Will Netanyahu invade Rafah?

If he could, he would have done it already. But it’s doubtful he can

For more than two months, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been threatening on an almost daily basis to invade the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

On Sunday, he vowed that no amount of international pressure would prevent him from going ahead with the planned ground offensive to achieve his war aims of eradicating Hamas, freeing all the hostages, and ensuring that Gaza never again pose a threat to Israel.

If Netanyahu was capable of proceeding with this assault he would not have dithered for a single day. But he is well aware that, for a number of reasons, it could be the end of him, and the beginning of the end of the Israeli occupation state.

The Israeli army is exhausted, demoralised, and depleted after extending the war into a sixth month without achieving any of its aims. It has sustained mounting casualties in its ranks and hundreds of its soldiers have refused to serve in Gaza to avoid being returned to their families in body bags.

The chief purpose of invading Rafah would be to try to achieve the principal goal of the war: the expulsion of one and a half million Palestinians into the Sinai desert. But this has become unachievable, because the vast majority of Palestinians would rather die than be removed from their homes and homeland, and there is almost unanimous opposition to such a displacement in most countries of the world.

Israel’s starvation policy and its war of annihilation failed to impel the people of Gaza to revolt against Hamas and its partners in resistance. The opposite happened. This popular support-base foiled all the US and Israel’s schemes to try to find an alternative to replace Hamas after the war was over. That is evidenced in the angry rejection encountered by the proposal to install a post-war puppet administration run by clans and local chieftains.

It may be relatively easy for the Israeli army and its tanks to storm into the Gaza Strip’s towns and villages But it is impossible to hold them because of the traps laid for its troops and tanks by resistance fighters as part of a well prepared and executed guerrilla war. It has already lost 1,270 tanks armored vehicles and thousands of dead and injured soldiers.

If Netanyahu were to go into Rafah, he and his army would not only face Palestinian resistance but also worldwide opposition. Most governments and international and humanitarian organisations have warned against such a move, in contrast to the early support his war on Gaza received on the pretext of Israel’s right to self-defence. This pretext fell apart in a matter of days when Israel’s true objectives were exposed: to wipe out the Palestinian people and annex the Gaza Strip and seize its huge offshore gas resources.

We did not need retired Israeli general Itzhak Brik to tell us that Israel has lost the war and its home front is not prepared for a regional war in Lebanon Yemen, and Iraq which would be a thousand times tougher than the Gaza war. Nor did we need the celebrity Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari to acknowledge that Hamas has won and achieved most of its aims in this war. The winner, he explained, is not necessarily the side that kills more people, takes more prisoners, destroys more homes, or occupies more land. The winner is the side that achieves its political aims, and in that respect, the October 7 raid was a success: thwarting normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia and any foreseeable prospect of an Arab-Israeli ‘peace’.

When Netanyahu sends his intelligence chief to Doha to discuss Hamas’ terms for a truce, it is hard to believe he is poised to invade Rafah — unless he intends to sabotage the negotiations, defy the entire world including the ever-indulgent USA, and kill more of the captives he claims to be seeking to free.

If a truce agreement is reached or he blocks it to go ahead with the assault, Netanyahu will emerge from this war defeated and deposed. Hamas and the other resistance groups will emerge victorious in the long run, like all national liberation movements that have waged effective guerrilla warfare against their oppressors.

Gaza will not be an exception. Ask the US what happened in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam, and remember how French rule ended in Algeria or the apartheid state in South Africa. The list is long, and history in every age is replete with proud examples.

Will Netanyahu invade Rafah?