Gaza ceasefire: How Israel’s war goals crumbled and the resistance prevailed

By Press TV Website Staff

Israeli regime and the Hamas resistance movement, with the mediation of the US as well as Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey, inked a new ceasefire deal early on Thursday, marking two years and two days since the start of the devastating genocidal war on Gaza

These two years, since October 7, 2023, have witnessed the Tel Aviv regime, supported by its Western allies, particularly the United States, commit horrendous war crimes, killing more than 67,000 Palestinians, most of them children and women, according to the Gaza Media Office.

The outcome has been a humanitarian catastrophe on a scale unseen in modern times, and yet, an enduring Palestinian resistance has defied all odds, proving that right ultimately prevails over might.

What began as a pledge of “total victory” has turned into a defining and decisive failure for the Zionist project. Despite relentless bombardment, siege, and starvation, the Benjamin Netanyahu-led regime in Tel Aviv has failed to achieve any of its strategic or political objectives in Gaza.

What Israel failed to achieve in Gaza

• Failure to crush the Palestinian resistance

After two years of no-holds-barred genocidal war, the Israeli regime failed to subdue Gaza or dismantle the Palestinian resistance, as it had envisioned following the historic and heroic Operation Al-Aqsa Flood by Hamas-led Palestinian resistance.

From the ruins of their homes and refugee camps across Gaza, new forms of resistance, resilience, and defiance emerged over the past two years.

The Palestinian resistance led by Hamas, though battered by the ruthless occupation, has remained organized, determined, and deeply rooted in national consciousness.

The vow to “erase Hamas” has become a symbol of hubris for the Zionist occupation, which was eventually compelled, under pressure from the Trump administration, to enter into a new truce with the very resistance it had sought to annihilate.

• Failure to break Palestinian will

Israel’s strategy of collective punishment —obliterating neighborhoods, bombing hospitals and schools, and starving civilians across the besieged territory — was designed to break the will of Palestinians.

Yet, even amid unimaginable suffering, the spirit of steadfastness, or sumud, has only grown stronger among Palestinians over the past two years, who refuse to submit, surrender, or abandon their homeland.

Families displaced multiple times have refused to leave. Resistance has evolved and expanded beyond armed struggle, becoming deeply embedded in other spheres of life.

• Failure to free captives through force

Despite near-daily bombings across Gaza, Israel has failed to free its captives held by the Palestinian resistance since October 7.

Every attempt to free them through military means has led only to further losses and humiliation for the occupation regime. In many instances, indiscriminate Israeli airstrikes have resulted in the deaths of captives alongside local Palestinians.

Negotiations have remained the only viable path to secure their release, from the very resistance Israel vowed to destroy.

• Failure to trigger a mass exodus

Israel’s goal of pushing Gazans into the barren deserts of Egypt or scattering them abroad has been met with fierce rejection, both from the resistance and the people themselves.

Gaza’s population, even when confined to makeshift tents or the ruins of their homes, has refused to accept the fate of another Nakba. They have resisted uprooting despite the regime’s repeated massacres.

• Failure to recolonize Gaza

Israeli plans to reoccupy Gaza or build illegal settlements amid the genocidal war have collapsed under new political, diplomatic, and military realities.

As the new ceasefire takes effect, Gaza remains uncolonized—and every bomb dropped has only strengthened Palestinian resolve and intensified global opposition to Israel’s settler-colonial ambitions.

• Failure to annex the West Bank

Israeli regime’s long-standing ambition to annex the occupied West Bank and realize its “Greater Israel” project has become a geopolitical mirage.

Local resistance, international scrutiny, investigations by the International Criminal Court, and growing internal divisions within the Zionist entity have hindered its advancement.

What Israel has actually achieved in Gaza

• A genocide broadcast to the world

Over the past two years, the world has witnessed — live and in real time — the mass murder of Palestinian children and women, the destruction of homes and hospitals, the starvation of families, and the erasure of entire communities.

Gaza has become the first genocide in history to be live streamed to billions across the globe, documented by journalists, civilians, and satellites alike.

History will remember this as one of the darkest moral collapses of the modern age, enabled by global silence and facilitated by Western regimes, especially the United States and its allies.

• Global condemnation and legal reckoning

From the United Nations to the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the Human Rights Council, and global NGOs, there is a consensus today Israel committing war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in Gaza.

The ICC has issued arrest warrants against Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu and former military affairs minister Yoav Gallant, while legal scholars continue to demand accountability.

The Brussels-based Hind Rajab Foundation — named after a young Palestinian girl murdered by the Israeli regime in Gaza — has documented Israeli war crimes and pressed governments worldwide to act against Israeli soldiers visiting their countries.

For the first time, the impunity once guaranteed by Western powers to the illegitimate regime has begun to fracture.

• Rising diplomatic isolation

Despite massive investments in propaganda and lobbying efforts across Western capitals to whitewash its genocidal atrocities, the Israeli regime stands increasingly isolated today, two years on.

Student movements, trade unions, artists, lawyers, academics and athletes have joined calls for boycotts and sanctions against the regime, once considered unthinkable

Public opinion, particularly among younger generations in Western countries, has decisively shifted. The once-dominant narrative of so-called “self-defense” has been exposed as hollow and hypocritical.

• Collapse of the Zionist narrative

Social media has become the new and decisive battlefield, and Israel has lost the war of ideas and narratives there as well.

Despite enlisting influencers and spending millions to spread Zionist propaganda about October 7 and its aftermath, the regime has failed to convince global audiences.

Citizen journalists in Gaza, armed with smartphones and unbreakable courage, have shattered decades of deception and lies.

The world now sees the truth unfiltered: a besieged population fighting for survival and liberation against an illegitimate occupier.

• Global awakening for Palestinian liberation

From South Africa to Latin America, London to Jakarta, Italy to Spain, millions now rally behind Palestine and its liberation from Israeli occupation.

It is no longer about a so-called two-state solution but about one and unified free Palestinian state, from the river to the sea.

The Palestinian cause has become a universal symbol of resistance against decades of illegal occupation, oppression, and settler-colonialism.

Calls for self-determination echo louder than ever, uniting diverse movements for justice under one cry: Free Palestine.

Two years on, as the new truce deal comes into effect, Israel’s genocidal campaign has not destroyed Gaza, but immortalized it. From the ashes, the Palestinian spirit still rises. Children continue to recite poems of return.

Resistance endures as the human will to exist, to remember, and to reclaim dignity.

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