What Have We Gained From This War?  

439 days into the war with Hamas, 818 IDF fatalities, and we are still fighting while Hamas retains the ability from time to time (most recently earlier this week) to lob missiles at southern Israel and continues to cause IDF casualties in the strip.

What has now become a war of attrition, is the major difference between dealing with a legitimate political state and a terrorist organization posing as a functioning polity but in reality, is just a bunch of terrorists hiding behind a cause with no concern whatsoever about the wellbeing of those they govern. Their leadership should be ashamed of the disdain they have demonstrated for their own people.

The latest example on line today is a new study by the Henry Jackson Society (https://henryjacksonsociety.org/) that establishes clearly something we have always suspected, that the casualty numbers reported by Hamas in Gaza are grossly inflated, both in real terms and in the method used for reporting.

You can read the full report here……

https://tinyurl.com/a956sya7

but for brevity the results can be summarized as follows:

• Remove the “natural deaths” from the statistics during the period of the war, use approximate figures for the numbers of those killed by Hamas or other Palestinian groups, and then adjust the numbers to align with the actual reports of deaths filed by family members. Once that is done, it is clear that there were about as many militants killed as civilians. For urban warfare, where combatants are co-located with civilians, Israel’s civilian-combatant ratio is so low as to be unheard of in any other urban warfare scenario in recorded history. (ICJ please note.)
• In addition, as we all recall, much of the reporting and commentary has referred to the conflict as a “war on Palestinian children.” So worldwide, demonstrators against Israel have chanted that “Israel is murdering Palestinian children” even though the number of children who died is proportional to their share of the overall society.

This is what happens when you go to war with a terrorist mob.

Conversely, when you deal with a legitimate political entity such as Lebanon, the reporting is totally different. The IDF has done an incredible job there attacking specific Hezbollah targets while trying not to harm the local civilian population.  There is always collateral damage of course, but the reporting from Lebanon has generally been “so many dead, of whom some numbers were women and some numbers were children” but always in proportional terms related to their representation in the overall population.

But honest reporting never serves terrorists well, so it is no surprise that the figures Hamas has reported over the last 14 months have been skewed to make people have sympathy for the group that murdered over 1,200 of our citizens in cold blood and took over 250 hostages with 100 yet remaining in captivity 14 months later.

The news today seems to indicate that some kind of temporary suspension of fighting in Gaza is in the works, coupled with the return of about 30 hostages (nowhere near enough), the release of beau-coup Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails (whatever number that is will be one too many), some IDF troops remaining in Gaza but…..70% of the hostages still left in Gaza, no official end to the war, Hamas still more or less in charge…….one needs to ask: what was it all for if this is the result after 439 days of war?

The only reasons to go to war are either to pre-empt an attack or respond to an attack. So while there may be two reasons to go to war there is only one object once the war starts…..to win. If we cannot win, if we do not have a clear picture of what victory is, or if victory is defined as something that is not achievable, then our only alternative is to end the war as one never prevails when the goal is not understood and achievable.  Is there a reason why our leadership does not understand this?