The Americans, too, understand that the battle is simply unwinnable, and most likely they also know that Israel’s policy of starving Palestinians is a direct outcome of their repeated failures in the battlefield.
An Israeli military analyst was cited by Al-Jazeera as making the following assessment of the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza:
“In the 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, we found the forest, but we did not find the trees, but when we entered the Gaza Strip, we did not find the forest or the trees”.
Indeed, in the 157 days of a most destructive war on the tiny and besieged Strip, neither a forest nor a tree have been found. But what is the logical explanation of this? In short, ‘passive defense’.
What is Passive Defense?
The basic definition of passive defense, according to Merriam-Webster, is “a defense designed solely to resist in place or minimize the effects of an attack against a specified area, position, or front.”
When this principle is applied in the military field, it looks something like this: “A set of measures taken to reduce vulnerability and minimize the potential damage caused by the attack of enemy forces”.
If the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7 was indeed, as many analysts, including Israelis, agree, “the largest strategy deceptive operation” ever suffered by the Israeli army, leading the country’s “largest intelligence failure”, then the war which followed is the greatest passive defense operation ever carried in any Middle Eastern war.
Change of Tactics
Not only did the Palestinian resistors in Gaza manage to absorb the initial shock of unprecedented firepower ever used by any standing army in decades, but it also managed to lure the Israeli army into numerous ambushes, leading to the destruction of an unprecedented number of Merkava tanks and other military vehicles.
Thousands of Israeli soldiers must have been killed and wounded in these televised attacks, though Israel only admits to a much smaller number.
And it seems that whatever the Israeli army does to change tactics, thus regaining the initiative, the outcome is the same, simply because the Resistance, too, constantly changes its tactics.
The last claim can easily be demonstrated in the current fighting in northern Gaza, where Israeli has claimed to have eliminated the Resistance, and where it is currently starving the remaining population there.
Despite constant assurances by Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari and, of course, by his boss, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, many Israeli military analysts – former, or even active top military brass – speak of a different reality underway in Gaza. In this reality, the Israeli military is simply beleaguered, depleted, and running from one ambush to the other.
The Americans, too, understand that the battle is simply unwinnable, and most likely they also know that Israel’s policy of starving Palestinians is a direct outcome of their repeated failures in the battlefield.
A recent published American intelligence assessment indicated that Hamas is likely able to fight for years to come.
Indeed, the Palestinian Resistance tactic of passive defense seems to be working and working well.
(The Palestine Chronicle)
