Ten months into the war on Gaza, the Israeli regime has not achieved its strategic military objectives. Netanyahu and his right-wing cabinet are also proving to be the obstacle towards settling with a ceasefire, since that would represent the greatest victory for the resistance axis. 

Netanyahu’s prolonging the war and dragging the Israeli entity into collapse, in addition to his desperate cling onto power, is effectively a gamble on luck with time. 

It is incomprehensible to the entity that it has not been able to locate its targets in these 10 months, within a tiny strip. This also explains why Israel seeks to drag America into a regional war: to distract the world from Gaza as the regime gets a free hand in intensifying its genocide. 

America’s current efforts to push for a ceasefire, however, are to avoid an uncontrollable war. This is because all American regional interests are at stake here.

Despite this, America must still prove its unwavering support of the Israeli occupation, as protecting the entity is tantamount to protecting America in the region. 

Israeli Officials Sound Alarms

The following statement by former Mossad chief Danny Yatom, and reiterated by several other Israeli officials, depicts the current reality of the occupation army:

“The (Israeli) army is roaming around Gaza and does not know what its goals are, because the goals set up by the prime minister are not implementable. What does eliminating Hamas mean? This means we will remain in Gaza for five years, and even this period will not guarantee us the elimination of Hamas. The meaning of military rule in Gaza is the killing of our soldiers.”

This confession begs the question: how is the army dubbed as the strongest and most equipped with sophisticated technology unable to defeat what amounts to a guerilla organization? 

The missing component when materially analyzing the asymmetry of power is the aspect of morale. This attribute has proven to be prominent within the Gazan resistance, leading to warfare tactics such as fighting at zero distance from the enemy.

When war is raging face-to-face, the use of sophisticated technology does not become a factor in attaining success. Rather, the entity with more courage and greater morale will prevail on the ground.

Israeli Major General and military analyst Yitzhak Brik said the Israeli occupation entity could not beat the Gazan resistance with a “small and weak” army that has “no surplus of forces.”

Although there are half a million Israeli settlers registered for reserve duty, only three percent of Israelis have actively served in the reserve since the onset of the war on Gaza. Military officials have cited exhaustion among reserve soldiers as one of the main reasons.

Tactics Used by the Palestinian Resistance

On the other hand, the Gazan resistance and its qualitative operations have succeeded in shattering the Israeli deterrence force, and breaking the quantitative superiority of its enemy in terms of weapons and forces.

The resistance has proven to be fierce in this long attrition battle and guerrilla warfare – and further succeeding in psychological and media warfare.

The resistance has proven to be well prepared in using its weapons wisely and changing its tactics according to how its enemy operates. Despite the Israeli entity’s claims of destroying resistance infrastructure in Jabalia, the resistance today continues to fire missiles from within. 

The occupation forces withdrew from Jabalia in May, after three weeks of achieving nothing except the mass killing of civilians. In its second attempt to dismantle the resistance, the Israeli occupation entity was declaring more losses as the days went on. 

This proves that when Netanyahu claimed the Israeli military damaged 20 out of 24 of the Gazan resistance brigades, he made unsubstantiated claims. This is whilst the Israeli occupation entity has been using the same tactics, creating a fire belt of destruction and maximizing civilian casualties. 

Failures of the Israeli Entity on the Ground

The Israeli occupation entity enters into enemy territory with maps, but with no real understanding of the terrain it is operating in. The intelligence has not served it much either, as the resistance operates within tunnels that provide protection, in addition to the presence of ambushes along the way.

Israeli soldiers falling into explosive tunnels is an important indicator of the occupation entity’s sinking in the mire of Gaza, which has become an explosive minefield of leaders, officers, and soldiers of the occupation.

A typical operation consists of luring in special Israeli occupation forces to the entrance of a tunnel, clashing with them at zero-distance with sniper fire, machine guns, and anti-personnel explosive devices. 

On several occasions, rescue teams have also been targeted. Buildings are booby-trapped and field command headquarters have been struck with mortar shells and short-range missiles. Surface-to-air missiles have been launched at helicopters in the sky of the Strip. 

Fighters have downed “Hermes 900” reconnaissance aircrafts and seized “Skylark” drones. This is whilst the resistance continues to strike the Israeli occupation entity’s depth with rockets after more than nine months.

This indicates the resistance is imposing itself in the field through owning bases of control and command, and with the surprise ambushing of the occupation’s soldiers.

Despite Israeli occupation losses under military censorship, a statement from the Zionist Energy Minister Yisrael Katz is an adequate reflection of a typical day in the Strip. “We have had a difficult day in the Gaza Strip. The battle is difficult and the losses are great,” he said. 

As an example of one such day, the resistance reported, “during the last 48 hours, Al-Qassam fighters managed to completely or partially destroy 44 military vehicles on all fronts of the fighting in the Gaza Strip. Our fighters confirmed that 40 soldiers were killed and dozens of other Zionist soldiers were killed or wounded.” 

The occupation’s announcement of the death of an Israeli commander in the Givati Brigade due to a heart attack induced by watching his colleagues being killed by the Palestinian resistance reflects the reality in the Gaza Strip, and what the occupation’s soldiers are subjected to.

The Tunnel Networks in Gaza 

The tunnels have proven to be the veins of the resistance for the past 22 years. Despite efforts to eliminate them, they continue to appear, whether in the Jenin Camp in 2023, the Freedom Tunnel out of “Gilboa” prison in 2021, or by the fighters who stormed “Nahal Oz” in 2014. 

Senior Israeli security officials told the New York Times during the start of the war that the estimated length of the entire tunnel network in the Gaza Strip is between 500 and 700 kilometers (over 300 miles) – roughly the equivalent of half of New York City’s subway system.

After the 2007 Israeli-imposed blockade on the Gaza Strip, the Iranian Quds Force under General Qasem Soleimani actively supported the further construction of tunnels and the smuggling of weapons to the armed wings of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. 

In 2021, senior Hamas representative in Lebanon Ahmad Abd al-Hadi said:

“Two people came up with the idea of digging these tunnels: The first is the commander Imad Mughniyeh, and the second is Qasem Soleimani, who went to Gaza more than once and contributed to the defense plan from the moment it was first drafted. The enemies know all this but what the enemies do not know is way more than what they do know.”