One month watching Hamas militants patrolling streets in the bombed-out narrow Gaza Strip, while handing over hostages, or dead bodies they have held for sixteen months under relentless, disproportionate and indiscriminate destruction, one cannot help imagine the humiliation of being powerful, yet helpless, that bullish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is going through. Last week’s handover of three bodies, a woman and her two little children for 620 Palestinian detainees, among them also twenty-six children, smirked at the heartlessness of this conflict imposed by Israel and its western allies for eight decades now. For choosing the heavy military assault, in the heat of the moment, when calm reflection and measured steps could have been better, Israel is paying a good price.

It has also been more like a game of cat and mouse, in a military and diplomatic brinkmanship, with Netanyahu’s bullish vows to finish off Hamas, regardless of the tight choke, still looking distant. The high handed Israel Defence Forces (IDF), and The Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, otherwise known as Mossad, although praised as among the best in the world, and has been conducting this most brutal, one-sided war of terror, must be reeling in agony. Mossad, with known guts, capability, determination and political willingness to go to any length after enemies of Israel, has had this conflict shutter its own hitherto invincibility.

The hostage swap with thousands of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel jails, often without trial, resembles the hasty retreat in humiliation that US soldiers suffered in defeat at the hands of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2020, after two decades of a horrendous similar one-sided war when a coalition of US, Canadian, Australian and European armies wreaked havoc. And for the record, it was the US that created, trained, funded and armed the Mujahideen to fight the Soviet Union culminating in the defeat of 1979 and then, they mutated into Taliban.

US and Israel have been complicit in the destruction of Gaza, the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing there to wipe out Palestinians off their land. Donald Trump’s proposal to buy out Gaza, bizarre as it is, to become US’s 51st state, is more like his meeting with Kim Jong Un, which ended nowhere. After sixteen months of indiscriminate bombing and destruction of Gaza, Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have still failed to locate, let alone rescue a single Israel hostage. Too, the IDF has failed to wipe out the Hamas army which is their war public policy. The impotence of the IDF is exposed, now evidenced by the fact that Hamas militants still openly patrol the streets, and handing over hostages at their locations of their own choosing and timing within the narrow Gaza Strip. Hamas is reported to be still holding sixty-three hostages, with thirty six believed dead.

This war has actually exposed the inability of the much-praised Israel intelligence organisations to locate where the hostages were being held. Even the huge amounts of diplomatic, military, logistical, economic and financial support that the US has given Jordan and Egypt over the years to play nice with Israel, betray and create an anti-Palestine leverage hasn’t delivered the desired victory.

The brutal, and sustained efforts to expel Palestinians from their homeland and ongoing threats to forcibly deport them after the genocide and ethnic cleansing to other countries like Jordan and Egypt, to distant lands Trump may be so geographically, economically, topographically and demographically ignorant about, offend common sense and every international, and must be rejected.

With Trump’s musings to take over Greenland, Mexico, Canada, Panama, and now the Gaza Strip by purchase or force, he is probably being as honest as a thug in a grocery shop, and a true face of ugly, greedy, and vicious American empire. The only country that may not denounce this idiocy will be Israel, while Europeans coil their tails.