The Super Bowl Massacre: Israel’s Invasion Of Rafah Will Be Catastrophic

For weeks the Israeli leadership has threatened to invade the southern most city in Gaza, Rafah, where some 1.4 million Palestinians are crammed in tents and crude shelters along the Egyptian border. The Sunday night series of airstrikes on Rafah, which caused another civilian massacre during the American Super Bowl, is only a taste of what is to come.

In the early hours of Monday morning (Palestine time), while Americans were fixated on the Super Bowl, Israeli airstrikes pummeled the Gaza’s Rafah, killing upwards of 100 civilians. Seemingly using the cover of the 8th most watched sporting event in the world, some 1.4 million displaced Palestinian civilians were subjected to a terror bombing that led to horrifying scenes of death and destruction, whereby at least 14 civilian homes and 3 mosques were destroyed.

As talks have been ongoing, regarding the possibility of a negotiated multi-staged ceasefire agreement between Gaza and Israel, the Israeli leadership have been consistently speaking out in opposition to a peaceful resolution and instead threatening to invade the southern most area of the besieged Palestinian territory. While world leaders have almost unanimously warned of the consequences that such an invasion would involve, the US Biden administration has reportedly given the tacit green light, despite expressed concerns for civilian life. The US government has stated that it only opposes the invasion under such circumstances that there is no plan for civilians, which is ambiguous and therefore leaves room for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime to present meritless claims that a plan for civilians has been drawn up.

If the rest of the some 130 days of war against Gaza have taught us anything, it is that the Israelis are consistently attacking without any coherent plan. Of its planned operations, Israel failed three rescue missions that it conducted with special forces units, one of them being an attempt to seize captives who were being held by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)’s armed wing, considered to be the fourth strongest faction in Gaza. In another case, Israeli soldiers shot dead three of its own prisoners — one of them 15 minutes after the other two — who were reportedly unleashed by Hamas and were holding up white flags.

On Monday morning, during their terror bombing of civilian targets in Rafah, the Israeli military announced that they had finally succeeded in freeing two Israeli prisoners. It was revealed that two, low-value, elderly men who were allegedly being held captive in southern Gaza’s al-Shaboura refugee camp, were extracted in the special forces operation. While Israel claimed it had killed three gunmen that were accompanying the elderly men, Hamas has downplayed the operation and reports have indicated that the two were being accompanied by a civilian family. In this circumstance, it is extremely difficult to tell what exactly transpired, as the Israeli narrative appears to have holes in it, which were only exacerbated following the release of heavily edited footage from the operation. However, the important point is as follows: This is the single largest military achievement that Israel has managed to pull off in around 5 months of combat, releasing two elderly captives who were not in a tunnel and clearly low-value.

Another element to this is that al-Shaboura refugee camp was a “designated safe zone” by the Israeli military, where the Israeli Air Force bombed civilian tents during its special forces raid. Meanwhile, Hamas announced that three other Israeli captives were killed during the airstrikes committed against Rafah that same night. The excuse for the massacre that they committed against civilians in Rafah, was that it was a “distraction” from their operation to free the two elderly men, which means that they essentially admitted that murdering majority women and children refugees was a sound price for extracting these two men that could have been released through a prisoner exchange anyway.

The reason that an all out invasion of Rafah will prove to be a disaster in every way, is down to two primary factors: The number of civilians who are sheltering there and the lack of any plan by the Israeli army. If we track the main phases of the war, we will see that Israel started off by bombing every area throughout Gaza. According to a report that was released by the Israeli media outlet, +972 Mag, the Israeli military were using the AI Habsora technology to produce a hundred targets per day and quoted a military source as saying:

“We work quickly and there is no time to delve deep into the target. The view is that we are judged according to how many targets we manage to generate.”

Many used this investigative article to point out the inhumane nature of the attack on Gaza, which it clearly demonstrates, yet it also proves something else, that there was no pre-planned targets and that they were quite literally hitting every other AI generated target based upon whether the target was said to be male or female.

When the Israeli army invaded Gaza on the ground, they focused their efforts on Northern Gaza and attempted to force the people out. They succeeded to drive hundreds of thousands south, into areas they would later bomb and invade anyway. At this stage of Israel’s assault on Gaza, proposals were being floated around about the possibility of annexing northern Gaza as a “buffer zone”, while Tel Aviv harped on about the “Hamas HQ” that they told the world existed under al-Shifa Hospital.

After the Shifa Hospital invasion proved that there was no Hamas command and control centre, or HQ, underneath it, they then shifted onto the next phase of their attack, where they would invade the centre and southern areas of Gaza. Israeli media and politicians, including ex-PM Ehud Olmert proclaimed that the real Hamas headquarters was located in the city of Khan Younis. Lo and behold, Khan Younis was invaded, so too were all the refugee camps in central Gaza, and there was still no Hamas base discovered. During this time, the people of Gaza were encouraged to flee to southern Gaza’s Rafah and set up tents along the Egyptian border.

When Israeli troops were rigging a number of civilian homes in eastern Maghazi refugee camp with explosives, a member of Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades emerged and hit one of the buildings with an RPG shell, before also targeting a Merkava tank. This incident, which killed at least 21 Israeli soldiers, was impossible for the military to cover up and led to several questions being posed about why the soldiers were rigging those buildings with explosives to begin with. Then we heard about Israel’s plan to create a “buffer zone” throughout the entire area surrounding the Gaza-Israel separation fence/wall, which Hebrew media were speculating would be a kilometer deep into Gaza’s territory.

Now, as Hamas continues to fight and shows no sign of collapse, the Israeli PM has rejected a ceasefire proposal that could have led to the release of all Israelis that are being held captive in Gaza. Instead, he and his leadership are claiming that they can only defeat Hamas through an invasion of Rafah. Yet, again, they provide not a single shred of evidence to support that allegation.

With 1.4 million Palestinians now living in crude shelters, where disease and hunger are rampant, a ground invasion will leave them with no where to go. The fear is that the Netanyahu government is trying to ethnically cleanse those homeless civilians from Gaza altogether and force them to flee into Egypt’s Sinai desert. But according to the way in which the ill-disciplined and poorly trained Israeli army has invaded every other area of Gaza, it seems that no coherent strategy to achieve such a goal will be implemented. It is more than likely that the exact same methods will be used in Rafah as elsewhere, meaning that Israeli forces will storm into the city inside armoured vehicles, bombing and shooting anything that is in their way. With nearly one and a half million people situated inside tents in Rafah, this is a recipe for disaster.

Like was the case elsewhere in Gaza, it is not likely that the Israeli army is going to do very well in its actual clashes with the Palestinian resistance and will suffer heavy casualties again. This will also lead to more “revenge” attacks, were the Israeli Air Force and ground forces will murder civilians in what they see as retaliation. If the Rafah invasion happens, it will be genocidal and could even force the likes of Lebanese Hezbollah to get involved in the war. In the event that such a development occurs, we are looking at a massive regional war that will drag in the United States military too.