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The Israelis are shocked that they didn’t beat Hamas, here’s why they failed

By Robert Inlakesh | Al Mayadeen | January 28, 2025

Contrary to what has been presented to the Western public, the Israeli military did not fight a war that targeted Hamas, instead they pursued their genocides and employed cowardly tactics that aimed to minimize their soldier casualties.

Ever wondered why the Israelis never had any real combat footage that featured their soldiers engaged in battles with Palestinian fighters? One explanation could be that no battles were actually fought in the Gaza Strip, yet that is contradicted by the near daily stream of clips, produced by some dozen Resistance groups, that featured attacks against the invading army.

Through analyzing the videos released by the Palestinian armed groups like al-Quds Brigades, al-Qassam Brigades, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, the Mujahideen Brigades, the Salah al-Din Brigades, and others, we can deduce that there were three main categories of attacks: Ambushes, Sniper Operations, and mortar/artillery strikes.

According to both the communiques and video documentation published by the groups in Gaza, the most frequent style of attacks was mortar/artillery operations; that would occur daily. Over 10,000 rockets were also used, but as the war progressed, most of the rockets fired were short-range munitions. Although this style of attacks used largely inaccurate weapons, it was indeed constant over the course of 15 months.

Then we have the steady stream of videos throughout the war, which featured ambushes, which could also be separated into two primary subcategories: Ambushes of convoys and ambushes on stationary Israeli army positions.

The first kind, against convoys, included the use of the now famous Yassin-105 Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) against tanks, bulldozers, jeeps, and Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs). Guided Anti-Tank systems and drones were occasionally used against military vehicles too, but appeared to be in much lower supply.

The spokesperson for the al-Qassam Brigades, Abu Obeida, announced in his ceasefire speech that over 2,000 Israeli tanks were damaged or destroyed by the group’s fighters. Despite the Israelis not having admitted to the number of tanks, bulldozers, jeeps, and APCs that were damaged/destroyed, reports published in Israeli media suggested that tanks were in short supply. In fact, several requests were made by senior Israeli military officials to deploy tanks into the West Bank after their assessments concluded the Resistance groups there had acquired heavy explosives, but were rejected due to the need to use those tanks in Gaza or Lebanon.

Another tactic that ended up proving more effective at neutralizing Israeli tanks later on in the war were Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) strategically planted in roads where military convoys would pass through. Groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)’s al-Quds Brigades and Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades even repurposed many of the unexploded ordnances, including the infamous 2,000-pound bombs, to use against Israeli military convoys.

Then we had the attacks on Israeli forces who were either entering areas to set up positions or who were already utilizing a space as a temporary military base or command node. These ambushes used IEDs that were pre-planted in an area, but also incorporated other kinds of weapons. For instance, sniper attacks were used throughout the war, and there are many such attacks filmed, some showing headshots and armor piercing rounds hitting two soldiers in a single shot.

The variations of the RPG warheads used were also different, when in sufficient supply, for these kinds of assaults that would often target gatherings of soldiers or those holed up inside buildings. A thermobaric RPG round was frequently featured in the published videos of such ambush operations. Something we also saw was the use of automatic and semi-automatic guns in such confrontations. There were also some knife attacks and occasional use of feda’i bombers.

The Israeli military has admitted to suffering an average of 1,000 soldier injuries per month during the course of the war, yet this even appears to contradict earlier announcements on the total number of injuries their forces sustained. These numbers have changed throughout the course of the conflict and do not appear to be reliable, especially due to Tel Aviv’s military censorship surrounding such issues. Regardless, judging by the Israeli total soldier death toll, set around 800, the injury to death rate is separated by an enormous gap.

So far, the Palestinian armed groups have not provided their own estimates as to how many Israeli soldier casualties they inflicted. Therefore, attempting to come up with numbers is rather difficult, but if we are to work with the statistic of 1,000 injuries each month in Gaza, this would equate to 33 Israeli soldiers injured every day. Provided that most of the time the occupying military was only launching full invasions in a couple of areas at once, this indicates frequent resistance.

However, with the exception of a handful of examples where the Palestinian Resistance fighters chose to try and hold certain areas, or delay an Israeli entry to a specific neighborhood – like what occurred during the second major invasion of the Jabalia refugee camp in May of 2024 – the opposition to the invading army was almost entirely surprise attacks and artillery strikes.

The Palestinian fighting made sense for a number of reasons. To begin with, it was obvious that even in the event that the Israeli military had sought to fight the Palestinian groups directly and engage in fierce battles with them, the ability to hold off the invading army that is backed by the world’s top military superpower was always a terrible choice. Therefore, the idea of being able to work in a similar manner to Hezbollah, holding back the advances of the Israeli army, would have been a suicidal strategy.

Even if the Palestinian Resistance would have proven temporarily successful, the massive loss of fighters would have been a disaster. This leads us to the next reason that explains their actions, that being the lack of any supply lines into Gaza. The Palestinian groups were forced to use weapons that were primarily manufactured inside the Gaza Strip, and thus had to preserve the ammunition they had carefully, which they managed to do. Their strength was in their use of a complex web of tunnels that the Israelis were simply not interested in bothering to enter on foot in most cases.

Tel Aviv and Washington still have no clue how extensive the tunnel system is under Gaza and only provide guess estimates. Other than in a few rare circumstances, the Israelis never bothered entering the tunnels and when they did, they would either use Palestinian hostages to go in ahead of them or attack dogs. The vast majority of uncovered tunnels were already abandoned, were bombed first, and rendered useless anyway, or the entrances were simply sealed with explosive charges. Attempts to flood the tunnels with seawater and gas both failed.

Not only do the Israelis themselves admit that most of the tunnels weren’t destroyed, but even in areas where the invading army had been stationed for over a year and destroyed every structure in sight, were sites from which long-range rockets were fired. In December, the Qassam Brigades even fired M75 rockets at Israeli settlements in occupied al-Quds from Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza. Tellingly, the first Israeli prisoners were also released by the Qassam Brigades’ elite Shadow Unit out of northern Gaza, which surprised the Palestinians and Israelis alike.

The real reason why the Israelis didn’t defeat the Palestinian Resistance factions, is because they weren’t really there to fight them. The primary target of each of their invasions, throughout the Gaza Strip, was always civilian infrastructure. Each invasion would culminate with the takeover of a hospital like Al-Shifa, Kamal Adwan, or the Nasser Medical Complex for example. They rounded up civilians who were either held hostage in their homes prior, or were displaced and living in UN schools, hospitals or stadiums.

Israeli airstrikes were totally indiscriminate, and while there were some more targeted operations, they were anomalies. Simply looking at drone or satellite footage of the Gaza Strip proves this beyond any reasonable doubt. The vast majority of their soldiers deployed into Gaza never saw a Palestinian fighter, even when fired upon, they were simply there to vandalize and destroy buildings, while shooting indiscriminately at whoever they chose. They behaved lawlessly like a horde of 13th century Mongolian raiders, minus having to actually fight battles against a modern army.

It was clear from the language employed by every Israeli, from its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right down to its soldiers who filmed TikTok videos of themselves detonating buildings and wearing women’s underwear, they were committing a genocide against those they called “Amalekites”. Their true purpose was not to pursue a military victory over Hamas, which we can prove through the absence of any clear plans at any stage of the war, it was just uncontrolled slaughter and destruction. They sought to pulverize and terrorize, with the propaganda behind them to justify it in their own minds.

While the lie was sold to the world that the war was specifically designed to destroy Hamas, it never was, they sought to destroy the people of Gaza and their livelihoods. They didn’t invade in order to fight Palestinian resistance groups and that’s why there is virtually no footage documenting this, even the few examples of combat footage they filmed ended up making the Palestinian fighters they killed look like heroes from an action film.

Now that the ceasefire holds, the Israeli society appears baffled, believing that their regime’s murderous assault on Gaza was going to crush Hamas and return their captives by force. Instead, they witnessed Palestinian fighters and police officers quickly deploy throughout Gaza, with weapons, vehicles and military/security-force attire, seemingly un-scathed. Yet, to those who have been closely following the conflict, this made complete sense and it is also one of the reasons why the Israeli leadership feared a ceasefire.

The Israelis employed a strategy of maximum cowardice in order to minimize their own combatant casualties at all costs. For instance, under the US/”Israel” doctrine of counter-insurgency, tanks would traditionally follow infantry units heading into an urban warfare zone, or at least there would be soldiers on the ground accompanying the tanks, yet this was not the case in Gaza. The Israeli soldiers hid inside their heavily armored tanks and vehicles, betting on the armor and Active Protection System (APS) to guard them.

Despite our inability to accurately estimate Israeli military casualties, it does appear that the difference between the deaths and injuries is a ratio that portrays far more injuries to deaths than in other similar urban warfare environments. This is because the Israelis hid in fortified areas or inside heavily armored vehicles most of the time. The reality is that even in the event that a tank is damaged, it doesn’t necessarily mean soldiers were killed in that attack and could have sustained injuries alone.

Most of the time, after arriving in new areas or buildings, a drone or robot would be sent in first to inspect the scene, prior to the soldiers that stormed the area. However, this didn’t always work and there would occasionally be ambushes after a failure to locate explosives, or tunnels. Most of the work the soldiers did required little real courage or combat capabilities. They were also careless throughout, as videos over the span of the 15 months war repeatedly showed soldiers casually standing in open windows, in one case an Israeli was filmed smoking out of a bong before he was hit with a thermobaric warhead.

Tel Aviv wasn’t looking to sacrifice its soldiers in the way that would have been required had they actually fought a war against Hamas, so they took the coward’s way out instead, and its population that believed in every lie they were sold are now shocked that the tactics employed proved ineffective at achieving the publicly stated goals of the war. With every known military advantage, destroying or damaging almost every single building in Gaza and slaughtering its people in such a manner that has constituted perhaps the worst atrocity since the Second World War, the Israelis couldn’t even come out of Gaza with the image of victory.

This speaks to the utter cowardice of the genocidal regime, contrasted by the stunning steadfastness of Gaza’s people as a whole. The Israelis didn’t fight a war against Hamas or any of the other Palestinian Resistance groups, note that they don’t even produce any statistics on the number of alleged fighters they have killed from any specific group other than Hamas; with the exception of occasionally adding mention of PIJ to the Hamas death toll figures. Palestinian Resistance groups fought, using the limited tools they had, against an Israeli military that was committing a genocide, that is what really happened.

January 28, 2025 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Hamas, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | 1 Comment