TEHRAN – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows well that his proclaimed declaration of a “total victory” against Hamas will not come true.

“The idea that we will stop the war before achieving all of its goals is out of the question. We will enter Rafah and we will eliminate Hamas’ battalions there…, to achieve total victory,” Netanyahu claimed in a meeting with families of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza on April 30.

It is a myth that Israel will eliminate the guerrilla fighters from Hamas and other resistance movements. If it had been so, the Israeli military, which is armed with Western-supplied modern weaponry, had to get rid of guerrilla fighters after more than seven months of relentless cruel war.

Israeli Knesset member, Amit Halevi, confirmed on May 16 that all 24 Hamas brigades are still present in Gaza and not a single one of them has been destroyed. Halevi said Netanyahu is lying to the Israeli people and inflating the army’s achievements.

In addition to Hamas’s steadfastness, the Islamic Jihad movement still exists, “and they lied to us that it had been eliminated,” Halevi added in his interview with Israel’s Channel 14.

If the attack on Rafah - the southernmost city in Gaza which Israel has so far not launched a large-scale military against it - would lead to the elimination of Hamas the other parts of Gaza should now be clear of guerrillas as Israel started carpet bombing from northern Gaza to the south. Surprisingly enough, Israeli forces are now coming under attack from the places that were supposed to have been purged from resistance fighters.

On May 12, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged that Israel’s attack on Rafah would fail to eliminate all fighters.

"Israel is on a trajectory potentially to inherit an insurgency with many armed Hamas fighters left or if it leaves a vacuum filled by chaos, filled by anarchy and probably refilled by Hamas," Blinken said on NBC's Meet the Press.

He also said Hamas fighters are returning to northern Gaza areas that Israel claimed to have cleared.

Benjamin has just one intention in his mind: a greater Israel from “the river to the sea”. Other far-right extremists and religionists, some of whom have coalesced his coalition government, are also pushing for the project.

The attack by Hamas on southern Israel on October 7 has provided the pretext for Netanyahu and other extremists to expedite their vicious goal. If there had been no such intention there were no justifications for such colossal destruction and untold human disaster in Gaza.

The Gaza Strip - a 365 km2 area - has already become an uninhabitable place for its 2.3 million population. Since October 7 the rulers in Israel have been putting Gazans under extreme pressure to seek refuge in a place outside the coastal strip. Israel first intended to drive Gazans into Egypt’s Sainai. However, it faced fierce resistance from Egypt.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in early March that Israel’s months of attacks on Gaza seem designed to make the strip into an uninhabitable wasteland.

“After five months of devastating war and destruction, the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza give the impression that its objectives go beyond destroying Hamas. As Major General Giora Eiland wrote last December in (Israeli daily) Yedioth Ahronoth there appears to be an effort to ‘turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in’,” Borrell wrote on his EU blog.

Satellite analysis by BBC Verify has found hundreds of Gaza's water and sanitation facilities have been damaged or destroyed since Israel began military action against Hamas.  Aid agencies have also said the lack of clean water and flows of untreated sewage pose a serious threat to people’s health.

The “greater Israel” project that Zionist religionists and far-rightists pursue is to wipe out the State of Palestine. They have started the project both in Gaza and the West Bank.

"I fear that after finishing off Gaza, Israel would head to the West Bank and deport its people to Jordan,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told the World Economic Forum in Riyadh in late April.

The accelerated building of settlements on the occupied West Bank and the intensified violence against Palestinian West Bank residents coupled with barbaric acts in Gaza are part of the efforts to create an Israel from "the river to the sea”.

But whether this treacherous and vicious plan, which has been formulated and pushed for inside and outside Israel for many years, will translate into reality remains to be seen. Being fully aware that they cannot defeat resistance fighters, Netanyahu and other like-minded figures want to leave ordinary people with no option but to seek refuge somewhere else, although opinion polls suggest support for armed resistance against Israel has risen both in the blockaded Gaza and the West Bank and Palestinians prefer to be killed rather than leave their homeland. They don’t want a second Nakba.