Tel Aviv suspended a temporary truce last Friday over Hamas' alleged violations of the agreement. As of December 5, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is said to have expanded its military activities in Gaza.
"More people are being killed every day. And the frustration is that we have been spending our time for the last 60 days trying to tell the world that our lives are just as equal, that even if the actual atrocities happened on October 7th, they happened to 1,500 human beings. But as you just said, 16,000 human beings died," Ghadi Francis, veteran war correspondent, told Sputnik.
In the north of Gaza, the Israeli military has focused on Shuja’iyya, a Gaza City neighborhood, and Jabaliya, a Palestinian city located four kilometers north of Gaza City, in the North Gaza Governorate. On Tuesday, the IDF and Shin Bet, an Israeli security agency, raided a Hamas general security headquarters reportedly located there. Prior to the op, the Israeli military completed the encirclement of the Jabaliya refugee camp – a densely populated urban agglomeration – in recent days.
At the same time, the IDF is expanding its ground operation into Khan Yunis, a city in the southern Gaza Strip and the capital of the Khan Yunis Governorate. The Israeli military believes that Hamas' leadership is currently hiding there, as per the Israeli press. Meanwhile, the Israel Air Force (IAF) is continuing to conduct airstrikes throughout the strip. For its part, Hamas is pushing ahead with rocket attacks against the Jewish state.
"Well, everybody has to know that the Israelis practically withdrew completely from north Gaza right now because they couldn't even hold the ground that they had," Laith Marouf, a broadcaster and journalist based in Beirut, Lebanon, told Sputnik. "So now that they're trying to go into the south of Gaza since the morning, they had at least seven tanks and seven APCs destroyed by the resistance. And as the Israelis were attempting to enter the south of Gaza and they had to withdraw from the confrontation themselves, because they had lost so much of their materiel and soldiers on the battlefield since the morning."
"So it is clear that what they couldn't achieve in a totally destroyed north of Gaza they definitely cannot achieve with a southern Gaza that hasn't been totally destroyed yet. And that's why we see the carpet bombing continue. The circles of fire at them as they continue to do things like destroying whole neighborhoods at a time. And that's still not helping them with the military battle with their opponents, Hamas and Islamic Jihad; they're only achieving destruction of civilian homes and attacking hospitals. Today, they attacked another hospital. And any time they are faced with their opponents, they either lose the battle or run away," the journalist said.
The Wall Street Journal claimed on December 4 that the IDF is planning to flood Hamas' underground system in the Gaza Strip with water pumped from the Mediterranean Sea in order to destroy the group’s subterranean network of passages and hideaways.
In addition, Israeli warplanes attacked Hezbollah installations, including observation posts, weapons depots, and other sites, in Lebanon on Tuesday in response to a cross-border missile strike. It was also reported on December 5 that several military sites in Sanaa belonging to Yemen's Houthis had been subjected to drone attacks. The reported strikes followed a massive attack on three commercial ships in the Red Sea, launched by Houthi militants.
Why It's Too Early to Draw Up Plans Who Will Reign Gaza
Meanwhile, The Washington Post released an article titled "Who will run Gaza after the war? US searches for best of bad options." As per the newspaper, the Biden administration is already planning for "the day after" in Gaza, even though Israel's operation is not over yet. Team Biden insists on installing a "revitalized" Palestinian Authority at the helm of Gaza – something which is equally unpopular among Israelis and Palestinians.
"I would say it is wishful thinking," Marouf said. "It's daydreaming that the Americans think that they can decide who governs in Gaza or in Palestine in general. They are dreaming of something that will never happen, which is, number one, the defeat of the resistance in Gaza and or the ability of the West to determine what's going to happen after the end of this war, as we see it right now, until today, after close to 50 days of war."
"Right now, the Israelis have not been able to achieve one military objective. We heard the secretary of defense of the United States talk about that. The fact that the Israelis have these goals that are unattainable, which include this big dream, the daydream of destroying Hamas, controlling Gaza after and who rules it. So I think the battlefield is going to decide what's going to happen at the end of this war," the award-winning journalist continued.
Over the past several days, the US administration has repeatedly raised concerns over Tel Aviv's Gaza operation, telling the Israeli leadership that it should exercise restraint in southern Gaza, which is densely populated, especially after hundreds of thousands have been evacuated there from the north. For his part, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly told Israeli civilian and military officials that they don't have much time to complete their op. Most recently, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin warned Israel that it may face "strategic defeat" if it fails to protect civilians. So far, the Israeli attacks have killed almost 16,000 in Gaza.
Per Ghadi Francis, the Palestine-Israel conflict cannot be solved on the battlefield. The perpetual cycle of violence will continue unless a fair peaceful solution is reached, he said. Otherwise, new generations of Palestinians would continue the fight.
"I think what Israel knows and what Lloyd Austin yesterday tried to tell them about the strategic war here is that there is no way they can kill everyone and there is no way that there won't be a new people and a new generation that knows 75 years ago what they did, what they did to Palestine when they did the first genocide in Palestine, they thought that with the time and with the years and with the normalization and with the whole different kind of war on the social structure and the social unity of the indigenous people of Palestine, they thought that after all these years, these new ones would have forgotten by now. They want to eat. They want to live. They want to acquire a phone. Well, the Generation Z surprised everyone in Sheikh Jarrah. And right now they are surprising the world in the sense that, no, they haven't forgotten and they are even more radical and they want their land," the war correspondent concluded.