The Army of Palestine in the Gaza Strip

In the more than two months long war between Palestine and Israel in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian army, led by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, has managed to keep intact its weaponry and manpower, its artillery firepower against Israel, its incomparable greater number of Gaza Strip tunnels, and of course the total number of Israeli prisoners of war since the October 7 military raid. The increasing Israeli army casualties in the battlefield are a result of this operational symmetric and non-symmetric prowess of the Palestinian Army.

Palestinian casualties are mainly of two, mostly non military, kinds: a) the aerial razing of urban homes and above-ground military infrastructure, and b) the 19,000 Palestinian dead from Israel’s aerial serial genocide are mostly civilians, i.e. children (9,000); women and the elderly. These losses are largely due to the absence of anti-aircraft infrastructure of the Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip.

At the same time, while Israel temporarily controls a large part of the above-ground northern part of the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian army controls the entire Strip underground and most of the above-ground part of the central and southern Gaza Strip.

Since the Palestinian Revolt led by Sheikh Hajj Amin al-Hosseini and Abd al-Qadir al-Hosseini in 1936-9 against the British and terrorist Zionist organizations, today is the first time that the Palestinian army of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad manages to counter the Israeli occupation forces at the level of Palestinian conventional artillery and ground forces. So far the light and distant support of the Axis of Resistance from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen to the Palestinian forces in Gaza is mainly of a warning nature to Israel and the USA for the escalation of the war and less of a distraction.

The military success of the Palestinian army has a psychological effect on Israeli army and public opinion and a political influence on the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip and the Occupied Territories with political ramifications reaching into the future of the leadership of the Palestinian Authority and cooperation with the secular forces of Fatah and the Organization for the Liberation of Palestine (PLO).

From now on, the strategic objective of the Palestinian Army in the Gaza Strip is twofold. First, the Palestinian population and its leadership remaining in the Gaza Strip, nullifying Israel’s attempt to annex the Gaza Strip, setting up a new Nakba (Catastrophe, 1948) by attempting to displace all of its 2.5 million Palestinian residents Lane from their ancestral homes.

Second, the Palestinian Army’s medium-term goal is to immediately begin diplomatic negotiations for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state based on the Two-State Solution.

The means to the achievement of these two goals is the continuation of the Palestinian war against the occupation forces of Tel Aviv, involving also the Palestinian Resistance in the West Bank, and the achievement of an armistice to exchange Israeli prisoners of war for Palestinian prisoners of war from the prisons of the occupation forces.

Today, due to Tel Aviv’s long-standing intransigence towards the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah for the creation of an independent Palestinian State, the above goals of Hamas constitute the red and non-negotiable lines of all of Palestine.