The military and strategic expert, Colonel Hatem Karim Al-Falahi, attributed the occupation’s lack of complete control over Rafah to its fear of not finding the prisoners and leaders of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), and its failure to destroy the resistance’s infrastructure, which means – according to his opinion – the failure of the “absolute victory” statement and the lack of Achieving the objectives of the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip.
He added, in an analysis of the military scene in Gaza, that this situation put the Israeli army and political leaders in front of a major dilemma from which even the American leadership was not spared, which found itself stuck with Israel in this war, and wanted to end it so that it could devote itself to other files.
Al-Falahi believes that Israel considers the incursion into Rafah a strategic mission as it aims to control the border strip with Egypt, and is searching for tunnels that could connect the Gaza Strip to Egypt, based on the statements of a number of Israeli officials about using tunnels to smuggle weapons from Egypt to the Gaza Strip.
However, the military expert believes that the incursion into the city of Rafah is still limited to certain areas, which the occupation entered some time ago and is still stationed in, such as the Yabna area.
Tunnel topic
Regarding the occupation army’s talk about discovering and destroying tunnels, Al-Falahi explained that these allegations do not mean much. He said that there were leaks that indicated the presence of 725 kilometers of tunnels distributed throughout the Strip, which means that the occupation only destroyed approximately a third of these tunnels.
Netzarim axis
Al-Falahi attributed the movement of sectors of the occupation army 3 kilometers north of the Netzarim axis towards Sabra to the increased risk of resistance strikes. He added that this expansion makes the moving sectors of the occupation more vulnerable to being targeted by the resistance.
Regarding Israeli reports about the occupation army approaching military control over Hamas, Colonel Al-Falahi denied the matter and said that this is not true, explaining that Israel was not able to control Hamas when it was fighting with 5 military divisions, ruling out that it would be able to achieve that while it was fighting. Now there is one military division in the Netzarim axis, and it is subjected to bombing and sniping day and night.