[News] Israel’s Gaza withdrawal, a prelude to full-out war

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 Israel’s Gaza withdrawal, a prelude to full-out war

Don't be lulled by the Israeli troop withdrawal from northern Gaza. Tel
Aviv has no intention of ending this war, and is escalating on all its
other fronts, including with Lebanon.

Hasan Illaik <https://new.thecradle.co/authors/hasan-illaik-104> -
https://new.thecradle.co/articles/israels-gaza-withdrawal-a-prelude-to-full-out-war

JAN 3, 2024
Photo Credit: The Cradle

At the start of the new year, Israel’s occupation army began implementing
the withdrawal of a large portion of its forces from the northern Gaza
Strip.

This withdrawal did not mean the end of the war on Gaza, and it certainly
did not suggest calm on the Lebanese-Israeli front. On the contrary,
reducing the pace of the war in the Gaza Strip increases the possibilities
of an Israeli war on Lebanon.

The battles taking place between the occupation army and Hezbollah along
the southern Lebanese border since 8 October, in support of the resistance
in Gaza, have been increasing in intensity day after day.

Washington and Tel Aviv have sought to maximize pressure on Hezbollah by
warning of the possibility of a large-scale war between Israeli forces and
the Lebanese resistance. These tactics were in effect long before the
assassination of Hamas’ Deputy Head of the Political Bureau Saleh Al-Arouri
on 2 January by an Israeli air strike in Dahiyeh, the southern suburb of
Beirut. The killing of Al-Arouri now exponentially increases the chance of
the war expanding.

*The third stage is coming*

The first stage of Tel Aviv’s war was the mass destruction and occupation
of northern Gaza; the second stage is the occupation of key points in the
south of the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian civilians have flocked for
safety. The current troop withdrawal from the territory’s north means that
the Israelis are cementing their southern plans and preparing to move on to
phase three: the long, low-intensity war.

As it enters the third stage, the occupation army intends to maintain a
geographical buffer surrounding the northern Gaza Strip. It also plans to
continue occupying the Gaza Valley area (central Gaza), while completing
its operations in Khan Yunis in the south.

The fate of the Philadelphia axis
<https://www.egypttoday.com/Article/1/129537/What-is-the-Philadelphia-Axis-and-why-is-it-strategically>
– or Salah ad-Din Axis – a strip of land on the border between Gaza and
Egypt which Israel wants to control, will be left to deliberations between
Tel Aviv and Cairo. This is to ensure that incidents do not occur that lead
to tension between the two parties, as well as to guarantee that refugees
do not flow from the south of the Gaza Strip towards Sinai.

Israel’s ground withdrawal from northern Gaza is taking place primarily
because the occupation army’s target bank has been depleted. All targets
prior to the start of the war have been destroyed, and all new operational
targets have been bombed.

Despite this, the Palestinian resistance continues to carry out operations
against Israeli forces. These organizations remain relatively unscathed in
the entire area of the northern Gaza Strip, which will increase the ability
of the resistance to inflict losses on occupation ranks, now and in the
future.

This clear Israeli loss – in terms of Tel Aviv’s stated war objectives –
has been made evident by two basic factors: First, that the occupation army
cannot “cleanse” the northern Gaza Strip house by house, tunnel by tunnel,
because this process will take years, expose more of its soldiers to
danger, and cannot be implemented without further displacing the entire
population of northern Gaza or massacring them. It should be noted, despite
Israeli attempts to portray matters otherwise, that hundreds of thousands
of civilians are still present in the north.

Second, the Israeli government needs to gradually re-inject reserve
soldiers into country’s economy to jump-start it, to ensure that the
productive sectors are not exposed to damage from which recovery will take
a long time, despite the fact that the US and much of Europe appear ready
to monetarily assist Israel’s economy, if necessary.

These measures are being taken because Israel has patently failed to
achieve the two main goals of its war, namely, eliminating the Hamas-led
resistance in Gaza, and liberating Israeli prisoners captured by the
resistance on 7 October.

There remains a basic motive that must be noted: Everything the Israeli
army is currently doing is implementing a US decision to push the war from
its first and second phases into the third phase before the end of January
2024. This requires the war to be “managed” at a slower boil, drawing less
attention to Israeli carnage and the mass suffering of Palestinians.

After three months of brutalities, Washington has assessed the inability of
the Israeli army to eliminate the resistance, the possibilities of regional
escalation, and the significant harm caused to the US administration of Joe
Biden as he enters the presidential primary season.

*An escalation with Lebanon*

As the Israeli occupation army moves to focus its operations on the
southern Gaza Strip, the intensity of military operations along the
Lebanese border between Hezbollah and the Israeli army have also been
ratcheted up.

Hezbollah increased its targeting of occupation soldiers, both in their
visible locations and inside the settlements of northern Palestine.

Hezbollah’s information capabilities have developed in both sophistication
and accuracy during the past months. The Lebanese resistance fighters have
employed missile types not previously utilized, which have a greater range
and better destructive capacity than previous generations.

On the other hand, Tel Aviv has doubled the firepower used in southern
Lebanon. The Israelis continue to limit their operations to the area south
of the Litani River, and are not expanding their scope except to target
resistance groups that carry out strikes across the border. In recent
weeks, the occupation army’s destructive power has increased dramatically
since the early days of the battle.

By increasing its strikes, Israel’s leadership seeks to inflict the
greatest possible number of losses among the ranks of the resistance
fighters, as well as to spread panic among southern Lebanese residents –
displacing more of them, and destroying the largest possible number of
homes. This places a burden on both Hezbollah and the Lebanese state in the
reconstruction process after the end of hostilities.

But there is a longer-term goal to this Israeli military performance. The
government in Tel Aviv, according to its official statements, wants
Hezbollah to withdraw from the south of the Litani, to ensure the security
of Israeli settlers in northern Palestine who abandoned their homes, either
voluntarily or under evacuation orders from their army. By some estimates
<https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israel-iran-tensions-rise-as-israeli-forces-trade-fire-with-militias-in-syria-lebanon-9b9b9cb1>,
the number of Israelis fleeing their settlements in occupied north
Palestine have reached more than 230,000 people.

In parallel with the public statements, messages began arriving in Beirut,
from the US and European capitals, demanding what they call “the
implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701,” meaning Hezbollah’s
withdrawal from the south of the Litani River.

According to emerging information, Tel Aviv is betting that Hezbollah will
be deterred, as the 2019 economic collapse from which Lebanon has not yet
recovered and the country’s long-running internal tensions are factors that
will ultimately prevent Hezbollah from waging war.

Therefore, Israel is hoping that Hezbollah will yield to pressure and meet
its demands regarding the withdrawal of its fighters from the border area
with occupied Palestine.

This Israeli assessment of Lebanese affairs preceded its assassination of
Al-Arouri in Beirut on 2 January. But in the same way that Israel military
commanders and politicians have underestimated and dismissed armed
Palestinian resistance initiatives within occupied lands prior to 7
October, they continue to cling to a dated Israeli calculus that Hezbollah
will never fully retaliate, or that it will only do so in a way that stops
short of war.

Granted, Hezbollah does genuinely seek to limit the scope of the military
confrontation, and has many times pushed for a Gaza ceasefire to end
hostilities throughout the region. Hezbollah is equally concerned about not
disrupting the lives and livelihood of southern residents.

But while Hezbollah takes into account the complex political and economic
Lebanese reality, it is not prepared to make concessions. Sources in the
resistance axis say that Israel - as Hezbollah sees it - is not in a
position to go to war with Lebanon when it cannot even compensate or digest
the massive strategic losses it has incurred from Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

Despite its desire to not expand the war, Hezbollah has already begun to
prepare for it. The party’s statement, issued after Al-Arouri's
assassination, indicates this, and field measures and developments will
begin to appear in short shrift.

What Israel was unable to achieve in Gaza (restoring deterrence) facing the
tight ranks of the region’s Axis of Resistance, it will most certainly not
be allowed to gain in Lebanon.

The first signs of this will appear in the plans that Hezbollah is expected
to carry out in response to Israel’s 2 January raid on Dahiyeh to
assassinate Al-Arouri, the first of its kind since August 2006, and to
which its Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah had previously threatened he
would respond.

The bottom line is that Tel Aviv’s assessment of a war with Lebanon is
based on its reading that Hezbollah wishes to prevent a major confrontation
at any cost. Not only is this calculus wrong, it has muddled Israeli minds
to the point where this may itself lead to the outbreak of a destructive
war between the two sides.
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