While an in-depth update on the situation in Gaza and the broader Israel genocidal campaign against Palestinians seems overdue, any full-bore treatment would quickly become emotionally numbing due to extent and savagery of the killing, maiming, and torture of Palestinians. That is before getting to the destruction of Palestinian society by destroying its institutions: its mosques, universities, schools, and hospitals.
As we’ll also cover briefly, the Biden Administration is trying to have it both ways with voters, pretending to Do Something via verbal wet noodle-love-taps. The latest was a cynical resolution at the UN which pretended to be a ceasefire resolution but a reading of the details showed it to be anything but. However, the US got to play virtuous victim when China and Russia vetoed it.
In the meantime, despite Israel’s continuing success in wiping out weak and defenseless Gazans, with a policy of starvation now doing most of the heavy lifting, the Israeli army continues to look like a paper tiger. As we’ll discuss, it is short on material and is increasingly dependent on a US which has drained its reserves in the Ukraine war. That is separate from the points often made by Scott Ritter, that the IDF is also operationally third-rate, with its air force the one arguable exception.
First, to the continuing horror on the ground. A solid, although therefore grim, sighting comes via the must-read Intercept story, “MAN-MADE HELL ON EARTH”: A CANADIAN DOCTOR ON HIS MEDICAL MISSION TO GAZA. The subject is Dr. Yasser Khan, an ophthalmologist specializing in eyelid and reconstructive facial surgery, who has taught and performed surgery in 45 countries in humanitarian settings. As many other doctors who have served in Gaza attest, he has never seen anything approaching the trauma and horror he witnessed there. A few snippets from Dr. Kahn:
What we’d been seeing livestreamed on Instagram, on social media or whatever, I actually saw myself and it was worse than I can imagine…
Doctors have been kidnapped, and, yes, they have been tortured. They dehumanize the doctors and health care workers when they capture them. We’ve seen pictures of them, so we know this happens, and it does indeed happen. A few of the doctors went through torture, and one doctor that came back, he’s a general surgeon, he came back, I was speaking to his wife, and he’s not the same anymore. He was tortured and he still has torture marks over his body, and he’s a general surgeon….These doctors when they come back, the few that are released, there’s still a lot that are under custody with the Israeli forces, they’re not the same anymore…..
I’m an eye surgeon, an eye plastic surgeon, and so I saw the classic, what I penned “the Gaza shrapnel face,” because in an explosive scenario, you don’t know what’s coming. When there’s an explosion, you don’t go like this [cover your face], you kind of actually, in fact, open your eyes. And so shrapnel’s everywhere. It’s a well-known fact that the Israeli forces are experimenting [with] weapons in Gaza to boost their weapon manufacturing industry. Because if a weapon is battle-tested, it’s more valuable, isn’t it? It’s got a higher value. So basically they’re using these weapons, these missiles that purposely, intently create these large shrapnel fragments that go everywhere. And they cause amputations that are unusual.
Dr. Khan performed surgeries to remove eyes of multiple children wounded in Israeli strikes, calling the injuries “the Gaza shrapnel face.”
Most amputations occur at the weak points, the elbow or the knee, and so they’re better tolerated. But these [shrapnel fragments] are causing mid-thigh, mid-arm amputations that are more difficult, more challenging, and also the rehabilitation afterward is also more challenging. Also these shrapnels [are] unlike a bullet wound. A bullet wound goes in and out; there’s an entry and exit point. Shrapnel stays there. So you gotta take it out. So the injuries I saw were — I mean, I saw people with their eyes blown apart. And when I was there, and this is my experience, I treated all children when I was there the first time. It was kids that [were aged] 2, 6, 9, 10, 13, 15, and 16, and 17 were the ones that I treated. And their eyes unfortunately had to be removed. They had shrapnel in their eye sockets that I had to remove and, of course, remove the eye. There’s many patients, many children who had shrapnel in both their eyes. And you can only do so much because right now, because of the aid blockade and because of the destruction of most of Gaza, there’s no equipment available to take shrapnel that’s in the eye out. And so we just leave them alone and they eventually go blind.And so I saw these facial injuries, I saw limbs of children just kind of hanging off, barely connected. I saw abdominal wounds where you had, of course, the intestines exposed
He also describes how the child amputees, even when not subject to multiple amputations due to infection, can’t be treated so as to be fitted for a prosthetic….charitably assuming they survive and there is money and for that:
The thing is that in any normal amputation, in a normal circumstance, a child who gets amputated goes through about eight or nine operations until they’re adults, to revise the stump and fix the stump. Who is going to do that now? Not only have they lost their supports, their entire family structure, they don’t have the family structure or the infrastructure to do that because it’s all been destroyed.
We had pointed out early on, even while the IDF was bombing Gaza hard, that they had done enough damage to infrastructure, as in destroying shelter and cutting off the electricity for water transport and purification (at that point they had not struck treatment plants…I assume that has happened) that the IDF could let nature run its course and let disease, starvation, and dehydration finish off the Gaza population. Israel now appears to be relying primarily on that approach, even though it is still targeting key facilities like the last remaining pretty functional hospital and also noising up its plan to attack Rafah, as in kill more Palestinians by military means if Egypt, as expected, continues to refuse to enable the ethnic cleansing by letting them enter Egypt.
To underscore that the starvation is intended, in case you harbored any doubt, see the Guardian in Israel will no longer approve Unrwa food aid to northern Gaza, agency says:
The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, said on Sunday that Israel had definitively barred it from making aid deliveries in northern Gaza, where the threat of famine is highest…
Last week a UN-backed food security assessment warned that famine was projected to hit the north of Gaza by May unless there was urgent intervention. Unrwa has not been able to deliver food to the north since 29 January, [Unrwa spokesperson, Juliette] Touma said.
Some representative commentary:
And to fill out the picture of Zionist savagery:
The latest Judge Napolitano interview of former Colonel Larry Wilkerson prominently featured a fresh example of US cynicism, that of proposing a UN “ceasefire” resolution that was anything but.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azjxQRMFVuk&t=15s
Starting at 1:15:
Napolitano: This is quite a turnabout for the United States…The United States of course offered a resolution for an immediate and long-term ceasefire. It included a condemnation of Hamas…The one this morning was vetoed by Russia and China….What kind of a sea-shift in thinking would there be to Joe Biden and Tony Blinken to authorize this resolution…?
Wilkerson: I think it’s a little more sophisticated than that. I don’t mean that term in the positive sense. They didn’t demand a cease fire. What they demanded was a determination of a process to get to a ceasefire. If you parse the language really closely, and what you see there, and this is why the Russians vetoed it, but others too, and I’m not talking about the current five but the big fifteen on the Security Council. In following that was defined what [it] would mean to determine the process [interrupts self] pure Blinkenese, and to a certain extent Bidenese, the process to get there, and that process would be orchestrated and demanded and would confine itself to what had happened with the United States diplomatic process. Now that’s a convoluted way of saying that Israel and the United States will determine the process that determines the ceasefire.
Napolitano: Well, that’s not a ceasefire!
Wilkerson: No, absolutely not. And there’s another aspect. They back off the statement that they should not go into Rafah with major military force. Just completely nullified that.
There is a wild card here, in that despite overwhelming sympathy among the Muslim “street” for the Palestinians, and frustration that governments have not acted, the reality, as many commentators have pointed out, is that none of these governments want to initiate a war, given that their countries, particularly the one most able to do so, Hezbollah as a part of the government in Lebanon, are in no position to endure the material and economic cost.
But as Alastair Crooke has stressed, the Resistance actually is in a slow boil, attritional conflict, with the Houthis taking the most visible, frontal action and Hezbollah pressuring Israel with its cross-border strikes, imposing costs on Israel by preventing the return of families near the Lebanon border to their homes and communities. Crooke has argued that the Resistance members worked out some time ago that both the US and Israel had organized their affairs so as to conduct short, intense, air-attack driven conflicts, and not to endure a protracted grind. We’ve featured occasional discussions of how the war is inflicting serious, and increasingly, lasting damage on Israel’s economy. Many businesses have shuttered or are operating at reduced levels. If that persists too long, they lose staffers and customers permanently. Similarly, a story last week reported that a large majority of the Israelis that decamped Israel shortly after October 7 planned not to return. That again is a permanent loss of productive and consumption capacity.
But will uprisings force some countries to take a more frontal posture with Israel? If so, what form might that take? See for instance:
In the meantime, another way the attritional Resistance strategy is exposing Israeli weakness is on the military front. See this story from The New Arab, Israeli army forced to use ‘1970s’ munitions amid shortages at start of Gaza war. Keep in mind that even though the story presents itself as presenting conditions at the outset of the conflict, when Israel had limited and too often old armaments stocks. However, there is no good reason to think the situation has improved much. Even though Israel’s needs are presumably lower than those of Ukraine, we know Ukraine has come close to cleaning out the entire Collective West cupboard.
Note further its mention of 155 mm missile shortages. The article does not mention a point sometimes made by Scott Ritter: the tubes wear out under high use and need to be replace. What are those inventories like? From The New Arab:
Israel’s army was forced to use outdated weapons and arms equipment as the army found itself inadequately prepared at the start of the war in Gaza…
In the first months of the war, the army, ill-prepared to fight, faced a munitions shortage that forced units to deploy 1950s-era shells, causing an “operational nightmare”.
Israeli daily Haaretz spoke to a reservist who described the chaos as Hamas’ incursion into southern Israel on October 7 took the military by surprise.
“There was a crazy shortage of equipment and the canons we had weren’t all in working order. Some worked, some were half dead,” the reservist told the newspaper.
The war has also seen Israel drop an unprecedented number of bombs on Gaza in just five months which has destroyed 35 percent of the territory’s infrastructure and killed 32,000 Palestinians…
Though Israel has a sophisticated arms industry, it also relies on the United States for large portions of its weapons supplies..
Artillery units scrambling to defend themselves against attacks from Hamas battalions were left to use “munitions dating back to the 1950s” which were in poor condition and produced “unusually high quantities of smoke that made it difficult for crews to fire for prolonged periods of time”, the Haaretz article noted.
In keeping with NATO standards, Israel uses “one of the world’s most wanted” 155mm artillery shells for its howitzer guns, a type of long-range artillery weapon which looks like a cannon.
Some of the cannons being used in the war originate from deals made with the US army in the 1970s, according to the Haaretz article.
These shells have seen huge price rises as demand has soared across the world in recent years, and Israel’s defence ministry signed a multi-million-dollar contract with Israeli weapons firm Elbit Systems which has factories in Britain, to produce these shells…
Other soldiers interviewed by Haaretz spoke of shortages of munitions from overfiring, and instances whereby officers told troops to preserve shells in case of flare ups in different areas of Gaza.
The soldier also mentioned that irregular shipments of munitions caused ‘chaos,’ noting an occasion when a unit received munitions marked “for training only” on the shells
We also have this interesting development, from Almayadeen Hezbollah drones deal precise hits to two Iron Dome launchers (hat tip Kevin W):
The Islamic Resistance in Lebanon – Hezbollah announced that its fighters launched two suicide drones at two Iron Dome launchers in the Israeli “Kfar Blum” military site at 12:20 pm (local time), dealing precise hits to the targets…
Earlier today, Hezbollah launched its operations at noon by engaging the Israeli “Ramim” barrack using artillery shells.
The Resistance also targeted the Israeli espionage equipment at al-Radar site in the occupied Lebanese Shebaa Farms at 1:10 pm, using accurate weapons and dealing precise hits to the target.
At 01:15 pm, Hezbollah further targeted the Israeli Bayad Blida post.
In parallel, Israeli occupation forces continued to target villages in south Lebanon as they shelled an area between Alma al-Shaab and al-Dhayrah, in addition to the Wadi al-Saluki and the outskirts of Kfar Kila, Kfar Chouba, and Jabal al-Sadana, according to our correspondent…
Amid Hezbollah’s strike on “Kfar Blum”, Israeli media expressed fear over the absence of deterrence against the operations launched by the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon, stressing that the absence of any warning before these operations is a “real problem”
Before the operation on “Kfar Blum”, the sirens were not activated, which led to a fire in the area as there was no chance to take appropriate emergency measures, Israeli media added.
Israeli media also reported that Israeli circles view the attack on ‘Kfar Blum” with great seriousness and caution, explaining that its results cannot be published.
Alastair Crooke has said that the Hebrew press has often had stories of unfavorable military deveopment, particularly IDF deaths, quickly yanked by the censors. So the lack of confirmation from the Israel side as to the effectiveness of the strikes on the Iron Dome platforms is not certain. But the fact that Hezbollah did appear to hit them is serious in and of itself.
The further question is whether these strikes are the most that Hezbollah can do now, or a warning of what might be in store?
We’ll stop here, since this is an overly dynamic situation and dwelling too much on current new information runs the risk of losing sight of bigger patterns. But in light of the above, Israel’s insistence on attacking Rafah and its increasing saber-rattling with Lebanon looks destructively reckless, or at best based on undue faith that the US can bail them out of whatever conflagration they set off.