Hamas has already defeated Israel, but neither the US nor Israel can admit it

 At the beginning of the Gaza-Israel war, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, announced his war government’s intent to completely crush Hamas. US President, Joe Biden, endorsed this position and began churning out atrocity propaganda in order to justify any number of civilian casualties inside Gaza for the sake of permitting Israel’s stated goal. Now in early February, it has become clear that Hamas has only become stronger and that the US-Israeli alliance fell into a perfectly prepared trap.

Gaza, after enduring 9 large-scale military assaults that decimated its civilian infrastructure, surviving in a territory that UN experts said became unlivable in 2020, on top of pushing through 17 years of siege and sanctions, the Palestinian armed groups have managed to pull off what most thought to be impossible: a decisive defeat of Israel.

Despite the insane level of human suffering inflicted by Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza, which would make many recoil at the assertion that Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime has been dealt a defeat, this time the indiscriminate murder and ethnic cleansing has not been a sacrifice made in vain. For many who were not privy to the topic prior to Israel having launched one of the worst and most indiscriminate military assaults in modern history, a litany of war crimes that makes even ISIS seem tame, the idea that this conflict has been anything but a catastrophe for the Palestinian national cause could seem quite counterintuitive.

For a little context, this is far from the first large scale assault of this kind against the Palestinian people. Many probably know by now of the thousands of innocent civilians who were butchered by the Israeli regime during the Israeli assaults on Gaza in 2008/2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021. Some, who have paid a little more attention, will also know of the brutal assaults in August of 2022 and even in May of 2023, but I would suggest the more solid comparison here would be to look briefly at Israel’s assault on Lebanon in 1982.

In 1982, the Israeli regime launched a murderous attack on Lebanese territory with the aim of dismantling the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), headed at the time by Yasser Arafat. The PLO, which is an umbrella organization under which the Palestinian political parties and factions had historically existed, was considered by the United States and Israel as a terrorist organization. Having based its headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon, its various groups carried out rocket attacks and cross border raids against Israeli military and illegal settlement targets. Each one of these attacks would beget disproportionate Israeli “reprisal raids”, as they were called at the time.

Israel’s assault on Lebanon ultimately resulted in the mass murder of around 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, most of them civilians. At the time, however, the attack was not initiated by any action taken by the Palestinians and was labelled pre-emptive in nature, leading to the collapse of the poorly prepared Palestinian and Lebanese resistance factions. The PLO leadership, along with many fighters, were ultimately forced to flee Beirut after having put up fierce resistance and were exiled to Northern Africa. Following this, the PLO’s power and influence significantly deteriorated and the lack of any force to protect Palestinian refugees in Lebanon allowed for a number of civilian massacres, which were either carried out or overseen by the Israelis who had occupied Southern Lebanon — the most infamous of which was the Sabra and Shatila camp massacre. In the Sabra and Shatila massacre alone, as many as 3,500 civilians were murdered.

Why do I bring up the 1982 Lebanon war? Because this was an example of defeat, yet, despite the overwhelming Israeli victory the resistance did not stop, in fact it was the very opposite. The PLO was expelled from Lebanon, but continued to operate and would later become more powerful inside of occupied Palestine. As for the resistance in Lebanon, from the 1982 war rose one of the most powerful armed groups in West Asia’s history, Hezbollah. Lebanese Hezbollah would later go on to liberate southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation and then defeat the Israeli military in a stand up fight in 2006.

A Defeat In The Military Sphere

This war between the Palestinian resistance in Gaza and Israel began with the Hamas-led and planned military operation known as ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’. The armed wing of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades, launched a meticulously planned armed raid which managed to completely dismantle the Israeli military in the southern portion of the country, all while eliminating the Israeli command and control, sending the Israeli forces into a random killing spree and managing to capture around 240 Israelis as prisoners in the process.

 

 

Israel and its Western allies have desperately attempted to frame the events that transpired on October 7, when Al-Aqsa Flood commenced, to have been a terrorist attack comparable to the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001. Although this article will not delve into the specifics, the military campaign clearly got messy and ended up involving several armed groups crossing over the separation barrier between Gaza and Israeli-held lands, during which around 670 Israeli non-combatants were killed. The atrocity propaganda, including claims of a pre-meditated mass rape campaign and that 40 babies were beheaded, were then used in order to justify Israel’s military response to its forces having been crushed by the Palestinian armed groups.

The Hamas military leadership anticipated the Israeli military invading the Gaza Strip and waited patiently for the full might of the Zionist armed forces to invade, so that they could engage them with their domestically produced small-arms arsenal. Using hundreds of kilometers of their complex web of tunnels, the some dozen Palestinian armed groups have engaged the Israeli army’s offensive in all areas of the besiege coastal territory. Well over 1,000 Israeli military vehicles have been partially or completely destroyed, while thousands of Israeli soldiers have been killed and wounded.

As for the losses on the Palestinian side, the Israeli military has claimed to have killed anywhere between 9 to 10 thousand Hamas fighters, while the likes of the Wall Street Journal reported that the number is somewhere between 20 to 30% of all Hamas fighters in Gaza. While the WSJ article concluded that the number of Hamas fighters killed, as per the analysis of the US, falls short of its war goals, these statistics are easily debunked through a common sense approach.

To begin with, there are over a dozen Palestinian armed groups fighting the Israeli army in Gaza. The likes of the Abu Ali Mustafa brigades, National Resistance Brigades, Quds Brigades, Mujahideen Brigades, and Salahudeen Brigades all have considerable numbers of soldiers. Specifically in the case of the Quds Brigades, which belong to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement, they are known to have more active fighters than Hamas does in its well known Qassam Brigades. The estimates that Israel and the United States have produced, regarding the number of Hamas fighters in Gaza, normally falls between 30 to 40 thousand, although these figures have not been proven and it is understood that during times of war the likes of the Gazan police and security forces could possibly be called upon to participate in the fighting, if need be.

Understanding the above and the fact that all the armed factions in Gaza operate under the ‘Joint Room’ of armed resistance factions, the Israeli and US estimates are easily proven non-credible. For anyone that has chosen to observe the hundreds of videos of the fighters in Gaza, it is evident that the fighters are not wearing formal insignia when they are on the battlefield, which then begs the question: how does Israel know when its killing Hamas fighters? All the group’s fighters are basically indistinguishable, so why do the Israelis and Americans claim that 9-10,000 Hamas fighters have been killed, without any breakdown of how many they estimate to have killed from any other group? None of it makes any sense.

The truth is, the Israeli military has no clue, and no hard evidence to present, that points to it having killed such large numbers of fighters in Gaza. Tel Aviv also has no idea how many rockets, RPG’s, fighters, or even tunnels exist in Gaza, it’s all random guess work, sometimes assisted by AI and intelligence gathering.

On the Palestinian side, they release tens of communiques every day and release daily videos documenting their successful attacks on Israeli forces, indicating what exact damage they inflicted on the invading army. We see nothing that even compares to this coming from the Israeli side, which has demonstrated a failure to destroy a considerable portion of Gaza’s tunnel system and to effectively seize any portion of the territory without encountering resistance. Even within areas the Israeli military has claimed to have established “full operational control” we have seen videos of their forces being blown to pieces.

No Hamas leaders in Gaza, like Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, or Abu Obeida have been killed. No Israeli prisoners have been extracted by force, while on three separate occasions Israeli special forces operations to re-take their captives have been foiled, even on one occasion by the PFLP’s Abu Ali Mustafa brigades — known to be the fourth most powerful armed group in Gaza. On one occasion, Israel even gunned down three of its own prisoners who were released and approached their armed forces waving white flags, one of which was shot 15 minutes after the first two. Four months and Hamas has not been defeated, shows no signs of surrender, and no military goal has been achieved by the Israelis. While, in the meantime, Lebanese Hezbollah has pushed the Israeli army back from its northern border with over 700 strikes on their positions and the Iraqi, Syrian, and Yemeni armed resistance groups have all opened fire on Israeli positions too.

 

A Defeat On The Political Level

On the political level, Hamas has managed to put the Palestinian cause back on the map, making it not only the most important issue in West Asia’s politics, but perhaps in global politics as well. Even the US and UK have expressed their intent to recognize a Palestinian State come the end of the war. While, on the other hand, Hamas has managed to dismantle Saudi-Israeli normalization efforts, crush US-Israeli regional endeavors, and to initiate a process of purging Western influence in the Middle East.

Hamas is now the most popular political party amongst the Arab world’s public and its support has expanded exponentially throughout occupied Palestine. No serious analyst would suggest that Hamas would lose a democratic election in the occupied territories at this point. To the vast majority of the Arab World, the Qassam Brigades are putting up the most heroic fight against what they see as a settler-colonial entity that represents Western imperialism.

Meanwhile, Hamas is being taken seriously by all nations throughout West Asia and even by the likes of Russia and China. It has demonstrated its power and everlasting commitment to the cause of creating a Palestinian State, in a way that can no longer be ignored.

Israel on the other hand has completely lost any semblance of its once highly proclaimed “deterrence capacity” — no one is scared of Tel Aviv anymore. The Israelis have been shown to be a paper tiger, consisting of soldiers who are incompetent, poorly trained, and ill-motivated for the tasks at hand, only possessing the capacity to kill on a mass scale from a distance in the most cowardly ways imaginable. The Israeli armed forces now appear to be what they sought to represent the opposite of, a scared group of cowards who are incapable of winning a standup fight.

Israel’s Hasbara Machine Defeated 

Through committing its genocidal attack against a civilian population, the Israeli regime has demonstrated on every single level that it is unstable, unhinged, and dangerous. Genocidal statements from its political, military, and intelligence leaders have travelled across the globe, as have videos from popular figures in the Israeli media, soldiers on the ground in Gaza, and even members of the general public. This, as South Africa charges Israel with committing violations of the Genocide Convention in Gaza, which the International Court of Justice (ICJ)’s judges overwhelmingly ruled was a viable case and issued provisional measures.

According to all the polling data we have from the US and UK, the majority of Americans and Brits desire a ceasefire in Gaza and believe that the Israeli military campaign has gone too far. The horrors committed against the Gazan civilian population have also led to unprecedented global street protests and nonviolent activism, on a scale which has dwarfed the anti-Iraq War Movement.

Playing a key role in the defeat of the Israeli narrative has been social media and the truly independent press, which has managed to set the tone of the narrative, despite the enormous efforts of the mainstream corporate media to run damage control in favor of Israel. As the polling data suggests, young people in the West are on average disgusted by what they are seeing in Gaza, and those who are 35 and under are more likely to side with the Palestinians.

Another major defeat for the Israeli narrative has been the attention that has been brought to the history of the conflict in general, which has greatly impacted the Zionist attempt to frame the history of the conflict as having begun on October 7, 2023. Young people from Jewish backgrounds are also coming out in record numbers to take direct action that calls for a ceasefire and condemns Israel’s actions, which serves as another massive defeat for the Israelis; whom argue that they represent all Jews.

To make things clear, despite the title being about a Hamas victory, the vast majority of the West’s public do not support the Palestinian political party or its armed wing. However, we are now seeing a greater understanding of why Palestinian armed struggle is necessary and that they do have the right under international law, per the 4th Geneva Convention, to resist using violent means, being an occupied territory.

 

The US and Israel Cannot Accept Their Defeat

Behaving like a heavyweight world champion boxer who was clearly outclassed and beaten, the image of Israeli-US invincibility has been dismantled in front of the world for all to see, and this is something that neither Washington nor Tel Aviv can accept. So, as many delusional boxers will start to make excuses and claim their opponent cheated, we see a very similar reaction here on the part of these two regimes.

The reality is that Hamas completely dismantled the entire Middle East policy agenda of the US-Israeli alliance on October 7. So, in retaliation, they are now choosing to mass murder civilians in order to get revenge. The Israeli military has failed to achieve any of its military objectives in Gaza and it has become clear that they have no clear war plans, it is just a bloodbath that is being carried out with the hope that it will crush the Palestinian armed groups during the process.

To summarise, Hamas has achieved the following:

• Putting the question of Palestinian Statehood back on the international agenda, to the point that even the US and UK have announced they are considering recognizing the State of Palestine at the United Nations.
• Inflicting a stunning military defeat upon the Israeli armed forces.
• Expanding their base of support throughout occupied Palestine and the Arab World.
• Proving the capabilities and strengths of the regional alliance of indigenous resistance groups and governments, which fall in the Iranian sphere of influence.
• Dismantling Joe Biden’s bid to bring Saudi-Israeli normalization and a new trade corridor through the region, something that won’t likely happen under the current administration at all, assuming the Democrats will fail to get reelected.
• Have revived the movement for Palestinian liberation around the globe and turned Israel into a pariah State.
• Managed to hold onto the Israeli prisoners, that will force Tel Aviv to strike an exchange which will free the some 10,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
• Will have deterred the Israelis from continuing to commit reckless aggression against Al-Aqsa Mosque. when the war ends.

On top off all of this, there will also be the possibility, come the end stages of this war, that Hamas will achieve ending the 17-year-long siege on Gaza, through a process in which the political party will work out an agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)’s Palestinian Authority.

While Israel has nothing to show for its genocidal attack, other than an endless list of war crimes and dead civilians, the Palestinians have paid the ultimate price in the fight for freedom and have pulled off what no Arab movement, group, or regime has ever gotten close to. Hamas has left the US and Israeli governments badly wounded. In the case of Israel, it has sustained wounds that it may never fully recover from, while Palestinians have advanced the notion that no matter what is done against them, they will never abandon the fight to liberate their homeland and allow the refugees to return.