Forget the Naysayers, Israel Is Winning the War

British Colonel (ret’d) Richard Kemp has fought in half-a-dozen military campaigns, and commanded British troops in Afghanistan. He has closely studied the IDF, even before the latest war in Gaza, and concluded that “Israel has the most moral military in the world.” He has just published a piece, urging that the “naysayers” denying the IDF’s achievements in Gaza be ignored, for Israel, he says, is “winning the war in Gaza.”

After the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, atrocities not condemned, but praised by the Palestinian Authority (even as some of its spokesmen claim that the murder of 1,200 Israelis was carried out by the IDF in a “false flag” operation), four-fifths of Israeli Jews now are opposed to a “two-state solution.” They have finally understood the depth of murderous hatred directed at them by Palestinian Arabs — demonstrated both by those who took part in the atrocities, and those who praised them — and understand that any state of “Palestine” would be built on land that Israel would have to surrender, squeezed back within borders that would be close to the 1949 armistice lines. The Jewish state would then have only a nine-mile-wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea, and forcing it to give up territories essential to its defense, including the Jordan Valley. This is something the Israelis, chastened by the war they did not start and did not want in Gaza, will not do. They will not withdraw from Judea and Samaria, territory assigned by the League of Nations to the Mandate for Palestine, which mandate was then to become the Jewish state. It is not in Haifa and Tel Aviv, but in Judea and Samaria, where Jewish history was made, where Jews have lived continuously (save for a 19-year interregnum from 1949 to 1967, when Jordan held the territory and kept Jews out) for 3500 years.

Meanwhile, not only Hezbollah’s long-term leader Hassan Nasrallah, but his successor Hashem Safieddine, as well as the commander and deputy commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Forces, and 10 of the 12 members of the terror group’s Jihad Council, have been killed by the IDF. 3,800 of its combatants were wounded so severely by those “exploding pagers” that they were no longer fit for combat. And 80% of Hezbollah’s vast store of rockets and missiles have been destroyed by the IDF.

It was the IDF’s battering of Hezbollah that prevented that Shi’a terrorist group from coming to Assad’s aid, and left him helpless before the rebel onslaught led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, directed by Ahmed Al-Sharaa. Furthermore, the Israelis bombed Iranian deliveries of weapons to Assad’s army. Without support from Hezbollah and Iran, the Assad regime could not survive.

On October 1, 2024, Iran fired 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. Almost all of them were intercepted by Israel, with some also being shot down by the Americans. The handful that did land caused no major damage, and only one Israeli was killed. On October 26, Israel retaliated, and managed to destroy all of Iran’s anti-missile defense systems, including the four S-300 batteries supplied by Russia. Now Iran is hopelessly vulnerable to an Israeli air attack, and will remain so until it can replace the anti-missile defense systems destroyed on that day.

The EU, as represented by its foreign minister Kyra Kallas, seems intent on criticizing and undermining the international position of Israel. The Israelis are not inclined to listen to its EU critics or their even more unfair critics at the UN. They will keep on keeping on, until both of their war aims — the freeing of all the hostages, and the total destruction of Hamas as both a military and a political force — are met. The IDF has already succeeded, Colonel Kemp says, in destroying 80-90% of Hamas’ weaponry, killed more than half of its combatants, and is now distributing aid to the Gazans that, because of IDF guards, will not be stolen by Hamas. That deprives Hamas of its main source of income — it can no longer seize most of the aid to then sell it to the very people in Gaza to whom it was mean to be distributed for free.

Colonel Kemp reminds us that Israel is succeeding in every front of its multi-front war. In Yemen, the Houthis are still smarting from the attacks that have destroyed their main port at Hodeidah and the main airport in Sanaa, and it has been months since they have managed to have one of their rockets hit Israel. In Lebanon, Hezbollah has been sufficiently battered by the IDF that now the formerly timid Lebanese National Army has been willing to take on Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, in an attempt to make Hezbollah remove all of its forces, as it had committed to doing in its ceasefire agreement, to positions north of the Litani River. In Iran, both its cities and its nuclear facilities have been stripped of their anti-missile defenses, and these cannot soon be replaced. And in Gaza, the Hamas has been battered from pillar to post. It has been unable to pay its operatives for the past three months, ever since the blockade was in force and there was no humanitarian aid coming in for Hamas to steal and then to re-sell to the people of Gaza.. Now the IDF is guarding the aid as it is being distributed, preventing Hamas from renewing its theft of such aid, which supplied the only stream of revenue Hamas has left. The IDF is succeeding, everywhere, and the heathens rage.