[News] Manufactured Reach, Real Resistance: Gaza’s Attrition and the Fall of a Myth

[Anti-Imperialist News]

english.almayadeen.net
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Manufactured Reach, Real Resistance: Gaza’s Attrition and the Fall of a Myth
Amro Allan
September 19, 2025
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The Israeli aggression on Gaza ended without resolution, shattering its
military myth and deepening the roots of the resistance.

   - [image: Manufactured Reach, Real Resistance: Gaza’s Attrition and the
   Fall of a Myth]
   <https://alpha-en-media.almayadeen.net/media/image/2025/9/19/f4a0067b-70c9-4901-ab11-0040ed65cb70.png?v=4&width=1000>
   “Israel’s” overwhelming firepower in Gaza has yielded only devastation,
   dependence on the US, and reputational collapse, exposing brutality without
   control and myths shattered by resistance (Illustrated by Ali al-Hadi
   Chmeis to Al Mayadeen English)

“Israel’s” campaign since October 2023 has fused overwhelming firepower
with expansive ambitions, yet the strategic ledger reads very differently
from the public claims. Inside Gaza, a grinding ground war has failed to
deliver decision even as devastation has been driven to genocidal scales;
across the region, spectacular long-range operations have leaned on
American scaffolding that exposes dependence rather than sovereign reach.
The consequence is a widening gap between military exertion and political
effect: tactical shocks without strategic settlement, destruction without
control, and a reputational collapse accelerated by the humanitarian
catastrophe.
Overwhelming firepower but absent control

By mid-2025 “Israel” had taken more than two-thirds of the Strip and massed
within roughly a kilometre and a half of old Gaza City, telegraphing an
intent to push out roughly three-quarters of a million inhabitants. Yet a
war designed to crush resistance instead entrenched it. Months of
bombardment, razed districts, and shattered infrastructure have not
produced so-called “security,” freed captive Israeli soldiers, or
dismantled the Palestinian resistance’s governing capacity underground. The
Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) which long cultivated an aura of
invincibility, have struggled to secure and hold dense urban terrain
measured in single-digit kilometres.

The attrition has been severe and asymmetrical. About a quarter of a
million Palestinians have been killed or wounded; whole neighbourhoods,
hospitals, schools, and power systems have been levelled. In a single
recent week, more than 500 buildings were destroyed; around 600 tents
sheltering displaced families were burned; at least 20 centres housing
refugees were hit, leaving more than 50,000 people homeless overnight.
“Evacuation” leaflets and last-minute calls function as coercive
displacement mechanisms rather than credible civilian-protection measures
in a territory where “nowhere safe” is an operational reality engineered by
design.

The resistance’s tunnel networks have proved far more resilient than IOF
threat assessments suggested, and urban fighting has repeatedly channelled
armoured formations into ambush geometries where aerial dominance confers
diminishing returns. Recovery attempts for captive IOF soldiers have
consistently failed; the core objectives of freeing Israeli prisoners and
imposing full control remain unmet despite the scale of force and technical
sophistication. In short, Gaza is the textbook case of imperial firepower
colliding with a politically anchored popular resistance that knows its
ground.
ISR saturation meets denial, deception, and adaptation

“Israel’s” second push into Gaza City, marketed as “Operation Gideon’s
Chariots 2”, was underwritten by a saturated intelligence, surveillance,
and reconnaissance (ISR) picture: persistent drone orbits, offshore
reconnaissance aircraft from U.S. forces and other IOF partners,
space-based imagery and electronic collection, cyber intrusions, and
informant networks. In doctrine, fusion cells knit SIGINT, IMINT, and
HUMINT into actionable intelligence; in practice, the system was publicly
humiliated when Hamas moved a live captive IOF soldier through recognisable
cityscapes in daylight and published the footage. This was not a mere
propaganda flourish; it exposed the vulnerabilities of overreliance on
technical collection in cluttered urban terrain, persistent HUMINT gaps,
and fusion shortfalls. It underscored how ISR saturation can manufacture a
false sense of control that agile adversaries exploit. Gaza’s defenders
turned density, electromagnetic noise, and population movement into living
camouflage that blunted overmatch. Cognitively, a short, audacious video
achieved more effect than a hundred airstrikes. It eroded the aura of
omniscience that sustains coercive credibility.
The collapse of a manufactured myth

Amid criticism, the Israeli government replaced Herzi Halevi with Yael
Zamir as IOF Chief of Staff, a handover wrapped in the promise that Gaza
could be delivered “on a plate.” What followed instead was the protraction
of “Gideon’s Chariots,” officer-level admissions that negotiation would
ultimately be unavoidable, and a strategic conversation haunted by
reputational loss. If an army operating with minimal legal or political
restraint cannot subdue a besieged enclave, the 1967-vintage myth of
invincibility is analytically useless. The Lebanon stalemates, in 2006 and
again in 2024, had already weakened that myth; Gaza has fractured it. The
inability to prevent missile and drone penetrations deep into Palestinian
land occupied in 1948 from Yemen and Iran compounded the psychological
damage and further punctured deterrence theatre.

Politically, the military has become a foil. Once central to “state”
identity, settler hard-liners now publicly denigrate senior commanders. The
old image, “an army with a government”, has inverted; the IOF is
scapegoated to preserve an unwinnable course. That inversion corrodes
settler-military cohesion precisely when adaptive learning and
cross-institutional trust are most required.
“Long Arm” revealed as scaffolded reach

The strike on a Hamas leadership meeting in Doha marked a geographic
escalation with messaging far beyond Gaza. Tactically, it failed to
assassinate key figures; strategically, it collapsed a live mediation
channel, signalled that no capital is sanctuary, and, most tellingly,
exposed how Israeli long-arm operations ride American infrastructure. Open
sources tracked US and UK aerial tankers (USAF KC-46A Pegasus; RAF
Voyager/KC3) orbiting east of Qatar in the strike window; integrated
CENTCOM radar coverage would have tracked launch platforms, deconflicted
airspace, and ensured corridor access. Whether munitions were released from
outside Qatari airspace with precision stand-off weapons, or whether
identification friend-or-foe codes rendered tracks “friendly,” the decisive
enabler was the US-managed architecture that makes such missions feasible.

The weapon signature points to method: small-calibre, delay-fused precision
bombs optimised for roof penetration and selected-floor detonation in dense
urban settings, consistent with the 250-lb GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb
(SDB I), a GPS/INS-guided glide munition with roughly 70–110 km stand-off
range depending on release parameters. That profile permits stand-off
delivery while preserving deniability for overflight claims, but it does
not conceal the obvious: without US tankers, shared radar pictures,
permissive corridors, and regional command-and-control, the sortie geometry
makes little sense. The projection of Israeli power, in this instance, is
an extension of American supremacy, not a demonstration of unconstrained
sovereign reach.

The theatre around foreknowledge, conflicting timelines between
Washington’s statements and Doha’s account, mattered less than the physics
of the strike. Everyone operating in Gulf skies understands that nothing of
that profile happens untracked. Hosting US bases offers “Israel” a shield
and a springboard; it offers Arab hosts neither immunity nor leverage when
Israeli aims and American enabling coincide.
“Greater Israel”

Having failed to translate battlefield brutality into decisive outcomes,
the Israeli governing coalition has traded in land and symbolism.
Expansionist projects in and around Jerusalem, most notably the E1 scheme,
are pushed by key ministers to pre-empt any Palestinian statehood by
fracturing contiguity. Settlement growth functions as political currency to
keep the far right aligned while the army bleeds. The rhetorical invocation
of a Torah-rooted polity from Egypt’s river to the Euphrates serves not
just as a policy blueprint but as an ideological cover for present-day
objectives as well: annexation by increments and a narrative that reframes
failure in Gaza as destiny elsewhere.

The same logic explains continued Israeli aggression against Syria and
Lebanon. Since the September 2024 war against Lebanon, a handful of newly
occupied hill positions along the frontier in South Lebanon has grown to
eight, quietly widening a de facto buffer. A formal ceasefire with
Hezbollah would undercut the coalition’s ideological project and its claim
to strategic depth; confrontation sustains encroachment and preserves
domestic cohesion.

American policy has reinforced this posture. Formal US recognition of
Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Hights (2019) and an explicit preference
for Israeli so-called security prerogatives over inherited borders have
emboldened expansionist instincts. *When Washington’s envoy, Thomas
Barrack, declares that ‘for Israel’s safety the Sykes–Picot borders are
meaningless, they will go where they want, when they want, and do what they
want’, thereby reducing those lines to dispensable abstractions, the
message is that borders are treated as matters of convenience rather than
as legal constraints.* In that frame, expansion is not an aberration but a
licence.
Negotiation as a target set

Regionally, the Doha strike did more than miss its human targets; it struck
at the negotiating architecture itself. By hitting a venue associated with
mediation, under the shadow of the region’s largest US air base, the
operation signalled that diplomacy is dispensable whenever it threatens to
impose limits on the war’s internal logic. In practical terms, it condemned
Israeli captives to continued limbo and further weaponised their fate
within domestic politics; strategically, it told Arab states that American
security umbrellas do not extend to the protection of their sovereignty
when Israeli operational aims are engaged. The message to intermediaries
was chilling: your capital can be made into a battlespace, and your utility
as mediator is contingent on alignment, not neutrality.
International cracks

Western governments have provided weaponry, intelligence, and protection at
the UN; popular outrage, however, has pushed European debates toward
recognition of Palestinian statehood, not from newfound sentiment, but from
the impossibility of defending the facts on the ground. Arab capitals that
flirted with normalisation now face domestic opinion radicalised by images
of mass civilian harm; neighbours responsible for refugees balance quiet
security coordination with public alarm. Even in Washington, the apparatus
is not monolithic. Pentagon and State professionals can calculate strategic
risk even when political leadership shields impunity. The net effect is
isolation layered atop impunity, a volatile combination in which immediate
costs are deferred but long-term damage compounds.
The humanitarian ledger

Whatever the IOF’s talking points, the humanitarian record is measurable.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians dead or injured; hospitals,
schools, and refugee shelters systematically targeted; power and water
grids broken; urban cores pulverised; mass displacement and famine
engineered by tempo and design rather than incidental effect, a genocide
televised in daylight. When a single week’s strikes in Gaza City can erase
hundreds of structures and reduce tens of thousands to homelessness
overnight, the intent is territorial transformation by explosive force.
That is not a pathway to governance or security; it is the manufacture of
future wars and the hardening of a people’s will to resist.
Where this ends

Israeli coercion has reached diminishing returns in Gaza. ISR dominance,
armour, and precision munitions have not produced a decision. Palestinian
resistance has adapted faster than doctrine has adjusted; the political
centre of gravity, captive release, and “credible security”, remains unmet,
and persisting on the same course promises only more destruction and
further erosion of deterrent mystique.

The Doha strike has confirmed an old truth. “Israel’s” theatre-level reach
is rarely autonomous. It is scaffolded, riding American command networks,
tankers, radars, and permissive corridors. The spectacle of boundless reach
is, in fact, a mirror held by another’s hand.

An occupation entity once defined by “rapid conventional victories” now
finds itself exposed by the kind of war it preferred to avoid: long, urban,
attritional, and political. The war on Gaza demonstrates that superiority
in sensors and munitions is different from control; the Doha strike shows
that “strategic depth” is often rented, not owned. Meanwhile, the
humanitarian catastrophe begets new hostilities into the future.

Despite the grimness of the present and the vast Palestinian sacrifices on
the path to liberation, the result of this Israeli doctrine will not be
pacification but serial repetition of more blows traded across borders,
more capitals pulled into the battlespace, more illusions dispelled, and a
myth finally, irrevocably, replaced by a reckoning.
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