Can Israel achieve the goals it has set for itself in a ground war? With Jon Elmer

We are now going to turn to our in-house war analyst John Elmer, contributing editor at the Electronic Intifada. John, what have you specifically been watching closely over the last few days, especially after the weekend? We saw a bunch of new videos come out from the Qassam Brigades. How can you assess the war at this point? Yeah, well, so now we're a week into the ground war. We're starting to see some of the movements take shape and understand a little bit what what Israel's plan and where they're moving. We've seen fierce fighting, fierce resistance. The resistance movements, the Qassam Brigades and Saraya al-Quds, are putting out constant communiques with their actions. Abu Obeida said the other day that they couldn't even keep track of all of their actions. But just to give people a sense on any given day, there's between 30 and 50 described actions that range from, you know, the constant rocket fire that's been happening on Israeli cities and towns, as well as the mortars on mustering troops on the borders. We've seen Qassam use their air force suicide drones aimed at mustering Israeli troops. We've seen them drop drone-dropped munitions into a crowd of Israeli troops mustering. The Israelis are looking to move into the territory, and they're doing it in large numbers, and so they have they have been seen in clusters in a way that I think maybe we'll talk about when with Ali later, but just shows kind of the lack of on-the-ground actual war-fighting experience that the Israelis have. Um the resistance has really been remarkable the way that they have given us the opportunity to see what's going on through their, you know, learned from Hezbollah, learned um that the media arm of the Qassam Brigades is a super important part of telling people what's going on and showing these actions and giving the narrative of what's actually happening on the ground. Um because the Israelis are very um you know, unclear about exactly what is going on and they've been moving very slowly. Um and it hasn't been you know, they're talking about how they're encircling Gaza City. Um we haven't seen that yet. What we've seen is significant fighting on three primary axes, but the two main axes are in the northwest. The Israelis have come across the north of the Gaza Strip and are looking to move down the beach. Um rather than what we had talked about before of moving through Shuja'iyya in the east and moving through these areas. It seems like their war plan has switched. Um probably it was unlikely their plan. I think both groups battle plans change as they see what unfolds on the ground. But now we're seeing the Israelis move down the western coast. Moving along the beach which is for them easier to do with their bulldozers than you know, bombing all of Gaza City and driving through the center of it. Um but yeah, I think the the strong resistance has kept the Israelis um from moving to the next stage of their ground operation which they've promised is to root out Hamas. If that's the case, um they're going to have to move into fixed positions which we haven't seen yet. They seem to still be on the move. Um but what we've seen is is pretty significant build-up at two of the strong points that the Israelis have set up. They have uh 90, like according to satellite images. So, we're looking at two things here. We're looking at satellite imagery of Israeli troop movements. Um we're matching that with Israeli videos and statements uh of where they are. And then we're matching that with videos and statements from the resistance of where the axes of fighting are. So, the the predominant fighting has been in the northwest uh of the Gaza Strip. Um and that's when they're moving down um the beach, but also on the east um in the southeast corner of Gaza City. Um they've been moving to cut across uh the Gaza Strip to cut it in half that we've talked about on previous shows. Um and the resistance shows multiple times a day videos of their homemade weaponry um built in Gaza attacking successfully um uh Israeli positions. Israeli positions inside houses when they take up positions inside houses or inside their armor, which is where they have been for the vast majority of the time. We haven't seen um the only time we've seen Israelis on foot has been in the wide-open fields of the north in the buffer zone that we talked about before. There's no footage yet. We haven't seen any footage of Israelis uh boots on the ground in urban areas. And the only time we did see that fighting in urban areas was Jabalia last week that we talked about and Israel dropped uh eight 2,000-lb bombs onto 20 houses uh in order to kill, they say, uh one fighter who led an anti-tank unit that killed two Golani Brigade soldiers. So, essentially, they get hit and then respond by essentially just wasting the entire area, which is something we saw previously, um you know, in 2002 in Jenin. Um we've seen it, of course, in Lebanon. Uh throughout the years in Qana and Bint Jbeil. Um when they get hit, they respond with massacres. And that's what we're seeing, and I think that's the analysis right now is is uh a scary part of what's going on is that they don't have, apparently, the courage to go in on the ground. Um and so, they're doing this work through the air and through artillery. And when you're in Jabalia or you're in Beit Hanoun or Beit Lahia, these are smaller farming I mean, Jabalia is a refugee camp. The other two are farming villages. It's not the same as going through street after street of 15-story buildings in a in an urban environment like Gaza City. So, what we've seen so far um is just um the very beginnings, and they're doing things very carefully, um and are still uh they lost 30 soldiers this week. That's what they've announced. Um we know that they flew 260 medevacs out of the Gaza Strip. But, one of the things about their armored vehicles is that their, especially their new ones, their Eitan infantry fighting vehicles, they're like miniature ICUs. They call them mobile ICUs. They have fridges for blood transfusions. Um they have all the um medical care that they need. They have a washroom inside it, so they literally don't ever have to get out uh except for their medevacs uh get out of their vehicles, and that's what they're doing right now. All of their bluster about how they're going to take uh all of Gaza City or all of Gaza and kill every single Hamas fighter for generations to come, as Netanyahu said, um just the most maximalist objective. Um if that's the objective, then they haven't even begun that, and already you can see the brutality of the way they're fighting this war. Um you know, they're targeting Shifa Hospital. They're targeting ambulances and telling us that Hamas fighters are putting weapons in ambulances after for a month they've been telling us about this massive tunnel network that allows their fighters to move everywhere without being touched. And now all of a sudden they don't have that tunnel network. They have they're smuggling in ambulances. Um this is just to open the ground for the urban warfare where they they believe that Shifa Hospital is a legitimate target, that the Indonesian Hospital is a legitimate target. As previous guests have said, 16 uh out of 35 hospitals in the Gaza Strip are completely out of service because of similar type um besiegement. They bombed the uh the solar panels that people had linked up to Shifa Hospital. When people moved south, uh if they had solar panels on their roof, but they were stringing those to the connection for Shifa, running things like incubators um with a backup supply. Israel went and pinpoint picked out all of the solar panels off the roofs of the building that were feeding Shifa Hospital. Um they told people to leave Gaza, and we saw the other day they massacred people walking on foot because people are too scared to leave in their cars because as we saw the other day with the tank shell just blowing the car away, any car moving is a target. So, people left Gaza City on their feet, on foot, and Israel massacred them. And so, the message is that you can't leave Gaza City. People are too scared to leave Gaza City because of these massacres. And all they're doing is targeting, again, civilian infrastructure, destroying the water reservoir in Jabalia. You know, just really putting a fine point on all the things that Ahmed said at the beginning when people are talking about what it's like to live in Gaza under this siege. People don't have water. They're starting to get sicknesses from waterborne like deprivation, starvation. But the ground war that they promised and all the bluster to sort of reestablish the image of the Israeli army after it was humiliated in front of the entire world on October 7th. Really, they haven't done any of that fighting. The only fighting they've done is this continual massacring of civilians as if bombing civilians is going to lessen support for the resistance when everybody knows it does the opposite of that. that's a great overview. I think we have a couple of clips we want to show, and I'm going to ask you about them. Should we do that now? Sure. All right. Which one do you want to do first? So, well, the Israelis the Haaretz article that was in the paper yesterday was basically verbatim the IDF explaining what their mission was. And they say right off the top that the mission in Gaza to do what the government is asking them to do. See, look at the whole article. The IDF said the IDF said Um so the IDF says that the they can do what the government is asking them to do, namely eradicate every single Hamas member, but they say in there very clearly that it'll take many, many months if not many years. And then they say also that they're not going to go into the tunnels. They're saying that at this point it's too dangerous to go in the tunnels. Uh so we're going to stay outside and quote, you can see that, they'll be dealt with quote at a later stage. So this whole bluster about going in the tunnels and fighting face to face in the tunnels, they actually have army-wide writ saying that going in the tunnel is prohibited, which is also we talked about what they did in 2014, their vaunted tunnel war of 2014. Soldiers were prohibited from entering the tunnels unless they'd been destroyed at one end. Um which as we know from a spider web is impossible to do. So it basically gives the Israelis the out to not touch tunnels. Which is where all the fighters are, tens of thousands of them according to the fighters, according to the Israelis, according to their intelligence assessments. That's where all the fighters are. And so they're telling us on day five, day six of the ground war that actually we're not going to go into the tunnels, which are the number one tool for the resistance to fight the ground war. It's their tunnels, it's their ability to move around, to come up in places the Israelis didn't expect. We've seen in Qassam videos already many of the things that we talked about earlier on on these shows. Um we've seen uh Qassam use RPGs and uh anti-tank weapons from high up in buildings shooting down on top of them, which we talked about would happen. Um, we've seen videos of them mouse holing in between buildings, um, making holes in between buildings so they can move between buildings without going outside. We've seen that this is just in their videos that they show. So, it's only um, a small portion of what they're actually doing. But, we've seen all that. We've seen the Israelis not be able to occupy buildings and hold that territory. For them to invade Gaza City, they're going to have to move into the buildings um, and fight in the buildings because the buildings have the tunnels in them. And so, if they're not going to fight inside tunnels, then they at least have to be inside the buildings. But, they're saying they're not going to do that. And so, really I think we're seeing the sort of tempering of the actual fighting component of the Israelis. But, what worries me and worries people in Gaza is it looks like there are no red lines. And so, if they're not going to fight face-to-face like they've said they're going to do to restore the image of their southern command, then they're just going to continue to bomb. And we know that people didn't leave Gaza City. There's hundreds of thousands of people still in Gaza City. Friends of mine, friends of ours that are still in Gaza City and who are people don't want to leave. Their family members don't want to leave because they saw the footage filmed by a kid on a bicycle the other day riding his bike through the carnage of people you know, Palestinian refugees becoming refugees again and walking from their community in Gaza City and being massacred by a plane. That's what Israel's doing, and if that's the way they're going to fight this war, uh tens of thousands of people are going to die. And 10,000 have already died. It strikes me, John, if we look at this. So, from from what I've seen, and we've looked at all the Qassam videos that come out, when I think we may show a clip, but where unfortunately due to the censorship on this channel, we can't show them because our this this this program will then be deleted by YouTube as happened to the program before last. So, we have to be careful about that, but we've watched the videos, and we've talked about them offline, and what they show is in many cases Israeli armor, that's to say tanks and armored personnel carriers, state of the art, I I assume, uh being destroyed, sometimes at very close range, by Qassam fighters using these uh Yasin anti-tank missiles or Cornet anti-tank missiles or even by placing explosives by hand on top of the tanks. Or the And we even saw that with an armored bulldozer. People have seen the videos. What we don't see in any of those videos is Israeli infantry, which as I understand, in urban warfare, you have to have infantry on the ground clearing streets, clearing buildings, guarding the armor. The armor is actually there to support infantry in the sense that the infantry directs the tanks, fire over there, fire over here. In other words, the armor in an urban setting is not the main course. It's like the side dish. The infantry is the main course. I'm sorry to use this this analogy. And also, again, as I understand from my reading, but you you can tell me if I'm wrong, these tanks do have sophisticated detection systems, radars, and all sorts of sensors and things. But, in uh in an urban setting, that's just going to produce a lot of noise. These tanks are are meant to be out in open fields fighting against other tanks or what have you. So, in other words, if you imagine you're driving your car, but you black out all the windows of your car except for, let's say, a little square in the windscreen this big. Yeah. That's what it's like to be in a tank in the middle of Gaza City. Yeah. And And Palestinians know that because they've watched children in the West Bank for the last, you know, for the whole Intifada. Um the children in the West Bank showed us that because the the tanks can't see. They don't have vision around them. So, once you get close to a tank, um the tank is actually can't see you. And so, kids, like 10-year-old kids, will climb up on a tank and try and pull or an APC and try to pull the gun off um because the troops have lack situational awareness and 360° awareness to such a degree that children can climb on the tank. Right. And as you said, now in the resistance is able to take that message and instead of climbing on the tank, they're putting uh explosive devices by hand in the exact spot on the tank where they're the weakest. So They're able to deliver that by hand. So what I want to say So what we what we see now is that up till now, this could change, but up to this point the Israelis who get beyond the perimeter, the empty fields of Gaza, are not willing to get out of their tanks or their armored personnel carriers. They're not willing to get to go into buildings or when they have gone, we've seen at least one builder uh in one video, they've been blasted by one of these thermobaric grenades that the resistance has. And then they bombed Jabalia. That's when they were in the building. Right. So that So that So that they're not willing to get out of the the armor. They're not willing to go down in the tunnels. So in other words, they're not willing to do any of what it takes so far to do the things they said they would do. Now, we have this one video that uh uh was put out by Netanyahu's office the other day. Can we take a look at that, Tamara? We won't get banned for this one because Netanyahu put it out. Yeah, exactly. This was put out by Ofir Gendelman, who is Well, just just Okay, just pause it for a second, Tamara. Or Or let that Just let it advance so we see the whole of the Arabic uh sentence there. And this was probably Yeah, all right. Just pause it for a second. So it says the the uh dogs chase the dogs of Hamas until victory. And this video, supposedly, again, it was posted by Ofir Gendelman, the official Arabic language spokesperson for Benjamin Netanyahu, and he claimed that this shows an Israeli soldier chasing a Hamas fighter through a tunnel. Run the video. Let's take a look. Yeah, I don't even know if that soundtrack is is genuine. But it turns out that me. Yeah, it turns out with that within an hour or so an Israeli journalist called Yoav Zeitoun, who is the military correspondent for Ynet, which is one of the major Israeli news sites. Yeah, it's not a like left-leaning news source at all. like it's it's related to Yedioth Ahronoth, which is the main one of the top newspapers in Israel. It's their website. Um came out and said, "This is a training video uh from basically from uh Operation uh Protective Edge. So, from 2014 or earlier. This is a training video. Uh and interestingly, uh so it was put out by Netanyahu's office, but not by the Israeli army. It was not on any of the Israeli army official accounts. It's totally fake. But what it shows you is that they know that in order to do what they say they're going to do, they would have to go down in the tunnels. And yet the army is saying, "We're not going to go down in the tunnels." So, it just seems that, you know, I guess fake it till you make it in a way. Is that Is that what's going on? Yeah, I mean, I've said it repeatedly the Israeli record of fighting face-to-face in urban confrontations is very thin. It's possible that they do do that. That's what they're promising to do. Um but their record of it is very thin. That's why they have to show a fake video. And that they show a video like that and the the dog handler actually is wearing uh the the guard. So, anyone that's worked with dogs immediately sees that that's fake. Um and it's the same with the tanks, right? When you talked about the infantry being outside of tanks, like I'm not sure what the exact number is, but you know, something like 1.3 million Americans served in Iraq. They served outside of a tank. They know what it's like to cover the back of a tank. Um and so, there's thousands of people that are watching these videos of the Israelis saying like, "These are very obvious mistakes." Um you know, packing troops together, like they dropped that drone-dropped munition right in the center of what looked like about 30 troops just standing around. Um they're not covering their back. I think it's probably best to not show the video if it means that we're going to take get taken off the air for it, but essentially um Qassam Brigades released a video that had 10 separate incidents of uh RPGs and anti-tank weapons being fired from point-blank range or put an explosive physically by hand onto 10 armored vehicles that exploded. Um and so, where their armor is the strongest armor in the world, they admit that because their tanks fight in their own neighborhoods. They don't have to worry about considerations that the Americans worry about their tanks cuz American tanks have to go onto planes to be flown over to their imperialist wars. Um Israel just drives down the road to get to theirs. So, their tanks can be twice the the weight of American armor. Um but eventually um these uh these tanks are going to have to hold neighborhoods in order to find tunnels or even just to fight Hamas, let alone defeat the every single last one of them. They'll have to hold neighborhoods. And in order to hold a neighborhood, you have to be out dismounted, out of your armor, looking behind you, looking above you, um and taking risks. And the idea is that you take um calculated risks by looking around you, which ultimately makes everybody in the armored core safer. But the Israelis aren't right now willing to do that. They're not with They're very casual casualty averse. Um and they've basically eliminated the two parts that are the most important for the ground war, which is to get out on foot and to go down into the tunnels. And if you're not going to do either one of those, then all you're doing is massacring civilians, starving them, um you know, creating uh waterborne diseases on a civilian population when you don't have the actual courage to fight the battle that you're saying you're going to fight. And if you're not going to fight that battle, then stop the war, stop attacking civilians, and and figure out some other way to get your prisoners out than promising a war that's going to last for more than a year when 1 month into it you've killed 10,000 people. Is that the pace of how we're going to go? Is there really no red line that even if they're not fighting this war, uh the Americans won't stop them from doing this? Because that's the pace. If you're talking 10,000 people killed every month um for the next year, And that may And that may well that may well accelerate because now we we you know the first month people still had relative amount of resources whether it was food or just simply their own health but after a month of this you know people are worn down their health is worn down they're living in in the horrifying conditions that Ahmed is Samak described of you know toilets that can't be flushed And crowded right very crowded You have six toilets serving thousands of people with no water horrifying conditions I mean death camp conditions and I say that without any exaggeration or hyperbole but if they are not going to fight go down into the tunnels and do the things they said they they would do even if they want to they may not be capable of it then we we have to to to hope and we have to make sure let me put it that way that they are not able to just indefinitely massacre people from the air because that has got to be something that the world just cannot tolerate any longer even if Joe Biden and Secretary Blinken want to tolerate it for longer I can't imagine that the world can let this go on indefinitely And we can't allow it