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Why the Israeli assassination strategy is leading them to defeat

By Robert Inlakesh | Al Mayadeen | May 10, 2026

The Zionist Entity cannot fight real wars, instead it uses assassinations and terror bombing campaigns to avoid having to actually engage its opponents. Since October of 2023, it has been proven that this strategy is a liability, especially when it is attempting to expand its occupation.

On March 3, 2026, Lebanese Hezbollah debunked the Israeli illusion that it was nearing “total victory” in a 7-front war. Now the reality is setting in for everyone. The Israelis have carried out their most successful assassination strikes, Mossad operations, and implemented the most destructive air attacks that the world has ever witnessed against a defenseless civilian population in Gaza.

All of this, and they haven’t defeated a single opponent. So why then did almost everyone believe that the Israelis had managed to overcome the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance? The answer is quite simple: propaganda.

Hezbollah, Hamas, Ansar Allah, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq and Iran’s IRGC are all still in existence today. In fact, the Israelis failed through committing a genocide in Gaza to fully defeat even one of the some dozen Palestinian Resistance factions that exist there. This is not to say that nothing has been achieved and no blows were suffered, evidently that would be delusional, but the fact of the matter is that the Zionist Entity has thrown everything they have at securing “total victory”.

Some would then come along and argue that Hezbollah did suffer significant blows, with the assassination of their senior leadership, the terrorist pager attacks, that Hamas and the other Palestinian factions have also lost much of their senior leadership, as has the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC). All of this is true, but that isn’t what wins a war.

This is especially the case when it comes to the Israelis, who possess the most advanced military technology and are on paper supposed to be a complete mismatch when facing up against Hezbollah or Hamas.

Their biggest issue lies in their military doctrine, the overreliance on technology, and beyond this the ideological weakness that runs through their society. In the year 2000, former Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah issued perhaps his most well-known address, which would later be referred to as the “Spider’s Web Speech”.

26 years later, and the Israeli political and military leadership, along with their media, are still obsessed with the speech. The reason why is because it cuts deep into the Israeli psyche and their self-perception. Israeli society is a military society, one that is obsessed with its citizen army. “The IDF is the most moral army” is the settler mantra, a concept so ridiculous to the rest of the world, yet a concept that the settlers themselves cling to with every ounce of their being. This is because the entire occupying regime is centred around the armed forces and militarism.

A soldier’s death is infinitely more difficult for the Israelis to accept than that of a non-combatant, which is why they do their utmost to cover up soldier casualties. If their soldiers are being killed in enormous numbers, then this begins to rock the entire society to its core and impact their belief in themselves to uphold their settler colonial project. Hence Nasrallah’s Spider’s Web theory. The idea of the Zionist entity being a spider’s web, is that its society is weak, not its technology, not its ability to drop bombs and carry out complex intelligence operations.

The concept of fighting short wars is enshrined in Israeli military thinking; it is a concept that dates back to its first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion. This is to say, fighting short and intense wars is safe, because the Israelis are militarily superior to their opponents, yet fighting long, drawn out conflicts of attrition is a danger due to the sheer size of their enemies.

The most successful Israeli war of aggression, the “6-Day War,” reinforced this view. Over the years, since the US has fully thrown its weight behind the occupying ethno-supremacist regime, the United States military has itself shifted to become risk adverse and implement a counter-insurgency doctrine.

In the Second Intifada, the Israelis then leaned into the use of “targeted assassinations”, special forces raids and counter-insurgency strategies, in a way that they hadn’t previously implemented at such a scale. Palestinian Resistance groups in the West Bank were indeed defeated as a result of it, but in Gaza, they managed to adapt and develop in strength.

After originally withdrawing from Lebanon, the Israelis realised that the threat of Hezbollah had grown to a level where it now posed a significant threat, but when they tried to defeat it in 2006, they failed. Therefore, they developed the Dahiyeh Doctrine, the concept of inflicting massive death and destruction against civilian populations.

The belief was that this achieved “deterrence”; in reality, it was Hezbollah that had deterred the Israelis, because Hezbollah was not the aggressor or attempting to implement a belligerent occupation. In order to deal with their defeat in Lebanon, the Israelis then implemented the Dahiyeh Doctrine in the Gaza Strip, where they were dealing with a weaker Resistance group under siege.

Over the years, the Dahiyeh Doctrine was repeatedly used against the Gaza Strip, alongside assassination campaigns, aimed at “mowing the lawn”, a twisted way of saying subduing the threat and achieving “deterrence”. Yet, this also backfired in Gaza, because eventually the Resistance would become so strong that they pulled off the largest military defeat of the Israelis that had ever been inflicted.

As a reaction to October 7, 2023, the Israelis went bad; they initiated a genocide in the Gaza Strip, before going on the offensive across the region. They relied on those same tactics that had failed them time and again, which led them to the Hamas-led surprise attack.

Assassination after assassination, terrorist tactics against civilian populations in order to try and force them into submission, economic warfare, using proxy groups, doing everything possible without having to actually make the sacrifices necessary to attain victory. The reason why they couldn’t simply fight on the ground and go after the Palestinian Resistance in Gaza, nor wage costly and bloody battles against Hezbollah, is because the Spider’s Web theory is true.

If the Israelis were to actually do what is necessary to truly defeat their opponents, they would have to accept losing tens of thousands of soldiers. This is a price that their citizens’ army is simply not willing to pay. The Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemeni and Iranians are willing to make that level of sacrifice, but the Israelis aren’t.

The Zionist regime seeks to achieve “Greater Israel”, but doesn’t want to make any real sacrifice in order to attain that project; they want to do it the easy way, but an easy way doesn’t exist. People are not simply going to bow down and accept enslavement, to live under the rule of an ethno-supremacist regime that treats them as animals, nor will they stop resisting because you slaughter their families.

Sneaky assassinations, surprise attacks and killing babies do not win wars against populations who are fighting for their ability to live freely in their lands. The Zionist entity had the opportunity to actually secure its existence, which was through accepting the so-called “Two-State solution”, but that would have defeated their entire purpose, despite it being the only route to securing their place in the region.

The “Two-State solution” was the Zionist solution that could have given them the ability to remain, but they chose to go down the path of no return. They couldn’t accept living as equals, because the Zionist project is one of ethno-supremacy, so now they are stuck. The illusion of victory over Lebanon is crumbling, as they fail to produce any solutions other than mass murder against civilian populations and ethnic cleansing across the region.

Especially when the Israelis are a weak society, they can’t succeed. This is why there is an obsession with achieving regime change in Iran and using the US to do it for them, because they are desperately betting on the idea that if they do succeed, the resistance against them will end.

May 10, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Gaza, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Zionism