The Battle of Jabalia: A Palestinian Lesson in War of Attrition
By Khalil Harb – May 23, 2024
Israel seeks fast, hard wars, while its opponents seek slow-boiling, irregular wars of attrition. Now, with the resurgence of resistance ops in Jabalia and Gaza areas, Israel has lost both the field and the war.
The ground situation in Jabalia refugee camp, north of Gaza City, is more than merely a military clash between an invading force and resistance fighters fighting a âguerrilla war.â The deeper implication of the sudden battles that have sprung up in Gazaâs largest camp is that Israel is far more entangled than it wants to acknowledge, mirroring the US experience in its disastrous Vietnam quagmire.
Unlike the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam, however, Gaza is a flat strip of land that lacks crossings, mountain passes, or forests for the resistance to move personnel and weapons with ease across swathes of terrain. Egypt, which shares the Rafah Crossing with Gaza, has distanced itself from the Strip, and Gazans share no other borders with the outside world.
The resurgence of resistance in Jabalia, in fierce battles that have caught the Israeli army off guard, therefore, points to what some may call a âmiracle.â
More than a guerrilla war
Speaking to The Cradle, a Hamas leader says that Tel Avivâs claims of controlling the north and center of the Strip before focusing on the south were always false and that the resistance still retains its strength and leadership.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) spokesman Mohammed al-Haj Moussa assesses the situation similarly, telling The Cradle, âWe are ready for a long battle of attritionâ â echoing the words of Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu Obeida.
Their comments that northern Gaza is not under Israeli control, as it has often claimed, are evidenced by todayâs resurgent battles in the north of the Strip.
At the warâs onset, Israeli forces moved from several directions toward the Strip, including Al-Atatreh, Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun, and Shujaiya in the north and northeast, and from central axes like Juhr al-Dik and Al-Zaytoun neighborhood towards Sheikh Ajlin near the coast â ostensibly to further tighten their control over Gazaâs north.
However, in January, Israel announced the redeployment of its forces, withdrawing from most northern areas and stationing mainly in Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, intending to move toward areas where resistance continued, mostly southward of the Strip.
Tel Avivâs confidence that matters had swung in its favor in Jabalia was misplaced. Todayâs the occupation armyâs announced losses â in both soldiers and hardware â confirm that a fierce fight is taking place in the camp and its environs.
A senior Hamas source informs The Cradle that Israelâs âmowing the grassâ strategy, intended to weaken or cripple Gazaâs resistance periodically, has failed to make the desired dent, even after 225 days of war.
The real war of attrition
Sources in the Palestinian resistance report that even Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, a major stronghold for Israeli forces to counteract the âPalestinian Viet Congâ in northern Gaza, was unstable for Israeli soldiers. Palestinian fighters regularly emerged from the rubble and underground to fight a real war of attrition against the thousands of soldiers stationed there.
Resistance sources also say that a range of explosive weapons were used in ambushes and attacks: âAl-Shuath bombsâ and âTandemâ to destroy Merkava tanks and other armored vehicles, âAl-Yassin 105â shells, and bombs and booby-traps in houses using rockets and shells that didnât explode during earlier raids, detonated when soldiers take cover inside.
Additionally, there are also ongoing sniper operations, mortar shelling, and sudden face-to-face clashes with enemy soldiers by fighters who emerge from tunnels.
The aforementioned Hamas leader tells The Cradle that these operations reveal âthe IDFâs loss of controlâ and adds:
The enemy is not ready for long and multi-front battles, and this is what made it lose its balance and, at the same time, began to lose the theory on which it was based, which is a policy of deterrence and pre-emptive operations.
A particularly ironic aspect is that the Israeli military claimed it had âdismantledâ 20 of the original 24 Hamas battalions, giving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an excuse to move ahead with his invasion of Rafah.
âWe canât leave them there,â Netanyahu said of the intact battalions in an interview earlier this month. âWhat they are trying to do is extort [or] blackmail us to leave Gaza. Leave them in place, these battalions, leave their leadership in place, and they go take over Gaza again and do it again.â
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A stalled âvictoryâ
But Netanyahuâs relentless efforts to overwhelm Gaza and declare âvictoryâ over the resistance keep hitting the wall of the Palestinian Viet Cong and their nonstop display of new tactics: deception, ambushes, sabotage, espionage, sacrifice, and, importantly, strategic patience.
Jabalia serves as a quintessential lesson from this new-and-improved resistance. It is a resounding slap to the prime minister and his war cabinet, undermining an Israeli âvictoryâ at every turn. It exposes the futility of the proposed plans â whether Israeli, American, or Arab â to occupy, administer, or impose authority over Gaza.
The PIJâs Haj Moussa says the military battles in Jabalia and Rafah, where occupation forces are also suffering increased losses, show that Israel âhas not been able, for about eight months, to reach any of its declared goals in Gaza, neither at the level of uprooting the resistance nor the expulsion of Zionist prisoners.â
Despite unconditional US and western security band military support, Tel Aviv has been unable to definitively impose its control over Jabalia or other areas. The PIJ official emphasizes that the Al-Quds Brigades, his movementâs military wing, is still present throughout the Gaza Strip, and there is no fear of resistance weakening.
Analysts, including some within the Biden administration, agree that Israel is far from achieving victory. It has neither captured land, freed prisoners, nor killed senior resistance leaders. Lacking a credible plan for the ânext dayâ and unable to destroy the labyrinth of tunnels, Israel is lost in the labyrinths above ground, not just below.
What happened to Tel Avivâs boasts of killing 13,000 Hamas militants (out of 30,000â40,000 fighters), or its identification and destruction of âHamas tunnels,â or its âcleansingâ of entire areas from resistance control? What happened to Netanyahuâs claims that only âfour battalionsâ were left in Hamas?
How is the Palestinian resistance still fighting fiercely in Shujaiya, Jabalia, Al-Zaytoun, Deir al-Balah, all the way to Rafah in Gazaâs south? How are Israeli tanks and armored vehicles being depleted so quickly, and the occupation forces dying in larger numbers than before?
If Netanyahu was betting that the subjugation of Jabalia, Rafah, and other key areas would facilitate his ability to negotiate the release of Israeli prisoners, he should cut his losses quickly to evade two defeats: a political one from his coalition partners and an angry public, and a military one in Gaza.
It is only a Gaza ceasefire that can save the Israeli prime minister from a Palestinian war of attrition, which will wear down Israeli morale, drain its economy, and frustrate its western allies.
For Haj Moussa, âthe talk of Netanyahu and the occupation leaders about the expected victory, it is nothing but an illusion, and they are nothing but slogans that have nothing to do with the truth.â
Khalil Harb
Khalil Harb is a Beirut-based journalist and former editor-in-chief of the Lebanese daily Al-Safir. He has also worked for the Associated Press and the Lebanese An-Nahar newspaper. Khalil is a graduate of the American University in Cairo.
