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

[Anti-Imperialist News]

english.almayadeen.net
<https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/the-israelis-are-shocked-that-they-didn-t-beat-hamas--here-s>
The Israelis are shocked that they didn’t beat Hamas, here’s why they failed
Robert Inlakesh
January 28, 2025
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Robert Inlakesh critiques Israel's "cowardly" war tactics against Gaza,
highlighting its genocidal strategies targeting civilians over true combat
with Resistance groups.
[image: 7cf11965-4043-482d-a323-4f6bbb1c4e87.jpg]

   - Palestinian Resistance groups fought, using the limited tools they
   had, against an Israeli military that was committing a genocide, that is
   what really happened. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Zeinab el-Hajj)

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 censor 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.
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