Foolish question of who won
IN THE YEAR 625 of the Common Era, adherents of the Islamic faith from Medina, commanded by the prophet Mohammed, engaged with an army of polytheists from Mecca. Mohammed was seriously wounded; his Islamist battalions suffered heavy casualties. The battle of Uhud (as it is known) was clearly a defeat for the forces of Islam.
draw attention to this battle now because it featured in a Facebook comment posted last week by Mahmoud al-Habbash, a senior adviser to Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas. Al-Habbash, who originally hailed from Gaza, is well known as a critic of the Hamas regime that currently rules the Strip.
In Mr Al-Habbash’s Facebook post, he drew a comparison between the outcome of the battle of Uhud and the fate of Gazans during Operation Protective Edge.
He left his readers in little doubt that Protective Edge must be regarded as an unadulterated defeat for the Palestinian cause.
In the aftermath of the recent hostilities involving Israel and Gaza, assorted commentators have rushed to judgment as to “who won?”
The ability of Hamas and its affiliates to fire rockets and mortars into Israel has clearly not been entirely frustrated. The recent deaths of Netanel Maman (an IDF soldier who was actually hit by shrapnel while on leave near Ashdod) and Sergeant Shahar Shalev (who last week succumbed to wounds sustained during battle) have brought the Israeli death toll to 72. More than a hundred other Israelis have suffered injuries of varying severity. There has been some — but, all things considered, not much — damage to property. Of course, a much larger number of Israelis have suffered a variety of stress-related after-effects, and the tourist industry has suffered, too.
According to Israel’s Ministry of Finance, Operation Protective Edge — always assuming that full-scale hostilities do not restart — will have resulted in a loss of 0.4 per cent of GDP.
Let us now consider the Palestinian side of the equation.
An exact figure for the total number of Palestinian casualties is hard to come by, not least because Hamas did its best to talk up the number of deaths of “civilians” as compared to combatants. That said, it’s likely that around 2,000 residents of Gaza lost their lives (a figure that includes those summarily executed on orders from Hamas, and deaths from rocket malfunctions). Of these, at least 50 per cent should be considered as members of a variety of armed militias; these fatalities have included some very senior Hamas military commanders.
Scarcely less important are the 270,000 or so civilians displaced as a result of Israeli military action. Gaza City suffered damage to around a quarter of its housing stock. Beit Hanoun is described as uninhabitable.
The elimination of Gaza’s only power station has had devastating infrastructure repercussions, including sewerage. There has been severe damage to Gaza’s agricultural industries and over two
Palestinian fatalities have included top Hamas commanders
hundred commercial factories were destroyed. In addition, 10 of Gaza’s 26 hospitals have had to close.
According to Oxfam, the cost of the total damage inflicted by the IDF upon Gaza amounts to around $5 billion, in an economy worth around $6.6 billion in terms of Gross National Product (say, 75 per cent). This is likely to take decades rather than years to repair.
Meanwhile, Hamas’s munitions inventory has been seriously depleted, and its command-centres severely damaged. Its tunnels into Israel have been destroyed but it is also worth noting that the parallel destruction of tunnels into Egypt has resulted in a loss of trade of the order of $700 million per annum.
No one should be fooled, therefore, by the otherwise comical “victory” celebrations ordered by Hamas when it accepted the latest Egyptian-brokered ceasefire.
The terms to which Hamas agreed on 26 August are those to which it could have agreed (and was indeed offered) weeks before.
Indeed, they are little different from those offered by Israel two years ago. The opening of border crossings to allow a limited amount of humanitarian aid serves only to underline the now completely dependent nature of the society and economy over which Hamas still claims to rule.
The extension of the Gaza fishing limit from three to six miles offshore is largely symbolic, since the depletion of fish stocks through rampant over-fishing is notorious. Fish will continue to be imported from Israel. The perfectly legal blockade of Gaza remains in place.
Given these facts, it is difficult to disagree with the verdict of Mahmoud al-Habbash to which I referred at the beginning of this column.
For the Palestinians of Gaza, the recent war has been an unmitigated disaster.