War Is a Back-and-Forth Battle, But This Round Belongs to the Resistance

October 10, 2024

Nasser Kandil

A fundamental truth of war is that it’s a cycle of wins and losses between opponents. Undoubtedly, the recent days – spanning from the destruction of communication devices to the assassination of Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, coupled with the brutal bombardment of the southern suburbs, villages, and towns in southern Lebanon and the Beqaa Valley – have belonged to the occupying army. They claimed this round without hesitation, successfully delivering painful strikes, which could have been fatal if their target had been anyone other than this steadfast resistance.

In the ongoing war between the resistance forces and the occupation, it’s clear that the occupier’s strategy revolves around focusing all its might on a single front and deploying every available military and intelligence asset to crush it. This effort is heavily supported by the United States, which provides intelligence, weaponry, legal, and diplomatic backing, maximising the chances of success. This was evident over the ten months of fighting on the Gaza front, where the occupier sought to secure even a relative victory. However, despite unprecedented levels of destruction, killing, and criminal brutality, they failed. In response, Washington furnished a lethal package aimed at delivering a knockout blow to Hezbollah, the central force within the resistance, hoping to secure a triumph that would resonate across all fronts of the resistance axis, including Iran.

Hezbollah spent days tending to wounds, but it remained firm, especially on the support front, firing rockets at settlements in northern occupied Palestine, proving its resilience. Then, Hezbollah’s Deputy Secretary-General Sheikh Naim Qassem made his first appearance, followed by a series of signals that Hezbollah – the heart of the resistance- was recovering, regaining its strength, and taking back the initiative. By his second appearance, signals grew stronger, particularly with the reintroduction of deterrence in the scene, as evidenced by the rocket strikes on Haifa’s residential and economic sectors. Meanwhile, on the ground front, Hezbollah’s
revealed much about its military strength and cohesive structure. The current phase belongs to the resistance, whose approach – outlined publicly by its Secretary-General over the past eleven months of war, and mirrored by the Gaza Resistance during the months of conflict – operates on principles directly opposed to those of the occupier. Rather than immediately laying all its cards on the table, the resistance employs a slow and methodical escalation, revealing its strengths gradually. It excels in the war of attrition, designed to triumph by wearing down the enemy to the point where continuing the fight becomes futile and the cost of war exceeds the anticipated gains, pushing public opinion within the enemy’s ranks to favour ending the war after having supported its continuation and escalation.

The resistance has yet to deploy many of its known capabilities, but it has begun to unveil some of its power. Today, it controls the crucial dynamics of the conflict, leaving the occupying army with little to boast about beyond assassination operations, whose effects quickly dissipated with the resistance’s recovery, even though deep pain and scars remain. Over the past week, the spokesperson for the occupier’s military has stopped celebrating achievements in the ground campaign, as their claims have become a source of ridicule – disproven by the undeniable reality of their failure to make any significant progress on any front. Meanwhile, the resistance continues to introduce new tools of warfare with each passing day.

This round unmistakably belongs to the resistance. By the tenth day of the ground campaign, the battlefield had demonstrated the resistance’s firm grip on control and initiative. Haifa now finds itself within the crosshairs of the resistance’s rockets, and a new phase of deterrent operations has emerged in response to the indiscriminate targeting of civilian infrastructure, including health and education services. Every day, settlers grow more disillusioned with their faith in their government and army to guarantee their safety while indulging in the slaughter of women and children in Gaza and Lebanon. With every death in Gaza and Lebanon, more rockets will rain down on their heads, and more fires will ignite in their settlements. Their institutions and homes will not be spared from these strikes. The price of the security they long for is clear: their government and army must cease this monstrous and criminal war.

The resistance fights to defend its people. It does not kill for the sake of killing, nor does it burn for vengeance. Instead, it forces those who revel in murder and destruction to understand that they will eventually drink the same poison they so gleefully watch others swallow.