The Yemeni Armed Forces and Ansar Allah's strike on occupied Yafa (Tel Aviv) last week did not happen in a vacuum. It came in the context of the continued televised Zionist genocide against Gaza, which has devastated about 90% of the Gaza Strip and resulted in nearly 200,000 casualties, including 39,145 deaths by July 24, and the numbers are on the rise. To grasp the full implications of such an important development in the ongoing war, a look at the bigger picture is needed.

Netanyahu has no real plans to reach a lasting ceasefire; he intends to prolong the war for as long as possible, aims to completely destroy the Gaza Strip, and has no other strategy but to continue the ongoing genocide against Gazans. Those were the conclusions both Hamas and Hezbollah leaders have reached in the past two weeks in light of Netanyahu’s conduct towards negotiations.

On the eve of Monday, May 6, 2024, when Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) were about to invade the besieged Rafah, Hamas informed the mediators, Qatar and Egypt, of its acceptance of the framework of the ceasefire plan proposed by President Biden. Nevertheless, this communique fell on Israeli deaf ears, and the IOF went ahead with its incursion plan, causing in its wake hundreds of additional civilian casualties and worsening an already dire humanitarian situation. The negotiations then halted, but Israeli massacres did not,  nor did the courageous and resilient Palestinian resistance.

Then, two months later, Hamas took another step to revive the permanent ceasefire negotiations. It informed Qatar on Sunday, July 7, 2024, that it was ready to negotiate a prisoners swap deal, without insisting on tying it into a long-term ceasefire agreement. But Netanyahu’s response to Hamas’s more lenient proposal came in typical Israeli fashion.

IOF committed the shocking and horrifying al-Mawasi massacre, a designated humanitarian safe zone, on Saturday, July 13, 2024, again jeopardizing the attempts to restart negotiations. The horrifying massacre killed at least 90 and wounded over 300, mostly women and children.

Politically, Netanyahu introduced new conditions to the table in what seemed like an attempt to prolong the war. "The key is pressure, pressure, and more pressure," Netanyahu said in a speech to the Knesset on Wednesday, July 17, 2024. "As long as we keep pressuring them, Hamas will give up more and more" in the negotiations, he added.

In his strategy, Netanyahu appears to be betting on at least one of three developments:

1. A total collapse of Gazan society, either under the weight of the encroaching Israeli manufactured famine, or by repeatedly bombarding the displaced civilians, even in UN-protected areas, such as centers of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), and in designated humanitarian safe zone.
2. Achieving any tangible military goal to present to the Israeli home front. Such as assassinating one of Hamas’s senior leaders, or recovering any of the Israeli captives alive, in the hope of saving his precarious political future after his government’s huge failure on the morning of Saturday, October 7, 2023.
3. Trump winning the upcoming US elections. Netanyahu believes that it would be easier to fully drag the US army in a new war in the Middle East if Trump came back to power.

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In any case, as the UN and the international community have failed to put an end to the ongoing Israeli genocide, and given that it has become apparent that Netanyahu has no real intention of stopping the assault on Gazans, the Axis of Resistance found itself obliged to ramp-up the pressure on the occupation in the hope of ending this ten-month-long horrifying Palestinian nightmare. And what has transpired since, indicates one thing; the Axis of Resistance leaders have concluded that without hitting strategic enemy targets, deep within the occupied 1948 territories, there would be little chance to bring Netanyahu back to the negotiating table.

In the early hours of Friday morning July 19, 2024, the Yemeni Armed Forces (YAF) and Ansar Allah hit occupied Yafa [Tel Aviv], in Operation Yafa. Yemen used a new type of drone in the operation, also named Yafa, that was capable of flying undetected through "Israel's" extensive air defense systems, according to YAF spokesperson Yahya Saree.

Following the attack, the Yemeni Armed Forces declared occupied Yafa, the most protected area in occupied Palestine 1948, an unsafe zone until the Israeli aggression is halted and Gaza's blockade is lifted.

With this carefully designed and executed tactical maneuver, the Axis of Resistance presented the enemy with either one of two bitter choices:

1. Stop the genocide, accept a ceasefire and a prisoners swap deal, and lift the Gaza blockade, thus, satisfying Hamas’s terms.
2. Expand the IOF area of operations to include Yemen, which lies 1,300 miles away, in addition to the current fronts in Gaza and South Lebanon, thus further stretching the capabilities of an already stretched-out and exhausted IOF.

The US announced on Monday, December 18, 2023, the launch of a 10-nation coalition (multinational security initiative) to combat Yemeni Armed Forces and Houthis in the Red Sea. Over six months later, the US, the UK, and the rest of the coalition have not achieved any single meaningful military objective. And it is questionable that the IOF would succeed where a US-led coalition has failed!

In all likelihood, the IOF opening a front with Yemen will only exacerbate the war of attrition it is currently facing. However, not responding to the Yemeni strike will further diminish the IOF’s already declining deterrence, which will increase the level of insecurity among Israeli settlers in occupied Palestine.

The latest Yemeni escalation appears to have been a neat trap set by the Axis of Resistance, which the Zionist enemy was forced to fall into with open eyes; a trap that pushed the enemy to abandon its war strategy.

This assessment agrees with what Sayyid Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, Ansar Allah's leader, said in a speech on Sunday July 21, 2024:

"The Israeli enemy's strategy after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was to throw all its weight and military capabilities against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and the Resistance fighters in the Gaza Strip, and to focus all its military capabilities on the Gaza front. While the Americans promised to confront any dangers that may arise from other fronts to support the Palestinian people.," Sayyid Abdul-Malik al-Houthi said in his speech. He went on to say that the Americans, the British, and their allies failed in protecting the Israeli enemy from other supporting fronts, hence the Israeli enemy turned to direct aggression towards our country; that was not from a position of strength, nor from one of comfort, the enemy was forced to go beyond the strategy it had adopted at the beginning," he then explained.

He then sums up the Yemeni strategy as part of the Axis of Resistance by saying, "As the Israeli enemy continued its aggression against Gaza, the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, starvation by severe siege, and preventing the entry of food and medicine into the Gaza Strip, we entered this battle to support for the Palestinian people, and we made sure that the scope of operations extended to the Indian Ocean, and to the Mediterranean Sea. As we reach the tenth month, and the enemy continues its genocide against the Palestinian people, it needs more pressure and deterrence in order to force it to stop its aggression, and this is what we have previously announced we were going to do, that the more the Israeli enemy continues, the more it escalates against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, and the longer the aggression lasts, we will move to new stages. That is why we headed to the fifth stage through Operation Yafa."

The occupation, after ten months of relentless fighting, finds itself in a lose-lose situation. The support fronts are reinforcing this equation with every new military escalation. The enemy has no choice but to either accept a ceasefire that meets the Palestinian people's conditions, which will have catastrophic strategic implications on the IOF and on the whole future of the Zionist entity, or to continue the war of attrition imposed on it by the Axis of Resistance, which may "lead the nation into the abyss", as Benny Gantz accused Netanyahu of doing. But most dangerously, the longer the Israeli aggression lasts, the closer we become to an all-out devastating regional war. Though such a war will likely change regional maps and rid the Arab World of the Nazi Zionist Entity for good.