Hurdles in Israeli ground offensive against Hamas terrorists in Gaza

It is day 18 of the Israeli retaliation to a gruesome terror attack by Hamas in which over 1400 persons were brutalized and murdered and 222 persons including foreign nationals were abducted. While Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have been on an aerial offensive from day one with intelligence-based cross-border raids into Gaza to take on Hamas leadership, the terrorist group with its backers Iran and Qatar are clearly playing to a military and information warfare plan which has already factored the Israeli retaliation. The periodic release of hostages in numbers of two is designed to delay the IDF land offensive and make barbaric Hamas terrorists appear more reasonable in front of the “Woke” Anglo-Saxon West. Apart from the hostages held by this Iran proxy group, it is the US which is trying to delay the Israeli land offensive as its assets in the Middle East will be targeted by the other proxy groups—Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

While Israel has no options but to eradicate Hamas in Gaza, the firepower and backing provided by Iran to Hezbollah in the 2006 war in Lebanon with Tel Aviv will sober down the most hot-headed Israeli generals as there is a definite possibility of IDF getting bogged down in Gaza. Simply put, Hamas is really a cat’s paw in Iran’s proxy offensive against Israel and Tehran will lose its credibility in the Islamic jihadist world if the terrorist group and its leadership get wiped out.

As of now, Iran is the big winner in the Middle East conflagration as in one blow it has killed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s dream to turn West Asia into a new Europe and severely retarded the growth of UAE under the visionary leadership of President Mohammed bin Zayed as the new global destination. Tehran has also given breathing space to its newfound friend China as the global focus is now Middle-East, not Indo-Pacific or Taiwan in particular. Fact is that while Israeli companies remained invested in high-tech areas of China, the Xi Jinping regime has not even condemned Hamas terrorism and only talked about civilian casualties in general.

Even though the US has placed its carrier strike group led by USS Dwight Eisenhower in the Persian Gulf to deter Iran from escalating the conflict with Israel, Tehran perhaps has armed its Sunni proxies enough in Tel Aviv’s neighbourhood to keep the fire burning for time to come. The other reason for the US to contain the conflict is that a horizontal conflagration will engulf the Middle East and the oil prices will go through the roof, damaging the political prospects of election-bound nations.

From Israel’s perspective, the ground offensive is also fraught with danger as Hamas’ military capability appears to be degraded but not decimated. Using an underground tunnel network reminiscent of Viet Cong communist guerillas, Hamas continues to fire rockets at Israel with Shia Hezbollah keeping the temperature hot on the Lebanon front. Israel needs a clear victory in Gaza and cannot afford a long drawn-out conflict on two fronts. Global sympathy has limits and time is running out.

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