entering the text-books for research, will be mind-boggling for its intensity of the ‘’kill factor”, huge bombs dropped on Gaza – 82,000 tons of explosives were hurled down on the Strip by the end of July starting from October, 2003 – and the enormous destruction this caused to the environment and ecosystem of a land that is no more than 364 square kilometers.

This mad holocaust – 2000 pound bombs, that’s two-ton bombs were willing and continuously dropped on residential squares – will take years to fathom, understand and put into perspectives with theoretical models that must be introduced to understand what and how it was triggered and how it was dealt with.

Continue reading
Israeli Soldiers Beg to Exit The Gaza Quagmire

Major-General Fayez Al-Duwairi said the letter of dozens of reserve officers in the Israeli occupation army to their Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, is a sobering reality of what these soldiers are going through in the hard fields of Gaza.

The strategic expert explained – in his Gaza military analysis – the one fighting in battle is the most honest because he is directly on the ground, noting the words of Israeli politicians cannot be taken seriously because they are seeking to exploit the war for their political goals.

He said the concept of victory in asymmetric warfare is completely different from that of the traditional one “if the weak party can continue fighting and survive, it is victorious, while the strong party is considered a loser if it does not win.”

Zero distance

The Al-Qassam Brigades – the Hamas military wing – and the rest of the factions are still fighting. Videos of the resistance in various combat zones, prove that the occupation army remains fearful of fighting from zero distance he said in his daily analysis on Al Jazeera.

Al-Duwairi stressed the army has suffered great losses in the strategic context that will require years to compensate for. In this war it has lost its superiority, has not be able to win this “conservative war”, undermined its deterrence and failed in its ability to work on the home front.

The expert added the statements of Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant in which he hoped the circle of war would not expand are a result of what the occupation officers soldiers about the tough time they have been having in Gaza whilst recalling statements by the Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari admitting that eliminating Hamas is like throwing dust in the eyes.

Al-Duwairi concluded the message of the officers is “stop swimming against the tide and recognize the reality, which is our inability to resolve the war with our weakest of regional enemies and end it, and talk of victory is not convincing and cannot be achieved.”

Out of reach

Dozens of reserve officers in the occupation army sent a message to Halevi in ​​which they confirmed that achieving victory in Gaza is still out of reach. They stated: “We, who came from the battlefield know well that the situation is still far from achieving victory,” as reported by Israeli Channel 14.

The officers, who spent 200 days of reserve service in Gaza, stressed “the enemy still has cross-border capabilities, drones, explosive drones, mortar shells, a huge tunnel infrastructure and many living terrorists ready to continue fighting against us,” as they described it, according to Jo24.

Continue reading
Stop The Horror: UN Condemns Israeli Attacks on Schools

The UN Human Rights Office condemns the increasing frequency of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) strikes on schools where hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced Palestinians have sought shelter, conducted with apparent disregard for the high rate of civilian fatalities.

In the latest of such strikes, at around 0430 hours this morning during dawn prayer, a mosque inside Al Tabae’en School was struck by the IDF at least three times with an initial report of at least 93 Palestinians killed, including 11 children and 6 women. The majority of fatalities appear to have been inside the mosque performing their prayers. Additionally, dozens of others were reportedly seriously injured, with the majority being children, women, and older people.

This is at least the 21st strike on a school, each serving as a shelter, that the UN Human Rights Office has recorded since 4 July. These strikes have resulted in at least 274 fatalities, including women and children.

Despite IDF statements that all measures are taken to avoid civilian harm, the repeated strikes on IDP shelters in areas to which the populations have been forced to move, and the consistent and predictable impact on civilians, suggest a failure to strictly comply with obligations required by International Humanitarian Law (IHL), including the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precautions in attack.

Furthermore, these systematic attacks on schools came in the context where more than 90 per cent of Gaza’s population has been displaced while the Israeli military continues detonating residential buildings and restricting the entry and distribution of humanitarian assistance. IDPs face indescribable horror after 10 months of hostilities, including multiple forced displacements, the rapid spread of diseases, and ongoing denial of access to the basic necessities of life. For many, schools are the last resort to find some shelter and possible access to food and water.

In most of the incidents, the Israeli military asserts that the schools were used by Palestinian armed groups and that they took measures to reduce civilian harm. While the co-location by armed groups of military objectives with civilians or the use of the presence of civilians with the objective of shielding a military objective from attack constitute violations of IHL, it does not negate Israel’s obligation to comply strictly with IHL, including the principles of proportionality, distinction and precaution when carrying out military operations. Israel, as the occupying power, is obliged to provide the population it has forcibly displaced with basic humanitarian needs, including safe shelter.

ENDS

For more information and media requests, please contact:

UN Human Rights office at [email protected]

Tag and share

Twitter @OHCHR_Palestine

Facebook UN Human Rights Palestine

Reliefweb

Continue reading
Complicity!

Sometimes, it is said that a picture is worth more than a thousand words!

Look at this one!

On 9 of August, 2024 the US through the Joe Biden administration announces that it will provide $3.5 billion in military aid to Israel.

On 10 August, the following day Israeli warplanes strikes a school in Gaza’s Daraj neigbourhood killing over 100 people while performing the dawn prayers.

The school was hit by three 2000-pound missiles that were also provided by the USA.

Continue reading