After a month of war between Israel and Hamas, there is no sign of an end

More than a month of war between Israel and Hamas remains 11,000 dead – almost 10,000 in Gaza -, 241 hostages and the thousands of Israeli soldiers advancing overland into the Strip, whose population is suffering an unprecedented humanitarian disaster and where there seems to be no end in sight.

A month ago, Israel woke up to the worst tragedy in its 75-year history.

A month ago it also started the bloodiest month in my life of the 2.3 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip.

Since that fateful October 7, in which militants from the Islamist group Hamas massacred more than 1,400 Israelis – most of them civilians – and took more than 240 hostages, the region has been plunged into a nightmare whose scale cannot be measured by numbers.

More than 9,700 Palestinians killed in Gaza
More than 9,700 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including 4,000 children. Nearly 25,000 injured, added to more than 5,000 in Israel. About one and a half million internally displaced persons in the Belt and 200,000 in Israel.

Unprecedented figures, but they do not express what the mass graves full of corpses in the Strip and containers with the bodies of mutilated civilians rotting while Israeli forensics are still trying to identify them.

“This terrorist attack represents a turning point for Israel,” says Miri Eisin in an interview with EFE. who served for more than 20 years in the Israeli military intelligence service and run by Israel’s International Institute for Combating Terrorism.

“The massacre completely changed us, both in how we see Hamas and in our military actions. “The destruction of Hamas’ capabilities is the only alternative, and that means a long and difficult campaign,” he adds.

“Israel has not experienced a full-scale war in 50 years.”

Israel brought in a large number of troops
In order to destroy Hamas and take control of Gaza, Israel didn’t just bomb fierce enclave 31 consecutive days, but also introduced a significant number of troops, which in less than ten days managed to surround the strategic city of Gaza and divide the Strip between north and south.

“Israel itself has already acknowledged that this goes beyond self-defense,” Tahani Mustafa, a Palestinian analyst at the International Crisis Group, told EFE, who also condemned that “Palestinians continue to be treated as a problem to be solved, not as a people with legitimate rights and cares.

Many of these rights have multiple warnings International organizationshave been undermined over the past month by continuous attacks on civilian infrastructure in Gaza, including schools and hospitals, and by an iron siege by Israel, which after a Hamas attack a month ago blocked the entry of water, food, electricity, medical supplies and fuel, among other things.

“After a month, it would seem that no one has learned anything, and those who have the opportunity to redirect the situation are not interested in it”, believes Mustafa, who also believes that the only thing that has remained of the war so far is “a gigantic humanitarian disaster that distances andPalestinian cause self-determination as Israel’s ideal of security.”

The analyst also highlights the regional dimension of the conflict, which she describes as a “turning point in the Middle East”.

Other fronts
It refers to the spread of violence in Gaza to other fronts, mainly on the border between Israel and Lebanon, where more than 80 people have died in the past month as a result of the most serious exchange of fire since the war with the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah in 2006.

Added to this is a series of attacks towards Israel from Yemen and a significant increase in violence in the occupied West Bank, which was already experiencing the bloodiest year since the Second Intifada (2000-2005) and where more than 150 Palestinians and two Israelis have died since October 7.

When asked about the possibility of ending hostilities in the short term, both experts firmly ruled it out.

“For Israel, the idea of ​​a ceasefire is irrelevant, l“The only thing we could consider are humanitarian breaks,” explains Eisin, who believes that the war with Hamas could drag on for months because of the army’s decision to attack on land instead of “eliminating” the Gaza Strip from the air.

Mustafa, for his part, notes that the Israeli government, composed of right-wing, far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties, has no capacity or interest in de-escalating the conflict and is taking advantage of this situation to pursue other political goals.