By Robert Inlakesh
A huge disinformation campaign has been used to intimidate and silence pro-Palestinian voices. (Design: Palestine Chronicle)
The point here is that Israel is committing a genocide; it has not once launched a campaign that seeks to actually destroy Hamas militarily. They seek to force the population to submit.
As Israel threatens its new offensive aimed at occupying Gaza City, dubbed “Operation Gideon’s Chariots II”, a psychological warfare campaign is taking place against the people of Gaza, one that the corporate media has participated in. This comes despite Israel’s military leadership knowing well that its occupation plans are doomed to fail.
On August 4, Israeli media began leaking reports that its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had made the decision to occupy the entirety of the Gaza Strip, replacing previous proposals to annex large portions of the territory. This then created headlines and spread fear across Gaza over what Israel has in store next for the brutalised and traumatized population.
Initially, Israeli Channel 12 and 14 had broken the reports citing an anonymous source in the Prime Minister’s office. Notably, when Channel 12 reported on the breaking news scoop live on air, their analyst appeared perplexed by the report. Channel 14 had also stated earlier that day that Israel had reportedly ordered the assassination of Hamas leaders abroad, another strange leak, as this could easily jeopardize operations that rely on the element of surprise.
By the end of the day, the Hebrew media had switched their reports to focus on a proposed occupation of Gaza City, in the north of the besieged territory, and not the entirety of the Strip. The next day, however, on August 5, Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly said he sought a “full conquest” of Gaza according to a “senior official” in his office.
First, a mini-cabinet meeting, followed by an 8-hour cabinet meeting, was convened to agree upon and approve the occupation plan for Gaza City specifically. On August 8, the cabinet approved the plan, which was followed by the release of satellite imagery by NBC News that featured a reported military buildup at the ‘Karni Crossing’.
Then came the assassination of Gaza’s most loved and well-known reporter, Anas al-Sharif, a massive blow to the entire population of the besieged coastal enclave on August 10.
Psychological Warfare as Israel’s Primary Tactic
The reason why it is paramount that we look at the buildup to Israel’s offensive is that this is as much part of the war as any ground efforts, and this must be understood by both the public and journalists alike. Fear is the greatest means of achieving forced displacement of Palestinians, which often fails in the absence of effective propaganda.
From the very beginning, the way the plans were leaked to the Israeli media was suspect and was designed to instill both confusion and fear, which is why nobody could even decipher what the plan specifically sought to achieve and how. Keep in mind here that both the reports of total occupation and the occupation of Gaza City alone had come from sources working for the PM’s office.
Then came the reports of internal divisions erupting between the Israeli Defence Minister, Israel Katz, and the military Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir. All of this from anonymous sources or carefully calibrated public announcements. Why is this even suspect? Because Israel imposes strict military censorship over everything it does, but suddenly we have all these reports from anonymous sources about clashes over the military strategy in Gaza.
Although these disagreements could be genuine, they could also be purposefully misleading and misdirecting attention away from the government’s broader regional ambitions, such as preparations for attacking Lebanon and/or Iran.
What is certainly suspect is the satellite imagery released by NBC News, featuring a military buildup. This imagery had to have been cleared by the Israeli military in order for it to end up in the hands of the corporate media. Satellite imagery around military sites is blocked otherwise.
Israel’s military censorship is so incredibly strict that we still have no proper damage assessment reports from either the 12-day Iran war, nor the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict last year, let alone it being possible for foreign media agencies to gain access at will to imagery of significant military buildups without there being direct approval for them to access such images.
If we also look at the assassination of Anas Al-Sharif, part of the reason for murdering him was to stifle the flow of information coming out of northern Gaza, but this is not the primary reason, as there remains an abundance of reporters and civilians with smartphones who are able to continue documenting Israeli atrocities.
The main reason for killing Anas al-Sharif, at the time they did, was to spread fear and communicate the message to Palestinians that they would kill anyone in the upcoming operation. That was the real reason, psychological warfare.
Keep in mind that in the buildup to Israel’s ‘Operation Gideons Chariots I’, where they claimed the military would annex portions of Gaza and that this represented “Phase 2” of the war, the Israelis also assassinated prominent al-Jazeera journalist Hossam Shabat on March 24, starting their operation officially around a month later.
In the buildup to the first ‘Gideon’s Chariots’ operation, the same fearmongering we see today occurred over the allegedly new tactics and even weapons that Israel was reportedly going to use to “crush Hamas” and “return the hostages”. Donald Trump even proposed that the US would “own” Gaza.
The lies about what Israel and the US are set to do have been endless, all designed to strike fear into the people of Gaza. In reality, every single time Israel launches a new “operation” in the Gaza Strip, it results in the use of the exact same tactics that preceded it.
What We Should Expect
Although there is no way to precisely predict what Israel is about to do in the Gaza Strip, we can figure out the nature of the new operation and what it could realistically result in. To begin with, Israel simply does not have the capacity to occupy Gaza City without greatly exhausting its forces, losing huge numbers of soldiers, and leaving itself open on the northern front with Lebanon.
According to Israel’s own internal military estimates, setting up an occupation of Gaza would take between 2 to 5 years, with some military officials having argued it could take a decade. It will also take at least 200,000 soldiers to occupy Gaza City alone, and this is a conservative estimate.
At the same time, the Israeli military is issuing evacuation orders to around 850,000 Palestinians living in northern Gaza, which contradicts their goal of occupation anyway, because that would constitute ethnic cleansing, not the imposition of a system of occupation.
The prominent Israel Lobby cutout think-tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), even published a recent piece by Israel’s Ehud Yaari, expressing doubts about the viability of the occupation plan. Below is an important excerpt from that piece:
“On August 8, Mr. Netanyahu had his cabinet adopt a resolution to ‘take control’ of Gaza City after moving its population of 800,000 to the southern sector of the Strip. The target date was set to October 7, but few take this threat seriously, especially in view of the IDF’s grave doubts about the wisdom of the idea and its practical implications. One also has to keep in mind the fatigue of the combat units after almost two years of fighting, during which tens of thousands of reservists were called to serve for unprecedentedly long periods…
“…At any rate, Hamas cadres would join incognito the massive migration of displaced Gazans as they did in Rafah and Khan Younis, rather than make a hopeless last “heroic” stand. Thus, the doctrine of separating civilians from Hamas has a very slim chance of success.”
Even the Israelis themselves understand that the plan has no legs. But why is this? Well, it comes down to some of the points touched on by Yaari, but it goes much deeper.
The Guardian recently leaked data from an Israeli military database, revealing that, in May of 2025, the internal estimates were that Israel had managed to kill 8,900 Palestinian fighters, which was only 17% of the total number of people it had killed up until that point in the Gaza Strip. What is the relevance of mentioning this when it comes to the occupation plans? It is very simple; it reflects a failure to even put a dent in the Palestinian armed groups in Gaza.
According to both Israeli and US intelligence estimates, the fighting force of Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades alone was said to be anywhere between 30,000 to 50,000 fighters, this is not taking into account the number of fighters belonging to some dozen armed groups, and also civilians who decided to take up arms independently in some cases. All these intelligence agencies also agree that Hamas has recruited enough fighters to replace those it has lost, according to the information it makes public.
Also consider that Israel and the US often project optimistic statistics and assessments through their media, in the interest of concealing war crimes and the fact that Israel is currently perpetrating a genocide.
As I have argued here in my pieces for the Palestine Chronicle throughout the genocide, Israel is not going after Hamas on the ground and waging a war; it is committing a genocide as its primary strategy.
To reiterate my argument briefly here, the Israelis have bombarded the Gaza Strip with the intention of making the territory unlivable and eliminating a large portion of the population. The goal is very simple: they seek to defeat the people by taking the war to them directly, and along the way will use their intelligence branches, special forces, and air force to take out armed fighters, but this is not the main goal.
This is why we have no footage of the Israeli military engaging in intense gunbattles or taking the fight to Hamas, in around 23 months of all-out war in Gaza. Beyond a few special force raids, the fight on the ground is never taken to Hamas, and when it comes to the tunnels, they choose to bomb the entrances or exits, but have not conducted the kinds of daring operations that would have been necessary to root out the resistance fighters.
On the other hand, the battle footage that we do have comes almost exclusively from the Palestinian side, statistically. We have countless hours of footage showing ambush operations from the Palestinian resistance.
This footage tells us the story of what is happening on the ground, which is that the Israeli army invades areas in heavily armoured vehicles and tanks, not daring to put infantry next to these vehicles, then setting up in fortified positions afterwards, from where they carry out demolitions or kidnap civilians. Their main targets of each major incursion into any given area have been hospitals.
Now, a counterargument to this could be that Israel is perhaps hiding its battle footage. Yet this argument makes no sense for two simple reasons: The first is that it would benefit Israel to release this footage as propaganda, and the second is that there is an abundance of footage published across all social media platforms from the soldiers themselves, which further supports the argument I make here.
The Israeli soldiers only ever publish battle footage when it is them being ambushed, often falling over each other and scrambling in the way you would expect people without combat experience to behave. All the rest of the footage features them blowing up homes, universities, mosques, and schools for fun, operating bulldozers, or defecating on floors and wearing the underwear of dead and displaced women, etc.
Again, this greatly contrasts the mountains of footage showing Palestinian fighters running up to armoured personnel carriers to throw IEDs into the vehicles’ hatches, sniper operations, daring ambushes where militants emerge from tunnels and jump between the rumble of destroyed buildings to fire an RPG round at a tank from close range.
The Palestinians are waging a guerrilla war, consisting of ambush attacks, while Israeli forces stay as far away from danger as possible, making sure to stay inside their armoured vehicles with the hope of reducing their overall death toll. Although Israel has been proven to hide its military casualties, during its war with Hezbollah, Iran, and Gaza, there does appear to be a massively disproportionate injury-to-death ratio amongst their forces.
The most recent Israeli reports indicate that 80,000 soldiers have been injured, yet they acknowledge losing less than 1,000 at the hands of the Palestinian resistance groups. These statistics always change, and often we are told various contradictory casualty counts, but the official numbers do in fact reflect much higher injury rates than death rates.
Eventually, perhaps we will gain access to more accurate Israeli casualty figures through leaks, like has just happened with the Palestinian death toll revelation, yet it is clear enough for now what kind of war is being waged on Gaza, and it is one that targets the civilian population.
If Israel actually seeks to occupy Gaza, this will mean that it must finally change its strategy in the territory and actually go after Hamas and the other armed groups there. With this will come a massive surge in Israeli military casualties, news which will begin reaching their own population and would inevitably drain their fighting force even further.
Already, the Israeli military is suffering from a manpower issue, and its soldiers are fatigued, many refusing to show up for service when called upon to re-enter Gaza, while around 25,000 of them suffer from diagnosed mental conditions as a result of their service.
So we now understand some of the reasons why the occupation project will fail. So what is likely to actually happen?
If we go by past examples and what Israel is capable of doing, it is likely that we will see an escalation of bombings, particularly aimed at killing large numbers of civilians in targeted massacres around Gaza City. The goal of this would be to try and force people to flee the area. Some will choose to flee to the south, but it is more probable that many will simply move to other parts of the north or areas around Gaza City itself.
The number of those displaced to the south will depend upon the fear that Israel is capable of instilling into the displaced refugee population in the Gaza City area, which is why there is such a campaign of psychological warfare and such a dragged-out process of approving the military initiative.
Next, they are also likely to launch incursions into areas as they did earlier on during the war, temporarily setting up in fortified positions and even creating new temporary military bases. This will depend upon how fierce the resistance to them is and whether they muster a force capable of performing the tasks they set. Keep in mind that they have done these incursions many times before, and each time the results were virtually the same.
Currently, Israel allegedly controls over 80% of the Gaza Strip, yet as we have seen in areas like Rafah and Beit Hanoun, the Palestinian resistance is still capable of carrying out ambushes on their forces in these allegedly “cleared” and “secured” locations. Keeping with this, upon entry to Gaza City, the Israeli soldiers would likely put their flags up and take videos for TikTok and claim they are victorious, without actually having achieved any of their publicly stated objectives.
This analysis here assumes that Israel isn’t simply misleading the public and preparing for a larger campaign on other fronts, such as against Lebanon and/or Iran, instead.
While the Israeli occupying forces will undoubtedly escalate the nightmare unfolding in Gaza, it is important to understand what they are actually capable of and what is viable strategically from the perspective of its leadership.
In 2014, the Israeli military found out what happens when they actually try to take on Hamas in a standup fight and know they will suffer immense losses, so they use the most cowardly tactics ever used by a modern military. In southern Lebanon, Israel also failed last year to even seize border villages like Khiam, and this was under the most favourable circumstances they could have possibly asked for there.
The point here is that Israel is committing a genocide; it has not once launched a campaign that seeks to actually destroy Hamas militarily. They seek to force the population to submit, and with that comes the defeat of all the armed resistance groups. Yet, the people of Gaza endure.
(The Palestine Chronicle)
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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