For weeks the Israeli regime has been threatening an invasion of Rafah, where some 1.4 million displaced Palestinians are cornered next to the Egyptian border. This has caused the United Nations to ring the alarm, over fears of mass expulsion of Gaza’s residents into the Sinai desert and a high casualty series of events. The US government has, however, approved the attack with the caveat that the Israelis must have a plan for civilians.

The UK, which shamefully abstained again on the latest United Nations Security Council draft resolution calling for a ceasefire, has threatened to limit arms exports to their Zionist allies in the event they invade Rafah. On the other hand, the second most steadfast backer of the Zionist entity’s genocide in Gaza, the United States government, has expressed what could only be described as reservations about the Israeli intent to invade the southern-most city in the Gaza Strip.

While there have been quite forthcoming condemnations of the Israeli threats made against Rafah, from representatives belonging to the European Union and United Nations, it is important to focus on the reason why the staunchest allies of the Zionists are alarmed over a Rafah invasion. This state of alarm is for good reason, as there are great implications of such an assault.

To begin with, the Israelis have presented countless “plans”, “proposals” and “strategies” to the public in the past 5 months, this has included the idea of re-occupying all of Gaza, seizing the north of the Strip as a buffer zone, in addition to the idea of creating a buffer zone along the entire perimeter of Gaza. The Israeli Foreign Ministry even presented a document, which was revealed to be in existence back in December, which detailed its three-step plan to dismantle the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in a post-war Gaza. 

The Zionist regime’s media spread rumors that their bunker busting munitions would destroy the Palestinian resistance’s tunnel infrastructure from the air, when the bombs were dropped and that then failed we heard that they were preparing to flood the tunnels and even gas them. The idea of pumping sea water and poison gas into the tunnels was tried and failed.

As the Zionist military pushed further into Gaza, during what could be labeled the first phase of their ground assault, they fixated on seizing the hospitals in the north of the Gaza Strip, specifically focusing their propaganda efforts on the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Once Israeli militants reached the hospital, which they received the backing of the US government in claiming had a “Hamas HQ” rooted underneath it, they failed to convince even the most biased American media outlets that any such military presence existed there. 

The Israeli military, after having pushed its way into a large portion of the built-up areas of northern Gaza, focused their effort then on areas like al-Maghazi, Nuseirat, and Deir al-Balah, while claiming that the real “Hamas HQ” was actually based in Khan Younis to the South. Eventually, after focusing their military efforts on central and southern Gaza, the Israeli army began to withdraw from areas in the north, where it has repeatedly claimed to have dismantled the Palestinian resistance’s command and control, asserting that the Israeli regime had secured “full operational control” in the likes of Gaza City, Beit Hanoun, Shujayeh, Beit Lahia, Jabalia and elsewhere. Demonstrating the extent to which they enjoyed such “operational control”, they were frequently struck by resistance fighter ambushes and fell into well-prepared booby-traps, as the resistance managed to continue to fire rockets right next to where Israeli troops operated.

From observing the daily resistance videos and communiques, which inform us of the details of the battles taking place throughout Gaza, it is clear that Israeli soldiers are continuing to make basic mistakes, such as remaining in open windows and frequently falling into prepared traps. While the resistance is developing in its methods of fighting the enemy, the Israelis continue to behave in the same manner they did on day one of the ground invasion: Israeli soldiers push into an area at great speed and rarely ever leave the cover of their military vehicles, they do not clear areas they encurse into and set up safe zones for their soldiers to guard them temporarily, before moving on into another area. 

The Israeli army has not demonstrated the enactment of a systematic plan that has led to any key military goals. In fact, there is still a great debate as to what the actual goals of the military assault are, beyond the complete and utter devastation of every structure and living being inside the Gaza Strip. Applying Occam’s Razor, or in other words accepting the most evident answer to the question in front of us, it can be concluded that there is no real plan in Gaza beyond mass murder and destruction. From countless genocidal, racist and bloodthirsty statements made on a daily basis by Israelis - from regular civilians to the highest authorities in power - it is obvious that the extermination of as many Palestinians as possible is a clearly agreed upon goal and one which we actually see evidence for on-the-ground.

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As for the ideas of buffer zones, re-occupation, annexation of territory, destruction of tunnels using various methods, the assassination of military leaders in Gaza, the recapturing of Israeli prisoners and the complete defeat of Hamas, there is no clear indication that the Zionist military is even capable of achieving any of these. At least, if any successes are made towards achieving such goals, they appear random and infrequent, but certainly not the result of any structured plan. The Israelis have no idea how many resistance fighters have been killed, only bothering to throw out random numbers of allegedly killed Qassam Brigades fighters, but no statistics for any of the some dozen other groups. The Zionist entity and its Western allies don’t even appear to demonstrate any knowledge on how many Palestinian resistance fighters even exist in Gaza, or know an accurate mileage estimate for the size of the underground tunnel infrastructure.

This then brings us to Rafah, which Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has declared is crucial to the war effort and even stated that without invading the area his military cannot win the war. The Hebrew media, as it did when the regime was threatening to invade Gaza City and Khan Younis, has set out its delusional analysts to make arguments as to why all of the Israeli prisoners are being kept in Rafah and that the real Hamas headquarters is there too. But, as was the case with every other area they fixated on, they have no idea what they are talking about.

While the entire world watches on in horror, using their common sense to predict the potential massacre that is awaiting in Rafah and an attempt to ethnically cleanse over a million people, the Israeli domestic conversation is rooted in a delusional idea of military victory. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that an Israeli military invasion of an area where 1.4 million refugees are packed into tents and other kinds of crude shelters, will be a disaster.

Many analysts and members of the general public are now speculating that there is an Israeli plan to ethnically cleanse the population of Rafah into the Egyptian Sinai, which could well be a goal of such an invasion. However, I would argue that despite there being an alleged “plan”, it will not be carried out in any orderly way and even if an attempt to purge the population of Rafah is made, it will be done sloppily.

What we have to understand about the Israeli military is that it is not really a professional army. Sure, the Israelis have modern military weapons and the backing of their Western allies, they even have well trained individuals when it comes to operating weapons systems, but they do not have an army. The Israeli soldiers are ill-disciplined, poorly trained, ill-prepared for confronting urban warfare settings of the nature they are now fighting in and they do not follow orders. For years the Israeli military has been suffering from issues in its ability to properly control the actions of its militants and we see that even in the case of high-ranking soldiers, they commit basic mistakes that low-ranking soldiers in most modern army’s wouldn’t.

It is this combination of a military force that has no ground capacity, armed with the most sophisticated and expensive weaponry that money can buy, that makes them so incredibly dangerous in a location of Rafah. What is to happen if an Israeli unit gets scared, makes a mistake and opens fire in the wrong direction, killing or injuring Egyptian forces for instance? Although the situation may be somewhat of a low possibility, it could happen. If it does occur, who is to say that there isn’t a response from the Egyptian side in the heat of the moment, which leads to a diplomatic catastrophe, or even a military freakout that brings on a large civilian massacre against Gazans?

What happens if the Israeli militants invading the area behave as they have everywhere else in Gaza, opening fire indiscriminately and sadistically into a densely populated area where hundreds of thousands are packed into? This is a huge possibility. Even in the event that ethnic cleansing is their end goal, all the evidence of the military’s conduct indicates that they will carry this out in an ill organized and brutal manner, if Palestinian civilians are forced into a stampede at the border with Egypt, there could be thousands crushed to death alone.

The Palestinian resistance are clearly still intact and capable of coordinating between their units throughout Gaza, so the idea that they would be keeping all of the Israeli detainees and the leadership of Hamas in Rafah, is illogical. Therefore, the Zionist forces will achieve the same results they have everywhere else in Gaza, complete failure. Then what? What occurs when the frustration sets in over their inability to even stop the rocket fire. Even worse, what do the Israelis do if the resistance has major surprises awaiting their soldiers in Rafah? If we are to use the last five months as our point of reference, the conclusions we can draw amount to them inflicting large-scale civilian massacres in one way or another.

The Zionist entity has no plan in Gaza, it has no idea how to defeat the Palestinian resistance militarily and has dramatically failed for over 5 months at this task. What we see “achieved” by the Israelis is mass murder, which is clearly genocidal in its nature. This behavior, akin to a Daesh-type militant group armed with the most sophisticated military technology on earth, will only be repeated in Rafah, but this time it will likely be on an unimaginable scale. 

All of what has been detailed above is leaving out the possibility of this also triggering a major regional escalation also. In his first speech during the ongoing war, the Secretary General of Hezbollah, Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah, set out what could be described as a single red line, “Hamas will win”. If the Israeli regime moves to ethnically cleanse Gaza, this could well be seen as crossing this red line, transforming the battle dramatically on the northern front of occupied Palestine. The US, by essentially greenlighting the Zionist plan to invade Rafah, is flirting with several dangerous scenarios, all of which could bring the region to a point of no return.