In the last few hours, Israel has had a difficult time on the military front and the diplomatic front. The nine Israeli soldiers killed in the same ambush on Tuesday in the northern Gaza neighbourhood of Shujaiya show that, in the third month of the war, the Palestinian armed resistance continues to seriously confront the occupying troops. Among the dead was a colonel, the highest-ranking military officer to lose his life during the ground incursion, with intense battles raging in both the north and south of the Palestinian enclave. That attack made Tuesday one of the worst the army has seen in the Gaza Strip in the current war. It also came as Israel, openly at odds with its main ally, the United States, is losing support in the international arena after the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday overwhelmingly called for a ceasefire, albeit in a non-binding vote.
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Israel-Gaza war, live
In the face of international pressure, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday: "Nothing will stop us." He made the remarks during a visit to a military facility where detainees are interrogated in Gaza. "We will continue until the end, until victory, until the elimination of Hamas," he added.
Earlier, the head of diplomacy had expressed himself in similar terms. "Israel will continue the war against Hamas with or without international support," Eli Cohen said. He said the country "has a broken heart" from casualties suffered a few hours earlier in Gaza, where he acknowledges they lost some of their "best" men. "A ceasefire at the current juncture would be a gift to the Hamas terrorist organization and allow them to return and threaten the inhabitants of Israel again," the foreign minister added, insisting on an increasingly disputed strategy. The burden of more than 18,500 deaths in the attacks in the Palestinian enclave and the growing humanitarian crisis affecting 1.8 million internally displaced people is growing.
The rains of the last few hours have left images of the improvised camps in the middle of the mud, which further complicates the survival of a population that fled their homes due to the bombings without what they needed to face the rigor of winter. The rains come as media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal report that Israel has already begun the operation, which could take weeks, to flood the tunnel system used by Hamas to defend itself with seawater and also to hide the more than 130 hostages still in its hands.
Israeli soldiers prepare to enter Gaza on Wednesday. RONEN ZVULUN (REUTERS)
Tuesday's ambush took place in the heart of Shujaiya, a densely populated area, where soldiers were attacked from buildings and suspected of having set off a bomb, according to Israeli media reports. The military responded with their weapons as they divided into groups, but when a rescue team arrived at the scene to help them, a second explosion occurred. Two of the dead are Colonel Itzhak Ben Basat, 44, and Lieutenant Colonel Tomer Greenberg, 35, both commanders of the Golani Brigade, an elite corps that lost other members in the same clash. Ben Basat is the highest-ranking Israeli military officer to die during the ground operation that began on October 27 and in which 115 soldiers have already lost their lives.
The Shujaiya neighbourhood in eastern Gaza City and overlooking the border with Israel has been the scene of intense clashes for days. It is in this very place, a network of alleys often inaccessible to tanks, bulldozers and armored vehicles, that Israel already stumbled into in 2014, during the last conflict fought in the Strip. Shortly before the ambush, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told a group of soldiers: "Gaza City is gradually crumbling and we will soon destroy the entire infrastructure of Hamas." "Hamas is on the verge of dissolution," the minister said the day before. The political and diplomatic battlefield, in which the heads of government of Israel and the United States face each other, runs parallel to the military scenario inside the Strip, where the army maintains its efforts to eliminate the Islamist militia.
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Photo Gallery: Images of the Israel-Gaza War
"What happened in Shujaiya was expected to happen," says Guillermo Pulido, a defense analyst for the magazine Ejercitos, recalling the conflict nine years ago, who does not see, in any case, that Israel is doing badly in Gaza. The neighborhood has been "one of Hamas' strengths for many years. In addition, the layout of the neighbourhood is quite problematic for urban warfare on the offensive and favours defensive warfare," he adds, recalling the battle of 20 July 2014 between the same protagonists. On that day, Israel bombed part of the neighbourhood from the air, killing dozens of civilians to save members of the Golani Brigade, who were ambushed by Hamas.
The UN resolution seeking a humanitarian ceasefire passed with 153 votes in favor, against 10 noesand 23 abstentions. Among those that rejected the proposal, in addition to Israel and the United States, were two European countries, Austria and the Czech Republic, followed by others from Latin America and Oceania and one African country, Liberia.
Territory known to the Islamist militia
In military tactics, generally, the attacker must do so with three times as many soldiers as the one defending. Israeli troops are better equipped and armed and are part of an army with a high level of technology, but the network of streets in the Shujaiya neighborhood, where almost 100,000 people used to live in six square kilometers, or the Jabalia refugee camp are territory well known to militants who have been waiting for the military for days or weeks before the possibility of hitting with a deadly ambush like the one on Tuesday. There is, moreover, one more obstacle for Israel in Gaza these days. It is the glorification of the martyrdom that surrounds the activity of members of Hamas and other Palestinian Islamist armed groups, and that makes them not feel like a loss their fall in combat.
A Palestinian prepares some food for his family in a camp for displaced people in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. MAHMOUD HAMS (AFP)
Despite Israel's unpopularity due to thousands of civilian casualties, Pulido believes that aviation has played an important role in countering the ability of Hamas and Islamic Jihad to attack Israeli territory with rockets. The army, he explains, has destroyed many launch pads, which is crucial after the intense missile activity that took place in the early hours of the Oct. 7 attack. "My opinion is that most of these rockets have already been destroyed by aerial bombardments," he said. During the early hours of that day alone, the Islamist militia launched some 3,000 rockets from the Strip into Israeli territory, according to data released by the army.
Pulido also does not believe that the militants have caused serious damage to tanks and other vehicles inside the Strip, many of them equipped with the Trophy active protection system, which makes it difficult for the rocket launchers (RPGs) with which they are usually attacked by the militants to hit, according to the vast majority of videos they are recording. In these Hamas recordings, very few fighters are seen almost always carrying out urban guerrilla tactics, adds this analyst, who believes that the ranks of the Islamists, "who hardly operate more than in platoons," have suffered serious damage both to their men and to their weapons and infrastructure.
As for the number of deaths in proportion to the number of attacks, the military analyst considers that "it is very low in Gaza" considering the 20,000 targets attacked that Israel reported two days ago, "so, if there are 18,000 dead, there is less than one per attack, in which more than one bomb or missile may have been used." "In other contemporary battles, such as those in Mosul or Raqqa, many more people were killed by each attack. In Mosul, an estimated 10,000 civilians were killed and there were far fewer airstrikes," the analyst explains.
"Things are not so bad for Israel, although it is not crushing [Hamas] as fast as it was believed," Pulido said. He has no doubt that, sooner or later, Hamas will lose the ability to stand up to the occupying troops, and so its men will have to "blend in with the population" and "go underground" by carrying out attacks in order to try to maintain a certain presence against the enemy. In that phase, he calculates, Israel will have to work more at the intelligence level, with "detentions, extortion and torture" to obtain information, a task in which, according to Pulido, the Israelis have extensive experience. But that phase, with very active battlefronts these days in both the north and the south, does not seem to be close.
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