Gaza no more! All of its 364-kilometers have been totally destroyed and obliterated. If the Israeli army had the capability, they would have wiped it off the face of the earth. But the resistance is another story. They stand strong and unflinching.
Israel has barely scratched the surface in “eradicating” Hamas and the other Palestinian groups. By all counts, and despite its colossal destruction, they give as good as they get and even better.
The Israelis, their politicians and army stand bewildered. The only thing they are doing is more destruction and bombing. They are bombing towns, cities and neighborhoods a second, third and fourth times simply because the resistance is too strong. They are bogged down. In Gaza there is no “cleaning operations”.
But it has been tough for the Palestinians in this smallest enclave in the world. Its destruction has been magnified and brutal.
“Every time I walk the streets of Gaza, I am overwhelmed by the desire to cry over what the city has become,” Bayan Abu Sultan writes on her X platform page @BayanPalestine.
“The smell of the blood of the martyrs’ wafts in every neighborhood,” the journalist whose home behind Al Shifa hospital was destroyed by the Israeli army says.
“The rubble extends as far as the eye can see in every direction,” the journalist who lived some of the worst onslaught on Al Shifa hospital by the Israel army, and was thought killed at one time points out.
Gaza no more!
“The garbage has piled up to an extent that prevents the continuation of normal life, and the features of the people only appear helpless.
Gaza has become uninhabitable,” she adds.
Quoting from what she said the Quds News Network points out “female Palestinian journalist Bayan Abu Sultan says after more than six months of brutal Israeli genocide, Gaza has become uninhabitable.
At one time when the Israeli army raided Al Shifa Hospital and started killing many of its people and destroyed its surrounding the French Reporters Sans Frontiers sounded the alarm bells that she may have been killed by the Israelis because she disappeared from the radar screen after 18 March.
Despite the mass slaughter, killing and destruction – 33,000 killed, 76,000 injured, 1.9 million displaced out of a total population of 2.3 million – many observers, a lot are Jewish and Israelis says after seven months of war on Gaza, it is Israel which is being defeated.
Many of the Hebrew media and newspapers are talking about a major defeat for Israel in its seventh months of war on Gaza. The daily Yedioth Ahronot headlines its report as “Israel defeated and Isolated” saying “the Israeli regime” is “defeated in the war against the Gaza Strip and is in sever isolation.”
The daily paper says the government and army has failed and “the main reason for this failure is the short-sighted party policy pursued by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”
Haaretz, another influential daily, writes: “We shouldn’t say that [word defeat] but there is no other option “We are defeated, it’s a total defeat.” Quoting the paper one blogger points out “admitting defeat is a matter of time…the entity is paying the price for its crimes”.
Adding insult to injury, he says none of the Israeli objectives were achieved in the war, only victories against women and children.
And Haim Ramon, an ex-Justice Minister, agrees. He says Israel has indeed, been strategically defeated in its war on Gaza. He made the comments in a radio interview quoted by the Hebrew Maariv newspaper.
And further to that, former Israeli Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Golan says that the Israeli army is stuck in Gaza without any real goals and/or exit strategy to leave the enclave.
One blogger (@HealthRanger) put it this way: “Israel’s only real military capabilities lie in bombing and slaughtering innocent, unarmed women and children who have no weapons, no air defenses and no armor.” He points out the IDF is “snowflake” and has been defeated whilst “Israel has only destroyed its reputation with the entire world.”
He says “Netanyahu has put Israel on a path of self-destruction that will earn the Zionists a place in history alongside the worst genocidal murderers the world has ever known”. Another blogger says Israel has “lost everything against the civilians of Gaza” whilst “Hamas has not been defeated and Israel appears for what it is: A genocidal state that aims only to take Gaza.
Finally, another Jewish blogger says in this war Israel sends the best of its soldiers but they return back handicapped, crippled and no longer of any use to the army that is if they are not killed.
Dr Asmar is based in Amman and covers Middle East affairs
