[Retraction: I
no longer believe that there will be a truce as Netanyahu does not care
about the lives of the Israeli hostages and even less about the
deterioration of Israel’s image abroad. Furthermore, Israeli public
opinion still does not support a deal with Hamas. As such, Israel’s
military forces will most probably try to put themselves as much as
possible out of harm’s way by scaling down even further their operations
in the Gaza Strip and instead simply enforce a total blockade of the
enclave so as to starve the
population and allow death by disease
to occur on an even larger scale than is the case right now while
continuing to bomb as much as possible of what is left of the
infrastructure/residential areas and also continue to bomb or shell as
many refugee camps as possible without providing too much evidence for
South Africa to expand the scope of its legal intervention before the
International Court of Justice at The Hague.
28th Jan 2024]
28th Jan 2024]
I am convinced that the loss of 24 soldiers
on Monday 22nd January will be seen in retrospect as the day marking the
beginning of the end of Netanyahu’s exceptionally long political career,
one that has been extremely lethal to the original inhabitants of the
land, the Palestinian people, as these are descended in large part from
the Biblical Philistines, unlike most of the Israeli settlers who are in
no way the descendants of the Israelites as their genetic make-up is
European (Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, Poland[added 28-1-2024], etc.),
not Middle Eastern.
Personally, I doubt that Israel’s bloodiest day so far can be ascribed ‘to an accident or friendly fire’ on the ground that it was unlikely ‘that Hamas fighters would be in the northernmost part of Gaza’ as a commentator posted on the Israeli daily Haaretz given that this is precisely what guerrilla warfare is all about, i.e. conducting unexpected and daring raids against your enemy, as what happened in fact on 7th October.
To me, Monday’s loss of twenty-plus soldiers is eerily similar to the tactics which were used against the IDF in early December, as reported by the UAE daily The National on the 7th of last month:
In a deliberate, complex ambush on Tuesday, Al Qassam claimed that it detonated numerous claymore and anti-personnel mines east of Khan Younis.
In another attack Hamas detonated a house-borne improvised explosive device, collapsing the building close to Israeli forces.
Its fighters also filmed Israeli soldiers relaxing in temporary quarters in Gaza before filling a tunnel beneath them with explosives and detonating it under about 60 soldiers.
Source: Thomas Harding, ‘Hamas develops new tactics to inflict high Israeli casualties’, Thomas Harding, The National, 7 Dec 2023
This is why I expect several such incidents to take place in the days ahead, so that this, together with pressure from the families whose loved ones were taken as hostages and who have still not been released by Hamas, will force Netanyahu to concede another ceasefire which Hamas will then be able to use to prepare for the next stage of the war, one in which they will act more like the Japanese kamikazes of World War Two and thus manage to inflict far heavier casualties on Israeli soldiers, so that the cost will be deemed too high by that country’s public opinion and that Netanyahu will then be obliged to come to the negotiating table, which in turn will sound the death knell for his political career as well as for his dream of going down in history as the Israeli politician who would have achieved the following:
Personally, I doubt that Israel’s bloodiest day so far can be ascribed ‘to an accident or friendly fire’ on the ground that it was unlikely ‘that Hamas fighters would be in the northernmost part of Gaza’ as a commentator posted on the Israeli daily Haaretz given that this is precisely what guerrilla warfare is all about, i.e. conducting unexpected and daring raids against your enemy, as what happened in fact on 7th October.
To me, Monday’s loss of twenty-plus soldiers is eerily similar to the tactics which were used against the IDF in early December, as reported by the UAE daily The National on the 7th of last month:
In a deliberate, complex ambush on Tuesday, Al Qassam claimed that it detonated numerous claymore and anti-personnel mines east of Khan Younis.
In another attack Hamas detonated a house-borne improvised explosive device, collapsing the building close to Israeli forces.
Its fighters also filmed Israeli soldiers relaxing in temporary quarters in Gaza before filling a tunnel beneath them with explosives and detonating it under about 60 soldiers.
Source: Thomas Harding, ‘Hamas develops new tactics to inflict high Israeli casualties’, Thomas Harding, The National, 7 Dec 2023
This is why I expect several such incidents to take place in the days ahead, so that this, together with pressure from the families whose loved ones were taken as hostages and who have still not been released by Hamas, will force Netanyahu to concede another ceasefire which Hamas will then be able to use to prepare for the next stage of the war, one in which they will act more like the Japanese kamikazes of World War Two and thus manage to inflict far heavier casualties on Israeli soldiers, so that the cost will be deemed too high by that country’s public opinion and that Netanyahu will then be obliged to come to the negotiating table, which in turn will sound the death knell for his political career as well as for his dream of going down in history as the Israeli politician who would have achieved the following:
Netanyahu’s address at the
UN on 22nd September 2023.
Lausanne, the above was
published on the twenty-third day of the
first month of the year two thousand and
twenty-four.
