Andrew Grossman
The Palestinian resistance factions, led by Hamas and its military wing the Qassam Brigades, continue to strike the Israeli invaders across Gaza at a steady tempo more than 440 days into the battle of Al-Aqsa Flood.
The resistance inflicts a steady loss of personnel and materiel on the IDF with guerrilla tactics, using the devastated landscape of their homes to evade Israeli surveillance drones and spotters. Resistance videos, regularly released, show the resistance utilizing sniper rifles and multi-stage ambushes which combine various weapons appropriate to the targets.
The resistance in the north continues to inflict losses on the IDF despite the total siege of northern Gaza. Rafah, in the south, was declared cleared of the “last three brigades” of the Resistance by Israel months ago, but a series of complex ambushes by the resistance in late November dubbed “Victory for Sinwar’s Blood” shows the lie of this claim. Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas and founder and organizer of the precursor to the Qassam Brigades, died fighting in Rafah in October this year while meeting with Qassam field commanders.
The weaponry of the resistance is locally-produced using un-exploded Israeli ordnance, following the precept of people’s war that the enemy is the supply line. This precept is also seen in the series of extraordinary commando-style assaults carried out by Qassam fighters in late December, whereby single fighters and small groups of fighters simply using knives have neutralized multiple IDF soldiers, taking their weaponry, gear, and uniforms, and then conducting further attacks.
The use of knives, however, does not imply that the resistance is running out of weaponry, but rather that it prefers to fight at “zero distance”, as Qassam puts it, which gives the guerrilla a tactical advantage.
The IDF continues to hide the full extent of its casualties through the total military censorship of media, while exaggerating in vague battle reports about hundreds of Palestinian fighters killed in single engagements, a ridiculous claim considering the resistance does not enter pitched battles and instead fights in small, mobile fire teams.
The resistance and the Palestinian people have continued to thwart Israeli plans, in particular the so-called “General’s Plan”, which aims to depopulate the northern Gaza strip, kill everyone who remains as a presumed militant, and then set up a “funnel” system of military checkpoints across the Netzarim corridor to process, arrest, and torture those passing back to their homes. The Palestinian masses in the northern Strip have organized demonstrations that proclaim their refusal to move.
Though there has been talk among analysts in the monopoly media that the recent fall of Assad in Syria will cripple the resistance by cutting off supply lines and weakening Iranian influence in the region, this assumes that the resistance is truly a “proxy” of Iran as the imperialists and their lackeys claim. In fact, the Palestinian national resistance bases its strength on the support of the Palestinian people and on its own independence and initiative.
image: Qassam commander lays out the battle plan for the multi-stage operation “Victory for Sinwar’s Blood”
