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.

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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.

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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.

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Weaponizing food!

By Saleem Ayoub Quna

Food is a major strategic weapon that can be used against one’s enemy. It can be applied in three cases: When consumed, boycotted or as a deprivation tool!*

Like other types of essential ammunition, soldiers need food to be able to keep on fighting and advancing. No better phrase can explain this idea than the famous quote attributed to Emperor Napoleon when he said: “Armies crawl on their bellies”!

But sometimes, when the other side, your opponent, is also smart and you have the capitalist system of franchising products working in every corner, unexpected things can happen!

This story can, one day, become a classical case study in politics, economics, sociology, psychology and warfare!

It all began in the first half of October 2023 when a franchised company in Israel, representing a famous world food chain, thought it would be a cool idea to photograph Israeli soldiers on the Gaza front, receiving nicely packed items of food produced by that company!

Its Israeli CEO, probably, wanted to demonstrate a symbolic gesture, rather than providing an irreplaceable type of food for the Israeli soldiers on that occasion. But he seemed to have forgotten or deliberately ignore that the same kind of food is available all over the world, including places, where his “enemies” and their allies, by the millions, live and regularly consume the same commodity!

Those millions on the other side of the front line were dismayed and felt offended by those carefully taken shots of the Israeli soldiers receiving their food packages.

The former did not know who was really behind this gesture. But they couldn’t not care less if the gesture originated from within Israel, or was inspired by the mother company in another faraway place.

So they, as a sign of protest of the war against Gaza, decided to boycott all products and services of this company in all of its branches.

They were also aware that the franchised branches play an important role in the local economy in each country. Thousands of young people are hired where unemployment rates are high; they also use subsidiary locally-produced items and so forth. But they had a choice to make. It was a hard one but less painful than acting as if they condone the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.

The results of this world wide boycott movement, even in some European countries, proved catastrophic for all branches and especially for the Mother Company, since it’s the one who gets the lion’s share of the pie!

In addition to the symbolic meaning of this initiative which involves national dignity, exercising awareness, it was used as a last resort to fight back and defend their rights and beliefs.

Never take anything for granted, when you go to junk food eatery. Surprises can crawl out from the slices of bread!

*Deliberately depriving the enemy of food is tantamount to a flagrant war crime!

This opinion was especially written for Crossfire Arabia by Saleem Ayoub Quna who is a Jordanian author writing on local, regional and international affairs and has two books published. He has a BA in English Literature from Jordan University, a diploma from Paris and an MA from Johns Hopkins University in Washington. He also speaks French and German 

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Israel Drops 82,000 Tons of Bombs on Gaza

Israel has dropped 82,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip according to the Government Media Office in Gaza City, Thursday.

The huge explosives were dropped by Israeli warplanes, tanks and from the sea since the Jewish state started its war on enclave after 7 October, 2023.

Israel’s war on Gaza is being facilitated by US support which has provided Tel Aviv with much of the weapons and mass bombs for its willful destruction.

Up till now, Israel has destroyed 430,000 houses, 821 mosques, 3 churches, 206 historical sites, 25,000 kilometers of sewage networks and 700 water wells.

Israel has killed up till now, 39,677 civilians and wounded 91,645 during this slaughter.

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