October 7, reveals Israel's vulnerability

Tehran, Qodsna –The unprecedented battle of the Palestinian resistance through Operation Al-Aqsa Storm has struck against Israel and undoubtedly, the effects of the earthquake that have been inflicted on the pillars of Zionist power are irreparable and will continue for a long time.

Hamas has said in a statement that the struggle of our nation against the occupying regime and colonialism did not begin on October 7, but 105 years ago as a result of occupation. Our people lived under British colonialism for 30 years and under the Zionist regime for 75 years.

The Al-Aqsa Storm was necessary to end the unjust siege of the Gaza Strip and a natural step in the framework of liberation from the occupation.

on the 3rd anniversary of the October 7, “Storm Al-Aqsa’s Operation”, Gordon Duff, former UN Diplomat, former U.S. military official, Advisor to The Intel Drop, senior editor of Veterans Today and military analyst in an exclusive interview with the Qods News Agency talked about the operation.

Three years ago this week, the world woke up to something it had spent decades pretending could never happen. On October 7, 2023, the Palestinian resistance in Gaza broke through the fence that had held them in for sixteen years and did what no UN resolution, no peace conference, no "roadmap" had ever done. It made the world look at Palestine again. That, at least, cannot be denied, he said.

Let me be clear about where I stand, because I have spent my life in places where clarity gets you killed, and I have learned that the only people who are truly "neutral" are the ones who have never had to choose. I am not neutral. I never was. I am angry, and I am going to stay angry, because anger is what you feel when you are paying attention, Gordon Duff added.

Asked about the achievements of Storm Al-Aqsa’s Operation, he said: Let's start with the part that is not debatable. Before October 7, the Palestinian cause was being buried alive—respectably, diplomatically, with ribbon-cuttings in the Persian Gulf and champagne toasts in Washington. Normalization deals were being signed over Palestinian heads. The "Deal of the Century" was unveiled like a shopping mall. The world had decided, quietly and comfortably, that Palestine was a solved problem: solved by being erased. October 7 unsolved it. Violently. Bloodily. Unforgivably, if you were on the wrong end of it. But it unsolved it. And within weeks, the entire architecture of "peace in our time" came crashing down. Saudi normalization stalled. The mask of Israeli invulnerability was torn off. The question of Palestine—real Palestine, the one with refugees and checkpoints and children who have never seen the sea—was back at the top of every front page on earth.

That is a fact. Facts are stubborn things. You can hate how they arrived and still acknowledge that they arrived, former U.S. military official said.

“Tens of thousands in Gaza dead. The majority of them women and children. Most of a city reduced to rubble. Hospitals bombed. Schools bombed. Universities bombed. Bakeries bombed. Mosques and churches and libraries and archives bombed. Families wiped out of the civil registry, their names reduced to a line in a UN report that nobody will read”, Duff noted.

In a response to Qodsna question that some analysts believe that Operation Al-Aqsa Storm dealt a massive crushing blow to the Zionist regime—one from which it will never fully recover. What is your opinion, Gordon Duff answered: I understand the impulse. I have felt it. But I am not here to flatter anyone, including my own side. Israel still has the bombs. It still has the planes. It still has the money, the technology, the intelligence services, and the superpower that has bankrolled it for seventy-five years. What it lost is not its arsenal. What it lost is the assumption—the assumption that it can do anything, anywhere, at any time, and the world will shrug. That assumption is gone. It is not coming back.

He also asked “The question is always asked: has Israel become isolated and hated”?

Yes. And I will add what the questioner did not: it was always hated. In the global south, in the refugee camps, in the mosques and the churches and the union halls, it was always hated. What has changed is that the hatred is no longer impolite. It is no longer confined to the people the West could dismiss as terrorists or antisemites. Now it is in the parliaments. It is in the courts. It is on the campuses. It is in the arrest warrants. It is in the boycotts and the graffiti and the votes at the United Nations that the United States can no longer control.

That is not hatred. That is judgment. Hatred can be ignored. Judgment has consequences.

So here we are. Three years on. The storm has passed. The rubble remains. And the question that matters is not who won, because nobody won. The question is what comes next.

I have spent my life in places where the morning after was the hardest part. Not the bombing—the rebuilding. Not the fighting—the feeding. Not the speeches—the schools. The people who build sanctuaries for the lost know something the people who write headlines never learn: that liberation is not a moment. It is a thousand ordinary mornings, each one requiring food, water, shelter, medicine, and someone willing to do the unglamorous work of keeping the lights on.

The storm is over. The morning is theirs to build.

And if the world looks away again—if the headlines move on, if the fundraising emails stop, if Palestine goes back to being a footnote in someone else's foreign policy—then the dead will have died twice. Once in the rubble. Once in the forgetting. We do not get to forget. Not this time.