Only the naïve could have imagined that Israel would continue the truce that allowed the exchange of some of the Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners.
As soon as the week-long truce expired, Israel not only went on the offensive again, it expanded its scope to southern Gaza, which it had earlier touted as a safe zone for the residents of Gaza city and northern Gaza to relocate to since the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) intended to occupy northern Gaza in the wake of its brutal military offensive.
As things stand now, not only has Israel militarily captured most of northern Gaza, it has turned its bloody gaze towards southern Gaza, where it claims the Hamas leadership and the remaining Israeli hostages are located.
It should not be forgotten that Israel’s earlier demand that northern Gazans move south to so-called ‘safe zones’ did not prevent it from attacking the columns of Palestinians streaming south. Now they once again face the prospect of being displaced with nowhere left to go.
The renewed Israeli attack on now the whole of Gaza so far has yielded 400 attacks and 700 Palestinians killed. As a result the total of Palestinian casualties since October 7, 2023 has reached more than 15,500, of whom 70 percent are women and children and 280 medics.
While well-meaning international organisations such as Doctors Sans Frontieres and the International Court of Justice appeal to the world’s conscience to stop Israel in its barbaric tracks, not much can be expected from these appeals and condemnations so long as the US’s total support to Israel continues.
This includes the inability of the UN Security Council to bring any sort of meaningful pressure to bear on Israel, given Washington’s veto power in that august but toothless body supposedly enjoined to keep the peace worldwide.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk says hundreds of thousands of Gazans are being squeezed into smaller areas in the south, resulting in no safe place anywhere in Gaza.
If he had been a little more truthful he would have unequivocally stated that Israel intends to drive as many as possible if not all Palestinians out of Gaza and occupy the Strip indefinitely to avoid the territory ever again being used for the kind of attacks staged by Hamas on October 7, which exposed the so-called impenetrable defence of Israel as overstated and hollow.
Some 1.8 million Palestinians have been displaced to overcrowded, unsanitary shelters in the south, resulting in chaos of an unimaginable degree. Meanwhile, the IDF claims to have found 800 tunnel shafts in the north, of which it claims to have destroyed some 500.
This, however, has still not prevented Hamas and Islamic Jihad from launching rockets into Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities, in a show of defiance and resilience that is a smack in the face of Israel.
The Zionist entity now faces a dilemma of unprecedented proportions. Its brutality, which cannot in today’s world be hidden from view in an unprecedentedly interconnected world, may be (according to it) bringing military advances but in the process is losing it the war of narratives, with enormous political implications for the future.
Even US President Joe Biden may well lose the 2024 presidential election because of the backlash at home against his unqualified support for Israel’s genocidal campaign. That campaign is not confined to Gaza. In the West Bank, 60 Palestinians are the latest count of detainees. They can be added to the 3,000 detained since October 7.
During the brief truce, as many Palestinians were arrested in the West Bank as were released in exchange for the Israeli hostages. Israel’s atrocities continue unabated and in typical lying, hypocritical fashion.
Israel is now threatening to eliminate Hamas leaders in southern Gaza, Lebanon, Turkiye, Qatar and anywhere else they can be found. The more repressive and barbaric the Zionist entity’s actions, the more it is cutting the ground from under its own future.
US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, an experienced top US military commander, has warned Israel that if civilians are not protected and the Israeli settler and security forces’ violence against the West Bank Palestinians not avoided in the kind of urban warfare being waged in Gaza, Israel risks turning a tactical victory into a strategic defeat.
He bases this view on the US’s experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. Of course, given the US administration’s position, he felt obliged to trot out phrases about the US remaining Israel’s closest friend in the world (amongst a dwindling few), but his words are a cautionary message to Israel not to push the civilians into the arms of the ‘enemy’, which would ensure their radicalisation and prolong the war.
Austin is being naïve if he thinks Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Gaza has not already wrought the result he is warning against.
Logic suggests on the basis of Israel’s previous military forays into Gaza that its stated goal of eliminating Hamas is unrealistic.
That implies the war will be a long one, and if the Houthis’ attacks on Israeli and US shipping in the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea and the almost by now daily clashes between Hezbollah and Israel on the Lebanon border in the north are any indication, a wider one.
Perhaps premature, but the same logic points in the direction of the beginning of the end of the Zionist entity. And not a moment too soon.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023