London – Together – Writer Paul Rogers, an honorary professor of peace studies at the University of Bradford, spoke in an article in the British newspaper The Guardian about the ‘brutal and losing’ strategy of the Israeli occupation army in targeting civilians in the Gaza Strip.
Rogers said, “The Israeli army’s inhumane attacks on Rafah are not a coincidence, but rather central to its brutal and losing strategy.”
He added that, during the 8-month war on Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government announced, repeatedly, that “Israel is using force directed against Hamas, and not against civilians, but that contradicts the actual conduct of this war, and with the entire Israeli method of fighting.”
From the beginning, ‘the Israeli army was expanding the scope of its attacks beyond Hamas’s paramilitary units, targeting schools, universities, hospitals, water treatment plants and the like, journalists, aid workers and medical staff.’
According to Rogers, this use of ‘disproportionate force’ constitutes an extension
of the ‘Dahiya Doctrine,’ which is believed to have arisen during the 2006 war in Lebanon, against Hezbollah, and stipulates the use of force on a large-scale and long-term basis against the civilian population in general. In order to achieve two specific goals.
The first goal of using this doctrine, according to the article, is short-term, and ‘is to undermine support for the fighting,’ while the second goal is to make ‘Hamas’ work in Gaza more difficult.’
The long-term goal is to “act as a deterrent to future paramilitary movements of any kind, whether in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, or southern Lebanon.”
Rogers pointed out that this doctrine ‘stems from the acceptance by the Israeli army, which rarely admits this publicly, that it is almost impossible to defeat fighters holed up in urban areas, especially if they are willing to die for their cause and inflict on its forces large, politically unacceptable losses.’
But despite the army’s widespread use of force and the destruction of a large part of the
Gaza Strip, the war, according to the writer, “is going poorly for the Israelis, such that Hamas remains and continues to reshape itself.”
He added: “The failure of the Israeli army has already become clear for several months, but the Netanyahu government has nowhere else to turn, while US President Joe Biden will not yet take the only major step of cutting off all arms shipments to Israel.”
As long as the United States and Britain refuse to accept the decisions of the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, ‘Netanyahu can remain alive’ (political), according to Rogues.
However, “there is one hopeful sign, which is that the public mood in Israel is changing regarding the continuation of the war,” which means that “its end may come from within.”
Rogers explained, at the conclusion of his article, that ‘Israel has lived, for decades now, in a security contradiction. It is apparently fortified, but it is constantly insecure, due to the fundamental conflict over the land and the p
eople.’
The writer concluded that ‘this trap of insecurity will continue indefinitely, unless a just settlement is reached with the Palestinians.’
It should be noted that the Israeli occupation committed, earlier today, a new massacre in Mawasi Rafah, which claimed the lives of 21 martyrs and 64 wounded, 10 of whom were in critical conditions.
This massacre comes two days after the occupation committed a massacre against dozens of displaced people by bombing their tents set up in UNRWA warehouses in Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip.
Thus, the death toll from the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip rose to 36,096 martyrs, since the outbreak of the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ on the seventh of last October.
Source: Maan News Agency