by Irina Park and Farrukh Abadi
Among the attacks leveraged against the Palestinian resistance and the heroic Operation al-Aqsa Flood is the claim that resistance forces are impotent, irrational, and suicidal. In other words, imperialist rhetoric is directed at portraying itself and its lackeys as invincible and the people as either weak, or, when rebelling against imperialism, as brainwashed zealots.
The military impact of al-Aqsa Flood and the ensuing resistance efforts by groups across Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq, prove that their united armed struggles are rational, strategic, and continue to be successful in depleting the armed forces of Israel, the backbone of the Israeli state. This is something that has been repeatedly acknowledged both directly and indirectly, by both the forces of reaction and resistance. The admittance by the IDF’s top spokesman that Hamas cannot be defeated after nearly one year of combat, the admittance by the IDF that it is lacking in tank crews and ammunition, Netanyahu’s begging US Congress for fast-tracked military support, and the US’s repeated deployment of military forces to the region—the most recent to include roughly 100 soldiers and anti-missile systems directly to Israel to counter Iran’s attacks despite claiming that Iran’s attack was “defeated and ineffective”—all of these amount to the enemy’s acknowledgment of the military prowess of the resistance, military facts that cut through the distortions of imperialism.
On the side of the resistance, the facts around its effectiveness can be seen in the number of casualties inflicted on Zionist forces, the number of operations carried out, and the quality of these operations.
Abu Obeida, the spokesman of Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades, stated on the one year anniversary of al-Aqsa Flood: “We killed and wounded thousands of enemy soldiers and destroyed hundreds of military vehicles.” By February, al-Qassam Brigades reported to have destroyed over 1,100 IDF vehicles.
The IDF reports that in Gaza it has suffered 740 deaths and 4,895 wounded (as of this writing). Of these, nearly half were killed on October 7 alone. These numbers do not include reservists who were also killed and taken prisoner, which highlights another strategic feature of the Operation. Still, these numbers are underestimated; resistance forces operating in Gaza regularly post video evidence of eliminating IDF members and, as mentioned above, the Israeli government is keen on minimizing the number of casualties it reports to try to retain its shattered image of invincibility. Occupation forces have withdrawn over 15 military brigades from Gaza over the last year, including several elite brigades that have served since or even before Israel’s founding in 1948.
Even based on underreported IDF data, the effectiveness of the resistance, coordinated among a number of different Palestinian factions, has so far caused the fourth highest amount of military deaths out of all of Israel’s wars. The military deaths on October 7 alone amount to the sixth deadliest war for the IDF. Far from “senseless violence”, the Palestinian counteroffensive has shown its ability of quickly eliminating enemy military forces within a protracted sequence.
One notable example is al-Qassam Brigades’ ambushes in the northern Gaza neighborhood Shuja’iyya in December 2023 that killed at least 11 Israeli officers and a battalion commander. Al-Qassam fighters had disguised themselves in IDF uniforms and lured the soldiers into a building filled with explosives. A more recent operation early in October 2024, titled “Renewal of the Covenant and Allegiance Ambush”, shows al-Qassam fighters in southern Gaza rapidly destroying a number of IDF vehicles in an attack dedicated to those “martyred and assassinated by the hands of treachery and betrayal, leading amongst them the recently-assassinated Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah.”
The West Bank has also seen resistance growing in quantity and quality over the last year. According to the Palestine Information Center (Ma’ta), about 80 guerrilla acts took place in the West Bank between October 7 and September 2024, in which 47 Israelis were killed and more than 470 wounded. One example includes a two-stage car bombing ambush that wounded 3 Israeli soldiers, including a brigade commander, during Israel’s weeks-long siege on refugee camps in the West Bank last August.
There have also been actions carried out within Israel itself over the past year. Most notably, in early October 2024, two Palestinians from the West Bank stabbed an Israeli solider, took his weapon, and killed 7 Israelis and injured at least 16 in Tel Aviv.
The Lebanese resistance party Hezbollah and affiliated groups in Lebanon have conducted 1,901 attacks that has killed dozens of Israelis as of late September, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED). Since Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, Hezbollah attacks have intensified and resulted in dozens of IDF casualties both in Lebanon and Israel. On October 13, 2024, around 25 Israeli soldiers were reported to be injured by Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon in what was one of the highest numbers of Israeli casualties in a single day since October 7. In the same week, Hezbollah carried out two drone attacks in central Israel just days apart, with one hitting an Israeli military base killing four and injuring over 60. This is to say nothing of the displacement of tens of thousands of Israelis from its northern occupied territory since Hezbollah began its attacks a year ago, and its economic impacts. A prominent Israel military affairs specialist recently noted that Hezbollah has yet to even use 10% of its capabilities.
The Yemeni resistance group Ansarallah reports having “launched over 1,000 missiles and drones over the past year, and we have also used boats in the seas. Our armed forces have targeted 193 ships linked to the Israeli enemy, and also to the Americans and the British.” On November 20, 2023, Ansarallah forces seized an Israeli ship in the Red Sea by helicopter and steered it to the coast of Yemen. More recently, on October 3, 2024, they caused substantial damage to a British oil tanker using a drone boat. Israel’s Port of Eilat declared bankruptcy over the summer as a direct result of the blockade, which is of particular significance for a country that receives almost all of its imports by sea.
Their missile strikes have also seen qualitative leaps over the last year. In mid-July, the group struck Tel Aviv near the US embassy with a drone that killed one and injured several more. Two months later, Ansarallah struck a military site in Tel Aviv using a hypersonic missile, destroying a train station and sending more than two million Israelis to take shelter for the first time in history. This number would be surpassed weeks later on October 1, with Iran’s Operation True Promise II, which struck military targets across the entire country with hundreds of hypersonic missiles, sending nearly the entire population of Israel to take shelter.
Between their naval and missile attacks, Ansarallah has the distinction of being the first military force in history to utilize anti-ship ballistic missiles and also to engage in space combat, when one of its ballistic missiles was intercepted in outer space.
There are other anti-imperialist groups that have also taken part in attacks on Israel, such as resistance forces in Iraq, as well as attacks that have aligned with the interests of the resistance, such as Iran’s missile attacks. Between these forces, and with the support of millions of masses throughout the Middle East and the world, Zionist forces have been dealt powerful blows from which it cannot recover.
