“The earlier wars [in the Middle East] were shorter in duration, the physical destruction was less and the death toll was less than the current war. In the current war, Gaza has been totally destroyed,” political analyst Dr. Hossein Askari told Sputnik on the one-year anniversary of the Israel-Hamas War, commenting on how the present conflict has been nothing like the mostly state-vs-state regional wars of 1956, 1967, 1973, or 1982.
Listing off the casualties of the current conflict, including 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza, Askari, a professor emeritus at George Washington University, says he fears the true death toll may be as high as 100,000, accounting for those who remain buried in the rubble and unaccounted for, or suffering from lack of food or medical care. Then there are the 1,200+ deaths on the Israeli side after October 7, hundreds of Israeli military casualties in Gaza, and now, the rising death toll in Lebanon amid Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah, which is escalating by the day.
“This war has been enabled and financed by the United States. The US has stood by and supplied Israel’s war machine,” the academic said, adding that unfortunately for the Palestinians, many regional leaders “are all too dependent on the United States for their existence and have no appetite for opposing Israel’s brutal rule and carnage,” unless they are somehow forced into the fray by domestic upheavals.
Characterizing the conflict in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem as an unashamed Israeli land grab attempt, Askari warned that the war could easily escalate into a “much more global war if Israel attacks Iranian infrastructure, especially its oil facilities,” following last week’s Iranian retaliatory missile strikes on military and intelligence sites across Israel.
Doing so could prompt Iran to target oil facilities in Gulf countries where the US has a military presence. “It could become a mess, a total regional war, if not a mini world war,” the observer warned.
Askari expects the conflict to continue for as long as Prime Minister Netanyahu continues to feel he can do anything he wants and continue to receive US backing. “America talks peace but in the same breath supplies lethal weapons, money and political support to Israel to continue its carnage and land grab,” he said.
The upcoming presidential elections in the US are unlikely to change things for the better, and could make things worse, the academic believes.
“Biden is weak and he bends to Israeli wishes. He considers not what is in America’s interest but what the Israeli lobby wants. He has said that he is ‘a Zionist’! But the future does not look good after Biden. If Harris wins she will follow Biden but with a little more empathy. If Trump wins, It will be Biden on steroids,” Askari said.
Gaza Hybrid War Shows Changing Face of Mideast Warfare
“From the 1980s, there’s been a new concept in our lives which is non-state actors…We have very organized, [well] armed non-state actors that have a chain of command, that have mobilization, that have manpower, almost acting as a national army,” Furkan Halit Yolcu, security expert and researcher at the Middle East Institute at Sakarya University, told Sputnik, commenting on the changing face of modern conflicts in the region, as exemplified by the Hamas-Israel conflict.
“Before that we had interstate wars where two or more states were having conflict zones, having clashes, raiding borders,” etc. Today, “it’s a bit more severe since we don’t have war fronts anymore and wars are now urbanized. War is now in the cities. War is now in the buildings that people used to live in. It’s become more severe,” Yolcu said.
Israel, which “has been trying to enlarge and broaden its borders,” now faces organized non-state adversaries from the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah and Ansar Allah, some armed with modern anti-tank weapons, air defense systems and missiles and receiving support from the Iran-led Axis of Resistance.
“The aim is clear - Israel has decided on annihilating Gaza, annihilating Palestine…So the next step is then attacking Jordan, attacking Syria and attacking Lebanon. [Israel’s adversaries] see that even if they sacrifice Gaza and the West Bank, it’s not going to be enough for Israel. That’s why they have decided that it’s better to stop this before it gets out of hand…to stand against Israel and force it to stop the massacres and accept a two-state solution.” This, the observer admitted, seems impossible so long as Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition remains in power.
“Israel, as long as they are managed with Netanyahu and their hawkish closed group - they are not going to sit down for peace talks at all. What they have in mind is that their political stability and their political terms, their political survival simply sits on the war itself. Because imagine, even before October 7, there were huge demonstrations against Netanyahu to force him to resign. And six months after October 7th, there were again demonstrations against Netanyahu even though the war was started,” Yolcu recalled.