“Israel’s” campaign since October 2023 has fused overwhelming firepower with expansive ambitions, yet the strategic ledger reads very differently from the public claims. Inside Gaza, a grinding ground war has failed to deliver decision even as devastation has been driven to genocidal scales; across the region, spectacular long-range operations have leaned on American scaffolding that exposes dependence rather than sovereign reach. The consequence is a widening gap between military exertion and political effect: tactical shocks without strategic settlement, destruction without control, and a reputational collapse accelerated by the humanitarian catastrophe.
Overwhelming firepower but absent control
By mid-2025 “Israel” had taken more than two-thirds of the Strip and massed within roughly a kilometre and a half of old Gaza City, telegraphing an intent to push out roughly three-quarters of a million inhabitants. Yet a war designed to crush resistance instead entrenched it. Months of bombardment, razed districts, and shattered infrastructure have not produced so-called “security,” freed captive Israeli soldiers, or dismantled the Palestinian resistance’s governing capacity underground. The Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) which long cultivated an aura of invincibility, have struggled to secure and hold dense urban terrain measured in single-digit kilometres.
The attrition has been severe and asymmetrical. About a quarter of a million Palestinians have been killed or wounded; whole neighbourhoods, hospitals, schools, and power systems have been levelled. In a single recent week, more than 500 buildings were destroyed; around 600 tents sheltering displaced families were burned; at least 20 centres housing refugees were hit, leaving more than 50,000 people homeless overnight. “Evacuation” leaflets and last-minute calls function as coercive displacement mechanisms rather than credible civilian-protection measures in a territory where “nowhere safe” is an operational reality engineered by design.
The resistance’s tunnel networks have proved far more resilient than IOF threat assessments suggested, and urban fighting has repeatedly channelled armoured formations into ambush geometries where aerial dominance confers diminishing returns. Recovery attempts for captive IOF soldiers have consistently failed; the core objectives of freeing Israeli prisoners and imposing full control remain unmet despite the scale of force and technical sophistication. In short, Gaza is the textbook case of imperial firepower colliding with a politically anchored popular resistance that knows its ground.
ISR saturation meets denial, deception, and adaptation
“Israel’s” second push into Gaza City, marketed as “Operation Gideon’s Chariots 2”, was underwritten by a saturated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) picture: persistent drone orbits, offshore reconnaissance aircraft from U.S. forces and other IOF partners, space-based imagery and electronic collection, cyber intrusions, and informant networks. In doctrine, fusion cells knit SIGINT, IMINT, and HUMINT into actionable intelligence; in practice, the system was publicly humiliated when Hamas moved a live captive IOF soldier through recognisable cityscapes in daylight and published the footage. This was not a mere propaganda flourish; it exposed the vulnerabilities of overreliance on technical collection in cluttered urban terrain, persistent HUMINT gaps, and fusion shortfalls. It underscored how ISR saturation can manufacture a false sense of control that agile adversaries exploit. Gaza’s defenders turned density, electromagnetic noise, and population movement into living camouflage that blunted overmatch. Cognitively, a short, audacious video achieved more effect than a hundred airstrikes. It eroded the aura of omniscience that sustains coercive credibility.
The collapse of a manufactured myth
Amid criticism, the Israeli government replaced Herzi Halevi with Yael Zamir as IOF Chief of Staff, a handover wrapped in the promise that Gaza could be delivered “on a plate.” What followed instead was the protraction of “Gideon’s Chariots,” officer-level admissions that negotiation would ultimately be unavoidable, and a strategic conversation haunted by reputational loss. If an army operating with minimal legal or political restraint cannot subdue a besieged enclave, the 1967-vintage myth of invincibility is analytically useless. The Lebanon stalemates, in 2006 and again in 2024, had already weakened that myth; Gaza has fractured it. The inability to prevent missile and drone penetrations deep into Palestinian land occupied in 1948 from Yemen and Iran compounded the psychological damage and further punctured deterrence theatre.
Politically, the military has become a foil. Once central to “state” identity, settler hard-liners now publicly denigrate senior commanders. The old image, “an army with a government”, has inverted; the IOF is scapegoated to preserve an unwinnable course. That inversion corrodes settler-military cohesion precisely when adaptive learning and cross-institutional trust are most required.
“Long Arm” revealed as scaffolded reach
The strike on a Hamas leadership meeting in Doha marked a geographic escalation with messaging far beyond Gaza. Tactically, it failed to assassinate key figures; strategically, it collapsed a live mediation channel, signalled that no capital is sanctuary, and, most tellingly, exposed how Israeli long-arm operations ride American infrastructure. Open sources tracked US and UK aerial tankers (USAF KC-46A Pegasus; RAF Voyager/KC3) orbiting east of Qatar in the strike window; integrated CENTCOM radar coverage would have tracked launch platforms, deconflicted airspace, and ensured corridor access. Whether munitions were released from outside Qatari airspace with precision stand-off weapons, or whether identification friend-or-foe codes rendered tracks “friendly,” the decisive enabler was the US-managed architecture that makes such missions feasible.
The weapon signature points to method: small-calibre, delay-fused precision bombs optimised for roof penetration and selected-floor detonation in dense urban settings, consistent with the 250-lb GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb (SDB I), a GPS/INS-guided glide munition with roughly 70–110 km stand-off range depending on release parameters. That profile permits stand-off delivery while preserving deniability for overflight claims, but it does not conceal the obvious: without US tankers, shared radar pictures, permissive corridors, and regional command-and-control, the sortie geometry makes little sense. The projection of Israeli power, in this instance, is an extension of American supremacy, not a demonstration of unconstrained sovereign reach.
The theatre around foreknowledge, conflicting timelines between Washington’s statements and Doha’s account, mattered less than the physics of the strike. Everyone operating in Gulf skies understands that nothing of that profile happens untracked. Hosting US bases offers “Israel” a shield and a springboard; it offers Arab hosts neither immunity nor leverage when Israeli aims and American enabling coincide.
“Greater Israel”
Having failed to translate battlefield brutality into decisive outcomes, the Israeli governing coalition has traded in land and symbolism. Expansionist projects in and around Jerusalem, most notably the E1 scheme, are pushed by key ministers to pre-empt any Palestinian statehood by fracturing contiguity. Settlement growth functions as political currency to keep the far right aligned while the army bleeds. The rhetorical invocation of a Torah-rooted polity from Egypt’s river to the Euphrates serves not just as a policy blueprint but as an ideological cover for present-day objectives as well: annexation by increments and a narrative that reframes failure in Gaza as destiny elsewhere.
The same logic explains continued Israeli aggression against Syria and Lebanon. Since the September 2024 war against Lebanon, a handful of newly occupied hill positions along the frontier in South Lebanon has grown to eight, quietly widening a de facto buffer. A formal ceasefire with Hezbollah would undercut the coalition’s ideological project and its claim to strategic depth; confrontation sustains encroachment and preserves domestic cohesion.
American policy has reinforced this posture. Formal US recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Hights (2019) and an explicit preference for Israeli so-called security prerogatives over inherited borders have emboldened expansionist instincts. When Washington’s envoy, Thomas Barrack, declares that ‘for Israel’s safety the Sykes–Picot borders are meaningless, they will go where they want, when they want, and do what they want’, thereby reducing those lines to dispensable abstractions, the message is that borders are treated as matters of convenience rather than as legal constraints. In that frame, expansion is not an aberration but a licence.
Negotiation as a target set
Regionally, the Doha strike did more than miss its human targets; it struck at the negotiating architecture itself. By hitting a venue associated with mediation, under the shadow of the region’s largest US air base, the operation signalled that diplomacy is dispensable whenever it threatens to impose limits on the war’s internal logic. In practical terms, it condemned Israeli captives to continued limbo and further weaponised their fate within domestic politics; strategically, it told Arab states that American security umbrellas do not extend to the protection of their sovereignty when Israeli operational aims are engaged. The message to intermediaries was chilling: your capital can be made into a battlespace, and your utility as mediator is contingent on alignment, not neutrality.
International cracks
Western governments have provided weaponry, intelligence, and protection at the UN; popular outrage, however, has pushed European debates toward recognition of Palestinian statehood, not from newfound sentiment, but from the impossibility of defending the facts on the ground. Arab capitals that flirted with normalisation now face domestic opinion radicalised by images of mass civilian harm; neighbours responsible for refugees balance quiet security coordination with public alarm. Even in Washington, the apparatus is not monolithic. Pentagon and State professionals can calculate strategic risk even when political leadership shields impunity. The net effect is isolation layered atop impunity, a volatile combination in which immediate costs are deferred but long-term damage compounds.
The humanitarian ledger
Whatever the IOF’s talking points, the humanitarian record is measurable. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians dead or injured; hospitals, schools, and refugee shelters systematically targeted; power and water grids broken; urban cores pulverised; mass displacement and famine engineered by tempo and design rather than incidental effect, a genocide televised in daylight. When a single week’s strikes in Gaza City can erase hundreds of structures and reduce tens of thousands to homelessness overnight, the intent is territorial transformation by explosive force. That is not a pathway to governance or security; it is the manufacture of future wars and the hardening of a people’s will to resist.
Where this ends
Israeli coercion has reached diminishing returns in Gaza. ISR dominance, armour, and precision munitions have not produced a decision. Palestinian resistance has adapted faster than doctrine has adjusted; the political centre of gravity, captive release, and “credible security”, remains unmet, and persisting on the same course promises only more destruction and further erosion of deterrent mystique.
The Doha strike has confirmed an old truth. “Israel’s” theatre-level reach is rarely autonomous. It is scaffolded, riding American command networks, tankers, radars, and permissive corridors. The spectacle of boundless reach is, in fact, a mirror held by another’s hand.
An occupation entity once defined by “rapid conventional victories” now finds itself exposed by the kind of war it preferred to avoid: long, urban, attritional, and political. The war on Gaza demonstrates that superiority in sensors and munitions is different from control; the Doha strike shows that “strategic depth” is often rented, not owned. Meanwhile, the humanitarian catastrophe begets new hostilities into the future.
Despite the grimness of the present and the vast Palestinian sacrifices on the path to liberation, the result of this Israeli doctrine will not be pacification but serial repetition of more blows traded across borders, more capitals pulled into the battlespace, more illusions dispelled, and a myth finally, irrevocably, replaced by a reckoning.