Israel's Gaza Assault Has Changed the Optics of War. India Shouldn't Fall For it

Those seeking 'Gaza-like' war must remember that India isn't Israel and Pakistan is no Gaza, writes Sanjay Kapoor.

Even as jingoists may crave a 'Gaza-like' solution for India, it is important to remember that Pakistan is no Gaza and India is no Israel, writes Sanjay Kapoor.

(Photo: Vibhushita Singh/The Quint)

There are active and passive wars. There are all out-wars and proxy wars. There are 'calculated escalations' and offence for self defence. Then there is Gaza. The sheer cruelty with which Israel has attacked Gaza since October 2023 seems to have set a new benchmark of war globally.

It was, thus, no surprise that when tensions escalated between sub-continental neighbours, India and Pakistan, thousands of miles away from Palestine, imprints of the 'Gaza model' became discernible. Be it the calls for an "Israel-like solution" and "Gaza-like" action against Pakistan, and even Kashmiris, on Indian social media in the wake of the fatal Pahalgam attack, which triggered the escalation, or the comparisons of the Pahalgam attack to the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 in Israel.

Or the image of the angry Prime Minister Narendra Modi swearing, “chun chun ke marengay" (we will identify them each and kill them all), to pacify an enraged nation.

This unveiled threat—issued to the likes of Dawood Ibrahim, Masood Azhar, and Hafiz Saeed—had the unmistakable ring of the promises Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), made to their countrypeople about snuffing out Hamas and its leadership located in Gaza after its militants carried out one of the deadliest attacks on Israeli soil. It's no surprise, in that sense, that Israel is the only country in the world that did not profess de-escalation—and instead offered unequivocal support to India's offensive, codenamed Operation Sindoor, against Pakistan.

But even as jingoists may crave a 'Gaza-like' solution for India, it is important to remember that Pakistan is no Gaza and India is no Israel.

Gaza is an 'Open Prison'

There has been a calculated method to the seeming madness with which the Tel Aviv government has gone about its destruction of Gaza. It has the ability to know every single person, man, woman, elderly and child it has killed in Gaza, and pinpoint every hospital, supply shelter, school, and mosque it has blown up.

That's because the Israeli occupation government has meticulously mapped the entirety of Gaza and the West Bank over decades. It knows who stays in which exact house, even their phone numbers. In fact, before beginning its invasion of Gaza after the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas, the Israeli air force has reportedly informed the inhabitants of the buildings in Gaza on its radar to get out before they bombed it. Once they were assured that everyone had moved out, the building was blown up. The same precision was shown in the past by Israeli forces when killing some Hamas sympathisers.

These limitations notwithstanding, the post-Pahalgam Indian attack on Pakistan has been well planned and executed.

On the night of 7 May 2025, the Indian defence forces were cognisant of the reality that was presented by Pakistan and the many agreements that the two countries were tied in.

India did not want to violate a long-standing ceasefire between the two sides, so it did not cross the line. New Delhi stuck to the tenets of the Simla Agreement that had been put in abeyance by Pakistan.

Double Standards of Guilt 

The Gaza operation has been admired by all those who can ignore the obvious abuses and disproportionate attacks on the local, civilian population while justifying the deaths of thousands of Gazans. The argument often breaks down at the point, "They started it first" (meaning the 7 October attack, the years of Israeli occupation and decimation of Palestinians notwithstanding).

In contrast, India rarely gets sympathy for even unprovoked acts of terrorism it links to our neighbours. Despite India’s continuous problems with the Pakistani government and intelligence wing, the ISI, routinely meddling in Kashmir and India's other domestic affairs since independence, New Delhi had garnered little sympathy from the West. It was only after the globally broadcast 26/11 Mumbai terror attack in 2008 that global attitudes toward India began to change, with some resolve being shown by the US to tame Pakistan and the ISI.

Much of this protective discrimination in favour of Israel can be traced back to its origins as a nation-state and the events that preceded it.

Though Pakistan and Israel are perhaps the only two countries of the world that were created on religious lines by the British imperialists after World War II, they are very different, both in their being and how their being has impacted their corresponding regions in different ways.

While Israel was created by the West to keep a watch on the oil supply lines and to preserve the status quo that ruled the Arab world, Pakistan had a more complex geopolitical mandate. It was not only to keep the communists of the Soviet Union in check but also to help the West in ensuring India and its Hindu-right nationalists did not come under the influence of either Moscow or the communists. Though the arrangement changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, both countries have more or less clung on to the countries that were responsible for their creation.

The rise of Israel as a military state is foreshadowed by the global guilt that followed the genocide of millions of Jews by race supremacists in Germany. The sheer scale of the barbarity, death, displacement, dehumanisation and persecution faced by the Jewish people provided the moral fulcrum for the rise of a Jewish state as a sovereign political entity of a persecuted people. Surrounded by hostile forces from the Arab world looking to upend its new political and territorial autonomy, Israel responded by obsessively building itself into a military fortress.

It was this guilt that perhaps aided sympathy and support for Israel and its cause to soar in the US and other Western powers.

Even India, which had once not recognised Israel, has been proudly manufacturing drones for Tel Aviv as helping them is not regarded a crime since the early 1990s when India established diplomatic ties with Israel.

Despite this manifest change in the West's attitude toward India since 2008, Israel remains the favourite of the US and European powers. It is perhaps the same historical guilt of genocide that, perhaps, continues to allow the international community to turn a blind eye to Israel's grave and continuous challenge to the exercise of global morality with its disproportionate use of weapons against the Palestinians, living in an open prison with not even basic amenities or dignities.

India can be sure that such license for genocide—as Israel's actions against Gaza have rightly been labelled by critics—will not be permitted, as can already be perceived in the reluctance of world powers to unequivocally back India so far.

Israel Can Afford to Fail, Repeatedly. India Cannot

Despite its high-grade, intelligence-backed, targeted military operations, supported by a vast civil defence infrastructure and the world's finest military tech and training, Israel doesn't always succeed. The October attack by Hamas was an embarrassing failure for the government of Tel Aviv. And it wasn't even the first time the much-vaunted Israeli intel agency, Mossad, failed.

During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Israeli intelligence agencies kept track of the movements of Egyptian pilots as they were tipped off about a potential Egyptian attempt at “escalation domination” by attacking them via air. The Israeli intel network tried hard to uncover the timing of the attack and other details. But, eventually, they failed to connect the dots about the coming air attack, despite intel coming in from all sides. History suggests that they were caught napping.

We Indians are quite used to such intel slip-ups. It happened when terrorists raided Kargil Heights in 1999.

This time, too, the killings that took place in the meadow at Pahalgam could perhaps been avoided. The government has admitted to intelligence failure. There are allegations, including by Opposition leaders like Mallikarjun Kharge, that Intelligence reports had warned of an impending situation ahead of the attack, though the warnings went unheeded. Moreover, as a Police DSP discovered, the attackers were equipped with high quality sniper rifles, which were superior to whatever the Indian security forces could throw at them.

India cannot endorse any "Gaza-like" solution as it would entail crossing many lines. India cannot do it without massacring a million people, which would be against the very tenets of justice and non-violence the country claims to be built on. It also cannot do so without sacrificing scores of its own along with the nation-breaking financial cost of war and the enduring generational trauma it leaves behind.

With Operation Sindoor, the Indian government has compensated for its intel failure and taken out some of its aggressor's terror assets in the last few days. But Pakistan has not held back either and has carried out constant attacks on India, leading to fresh escalation, this time on military assets.

As the war gets closer home, the moot question is, has the nation succeeded in knocking off all its enemies — chun chun ke?

And can it do it, without doing an Israel?

(Sanjay Kapoor is a veteran journalist and founder of Hardnews Magazine. He is a foreign policy specialist focused on India and its neighbours, and West Asia. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)