Facts hidden by Israel's boasts

Hamas has returned to showing signs of new governance in these areas, not to mention that the issues of Rafah and the Philadelphia border axis with Egypt have not yet been addressed...

As the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip continues, assessments increase in the Israeli media, which is trying to shed light on blatant facts that are overlooked by the boasting that characterizes the official statements and positions of officials in the political and security institutions, and reflects nothing more than interpretations, or reflects an epistemological nihilism that fuels moral nihilism, according to the expressions of limited academic circles. 

Perhaps the most important of these facts are two: The first is the inability of the Israeli army to impose complete control over any of the areas of the Gaza Strip, including the northern region, as it claimed and still is, despite the war entering its fifth month. According to the latest approaches of even the military analyst of the right-wing newspaper Israel Hayom, which promotes Benjamin Netanyahu's policy, the Israeli army is exerting harsh pressure on the Hamas movement in Khan Yunis, but is not succeeding in targeting its senior leaders. The Israeli army has also been working in recent days in the areas of the northern Gaza Strip, but Hamas has returned to showing signs of new governance in these areas, not to mention that the issues of Rafah and the Philadelphia border axis with Egypt have not yet been addressed, which means that completing the war’s goals is still pending. 

The second of these facts is that achieving victory over the Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip using the enormous force in Israel’s possession, a force that is not at all doubtful, is considered a kind of fantasy.

One of the latest examples of this ruling is what came from the former head of the Military Intelligence Division (Aman), Major General Reserve Uri Sagi, in the context of an article he published in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper on February 4, 2024, entitled “Not by force alone,” in which he concluded that force is Not everything.

Likewise, what was confirmed by the former official in the General Security Service (Shin Bet) and former member of the Knesset from the Likud Party, Ehud Yatom, in an article in the Maariv newspaper on February 5, 2024, in which he stressed the impossibility of achieving victory through military force alone. Naturally, such positions do not come from these two former security officials, like many others, from the standpoint of opposition to war or opposition to the occupation and support for the Palestinian cause...etc., but they express contempt for the frequent statements issued by political and military leaders regarding victory, not to mention that they It reflects the crisis surrounding the Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip, and the unrealistic relationship between the conduct of those operations and the goals that the Israeli government set for the war and still insists on achieving. It must be added that it involves, in depth, an acknowledgment of the capabilities and capabilities of the resistance.

However, anyone who follows the Israeli issue sees at the core of these assessments an attempt to formulate justifications for this lack of victory that has become apparent on the horizon of the ongoing war, foremost of which is the justification related to the issues of Rafah and the Philadelphia axis. For several days, the Prime Minister's mouthpieces have been promoting that it is not possible to achieve victory over Hamas and recover the prisoners in Gaza without addressing the Philadelphia axis in particular, and they are repeating a claim that not occupying this axis directly at the beginning of the ground maneuver was a grave mistake. It also declares that the benefit of occupying the border axis is known, and the issue has been raised more than once in the media, as through it the weapons that have increased Hamas’ military capabilities flow from Egyptian territory to the Gaza Strip, even if it is said that the majority of the weapons used by the resistance were manufactured inside the Strip. As one of Netanyahu's most prominent mouthpieces, Amnon Lord, chief commentator for the Israel Hayom newspaper, recently wrote, it is clear that Russian anti-armor missiles of various types arrived by underground smuggling from Egyptian territory, through tunnels or by other means via the Philadelphia axis. In his opinion, there is no doubt that in order to stop smuggling operations to Hamas, and prevent its military power from growing again after the Gaza Strip moves to the reconstruction phase, the aforementioned axis must be controlled.