“Gaza has won,” Iranian Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei posted on social media platform X on Wednesday.
“We’ve said that the #Resistance is alive and will stay alive. #Gaza has won.”
We’ve said that the #Resistance is alive and will stay alive. #Gaza has won.
— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) January 22, 2025
There are some in Israel who agree with Mr. Khamenei. They look at the emergence of Hamas fighters from their tunnels since the ceasefire went into effect, along with the release of Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails to receive hostages in return and claim the terror group is more victorious in this war than Israel.
But if Khamenei really believes Gaza “won,” he has a different idea of the concept of victory if one even looks at some basic statistics.
The official Palestinian Health Ministry count claims more than 46,600 Palestinians have been killed since the war against Israel began – although, as has long been pointed out, Gaza death statistics happen to distort the numbers of men of military age who happened to have died in the fighting.
Compare that to Israel’s loss, including October 7, of around 2,000 Israelis, both civilian and military, who have died since the war’s inception.
Based on those numbers, claiming victory is a bizarre statement.
According to United Nations estimates, rebuilding the Gaza Strip will require $80 billion—25 times the amount needed for reconstruction after Operation Protective Edge in 2014. This substantial figure is attributed to the destruction of approximately 69% of buildings in the region, including nearly 90% of its housing units, amounting to over 170,000 structures.
Before reconstruction can begin, around 42 million tons of debris from the bombings must be removed. The cost of clearing this rubble alone is projected at $1.2 billion. A UN report from last April estimates that the process of dealing with the rubble will take up to 14 years.
If nearly 70% of your buildings are destroyed by the enemy, what kind of a victory is that?
By contrast, in Israeli areas near the Gaza Strip, significant reconstruction efforts are already underway. The Tekuma Administration has already spent NIS 6.4 billion ($1.7 billion) on demolishing 525 buildings and repairing thousands more. A five-year plan is in place, allocating NIS 19 billion ($5 billion) for rebuilding Sderot and surrounding rural communities.
Still doesn’t look like a victory for either the Gazan people or Hamas. Khamenei, in true ayatollah style, ignores the facts on the ground and proclaims a political triumph for his proxy group.
Khamenei also turned on his eternal enemy – the United States. He tweeted, “If history said a massive military force like the US helped a bloodthirsty regime like the Zionist regime, that killed 15,000 children in 15 months, & gave them bunker-buster bombs to bomb homes & hospitals, we surely wouldn’t have believed it. [But] today, we’ve witnessed this.
“The US gave all the kinds of equipment it had to the Zionist regime. Because if it hadn’t done this, the Zionist regime would have been brought to its knees in the very first weeks.”
Khamenei is once again pushing the narrative that the only factor keeping Israel viable in conflicts is help from American allies, which completely diminishes Israel’s military and strategic capabilities while bolstering the storyline of the weaker, resistant warrior against the big bad bully.
A weak military assessment
Khamenei needs to remember it is not American troops on the ground fighting Hamas. It is Israel’s civilians. The country has a civilian army. The nation’s people come to protect it during its hour of need. It was not US servicemen who led daring rescues of hostages from the hands of Hamas. Nor US servicemen who have gone house to house within Gaza for 15 months, clearing away the terror group from its civilian hiding places.
Nor was it the US who struck Hezbollah terrorists with hundreds of exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in his Beirut bunker deep underground, or struck Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh as he was in Tehran, the belly of the beast itself.
US aid and weaponry is invaluable to Israel. But to claim that Israel would ‘have been brought to its knees in the very first weeks’ does a disservice to the proud, fighting people of Israel and the values they uphold when defending their country. Not that Khamenei cares.
The ayatollah finished his social media commentary with the line, “That delusional dreamer announced that Iran has become weak. The future will show who has become weak.”
Unfortunately for the ailing leader, rhetoric is well and good, but the reality on the ground in Iran paints a different picture.
Iran, the puppet master pulling the strings of its proxies, is mired in its own turmoil. The streets of Tehran are rife with unhappiness as the regime faces growing dissent. The bazaaris – among the most ardent Iranians who supported the revolution —are striking in defiance of the government due to financial costs. The deeply unpopular hijab law has also reignited widespread dissatisfaction, exposing the regime’s deepening unpopularity.
From conversations with many Iranians based inside the country and in exile, it seems that the tipping point may be closer than people think. Khamenei’s ongoing propaganda and desire to place himself as the protector of the Muslim people does not impress ordinary Iranians.
They are the ones who sit at home, sip their coffees, and ask themselves why their country sends $50 billion to a country like Syria under former leader Bashar al-Assad, as opposed to investing domestically. Why does their leader support the Houthis in Yemen, a country that has known little peace in the past 40 years, when things are failing so badly at home?
‘How have members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps been allowed to enrich themselves while the people suffer high inflation, low wages, and decreasing standard of living?’ they ask themselves. Iran is not an autocracy. It is a kleptocracy, stealing from the people and sending it out to terror proxies across the Middle East.
If Khamenei has such a deluded definition of victory, when the Iranians finally stand up to the ayatollah, he might have had a hard time realizing what is happening.
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