Tehran Times – Gaza – The Secretary-General of Lebanon’s Hezbollah made the famous remark that Israel is “weaker than the spider’s web” after Hezbollah drove Israeli forces out of Southern Lebanon in 2000. Hamas has backed up those words in front of the eyes of the international community by waging the most complex operation against the usurper Israeli regime that is unprecedented in 50 years.
Israel prides itself on its intelligence apparatus, purportedly aware of an incoming Palestinian missile fire before it is even launched. Or the highly sophisticated surveillance and monitoring methods, which Israel undertakes to track the movements of Hamas members in every inch of what is a very tiny coastal sliver.
The operation that began on Saturday morning by the resistance forces is continuing amid fierce fighting inside numerous Israeli settlements. The operation, codenamed Al-Aqsa Storm, has caught the regime’s intelligence completely off guard and left it embarrassed before the eyes of the world.
All the measures that Hamas took to make the intrusions into Israeli settlements would have required weeks of planning, training, and coordination. Despite all of this, the preparations were missed by Israeli intelligence.
The operation by Hamas and its security coordination with other resistance movements in Gaza is unprecedented compared to previous rounds of fighting between the Palestinian resistance and the Israeli military. It’s a major dent to the image of the entity’s intelligence that will be remembered for many decades to come.
The former chief of the Israeli navy, Eli Marom, said on live television that “it’s a colossal failure; the hierarchies have simply failed, with vast consequences.” He also highlighted the fact that “all of Israel is asking itself. Where are the [Israeli military branches]? Where are the police? Where is the security?”
For the first time in 50 years, more than 1,000 Israelis have been left dead in a matter of 24 to 48 hours, and the casualty numbers are rising by the hour.
A spokesperson for the Israeli military, Jonathan Conricus, in a social media post, said that “almost 48 hours into the fighting… the situation in Israel is a dire one and the death toll will rise”. 100 Israeli hostages, perhaps more, is something unheard of since Israel’s creation in 1948.
Some members of the UN Security Council that held an emergency meeting on Sunday denounced Hamas, but the United States denounced the lack of unanimity.
It has been, after all, the worst year on record for Palestinians, with Israeli forces invading occupied West Bank cities, towns, and villages on an almost daily basis. Something not overlooked by the international community, including the U.S. itself.
But the term “invasion” has been lost by Western leaders and their mainstream media. That term has been reserved solely for the Ukraine war.
U.S. President Joe Biden told the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that additional assistance for the Israeli military is now on its way to Israel “with more to follow over the coming days.”
The fact that Israel is relying on the United States, at this moment in time, to boost its military and give itself some level of advantage over the Palestinian resistance speaks volumes.
On Sunday, Netanyahu warned Israelis to prepare for a “long and difficult” conflict ahead. He is being egged on by his cabinet ministers to not only wage a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip but also to re-occupy the coastal enclave.
This is something that the resistance would welcome, giving it the opportunity to take on Israeli troops on the ground, something that they have been prevented from doing by a heavily fortified separation wall.
It was the Israeli occupation of Gaza and guerilla-style attacks on its troops that drove Israeli forces out of the Gaza Strip and Lebanon in the first place. A fact that appears lost on the minds of Netanyahu’s cabinet ministers. For now, Israel is responding in the way it best knows how to respond – bombing Gaza from the air and killing women and children.
The director of Gaza’s Ambulance Service said on Monday that the continuous Israeli shelling of the Gaza Strip has risen to more than “510 martyrs and 2750 injured’, in addition to extensive damage to civilian homes, residential buildings, properties, and infrastructure.
On the third day of the Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip, officials have spoken about widespread destruction to a large number of mosques and schools since the start of the Israeli air raids on Saturday.
So far, more than 570 Palestinians have been killed, according to the health ministry of the Palestinian Authority. They include at least 90 children and more than 60 women. A further 2,300 people have been wounded amid the Israeli air strikes, it added.
Reporters on the ground have spoken of many injured civilians being taken to Al-Shafa Medical Hospital after the regime flattened the al-Soussi Mosque.
The majority of the injured Palestinians are women and children, among other civilians, but the number of civilian casualties is expected to significantly increase as many women, children and the elderly remain under the rubble of their flattened homes.
Hamas fighters are not being killed. The Hamas fighters are inside Israeli settlements engaged in “fierce battles” with the regime’s troops.
In the space of a few hours on Monday alone, a government official in Gaza said that the Israeli army committed massacres against 15 families in the Gaza Strip after directly bombing their homes.
Four Israeli prisoners of war killed in Gaza bombardment
Such is the scale of the Israeli bombardment that Abu Ubaida, the military spokesman and commander of the al-Qassam Brigades, (the Hamas armed wing), announced that the occupation regime’s indiscriminate bombing of the Gaza Strip led to the killing of four enemy prisoners.
The Norwegian Refugee Council says the situation in Gaza right now is “just unspeakable”.
“The nights are impossible to live through – our colleagues who have young children say they can’t get any relief and that is when they are most terrified,” the council told news media.
“Then in the mornings, they leave their homes to get supplies and take account of the level of destruction.”
It says there is rationing of essential food supplies, including limitations on the amount of bread.
“Food is in short supply, alongside of course fuel – Israel has cut electricity to the Gaza Strip. So there’s only around four hours of electricity per day, and in general, the situation is extremely dire.”
Gazans have been told by Israeli officials to leave the area as they carry out air strikes.
But the Norwegian Refugee Council points out that “there really is no safe place for Palestinians in Gaza to flee to.”
The earthquake-like scenes of the collapse of residential buildings in Gaza are the only way that Israel, which is on the defensive, can pressure the Palestinian resistance, who are on the offensive, to stop fighting and end the conflict.
Conflict didn’t start on October 7
Israel’s new fascist cabinet has allowed it to be a record-setting year for the number of Palestinians, including children, killed, the number of homes demolished, the number of attacks by armed settlers, etc.
The al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, had been desecrated for seven days in the lead-up to Saturday’s operation by the Palestinian resistance.
