Former British Army colonel Tim Collins says 'big fight' is yet to come in Gaza: Hamas versus fellow Arabs

In his interview with the News Letter he gave his predictions for the future of the conflict, questioned why it had sparked such widespread protest in comparison with other episodes of global bloodletting, and cast doubt on the death toll in Gaza, suggesting it has been grossly inflated.

Getting reliable death toll estimates has become increasingly hard as governance in Gaza has largely fallen apart.

The figures just before Christmas stood at 21,822 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza, about 70% of which are estimated to be women and children.

Those numbers come from the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry.

Meanwhile, upwards of 170 soldiers have been killed in Gaza since the start of the ground operations.

Added to all of that are of course the 1,200 or so Israelis killed by Hamas on October 7, which kicked off this latest round of hostilities.

The UN has also reported that about 1.9 million people in the Gaza Strip, or nearly 85% of the population, have now fled their homes to seek shelter elsewhere – about 1.4m of them in UN-run buildings like schools and clinics.

• ARAB PEACEKEEPERS VS HAMAS? •

So what does this ongoing Israeli onslaught mean for Hamas?

Col Collins said the group is facing an “existential crisis,” and will continue to “go to ground” and try to survive using humanitarian aid.

It will stay this way “until the Israelis declare they've had enough and pull out”.

“At that point, the Palestinian Authority [the non-Hamas-based government which is in power in the West Bank] will not be capable of holding Gaza on its own, so there'll inevitably be some sort of pan-Arab peace-keeping force that will have to be cobbled together quite quickly: which I probably envisage would both in Gaza and in the Palestinian Authority to reinforce some form of two-state solution.”

Hamas will then “need to equip and arm themselves in order to fight the Palestinian Authority and the pan-Arab force, and that will be the big fight: the one that all the experts haven't even spotted – the pseudo-experts, I mean”.

In short, “a two-state solution will be imposed, I think, by the international community, including the US, and the guarantors will probably be this pan-Arab peacekeeping force”.

One big upshot of this will be “the Israelis will have to remove the illegal settlements” which now criss-cross much of the West Bank, on what is meant to be Palestinian land.

“And it's a question of do Israelis want to take them out with their own people, or do they want to be removed by other people?

“I suggest it's better if they move them themselves.

“So what Israel will find is they are firmly within their Oslo borders without any manoeuvre.”

As for the criticism levelled at Israel for its actions in Gaza so far, Col Collins said: “They have a right to self-defence, but they haven't got a right to cross the boundaries of international law and they know it.”

Have they broken the law?

“No, is the short answer,” he replied, partly because there is so much attention on them.

But he added that they are sometimes “straying towards the boundary”.

Asked to elaborate, Col Collins said “if there's a building with 100 people in it and someone fires out the window,” then targeting that building in response would be “verging on a war crime”.

However, he said “if its a fully kitted-out headquarters with a flag flying from the top and you then drag five or six people inside and you fire out the window ... and say ‘you can't fire back because there's civilians in here’, you are going to get hit back”.

• ‘LIKE SINN FEIN – IT’S JUST LIES’ •

What does he make of the quoted death toll in Gaza, coming from officials linked to Hamas?

"These figures are coming from Tehran,” he said.

"Do you believe a word they say? I don't believe a word they say. It's like Sinn Fein and the IRA. It's just lies.

"They can't be trusted and shouldn't be trusted. They have an agenda. It has to be independently verified.

"I heard the same hysteria on marches about the Iraq war. ‘A million people dead’ – and this was in 2006.

"My simple question was: Oh my God. That's the number of people the British Empire lost in the First World War.

"Where is the first day of the Somme? Where are the three Battles of Ypres? Where are the bodies? Where are all these dead people, can anybody see them?

“Because they didn't exist.”

He said he believes the more or less correct death toll in Gaza is “probably two to three thousand by now – and if you ask who's culpable for that, well, obviously Israelis are dropping the bombs, but the people who are hiding amongst the population... must bear some responsibility for that”.

On the subject of the Iraq body count, estimates have varied wildly.

Arguably the most-cited estimate is known as The Lancet Study (after the medical journal in which it was published), which estimated 655,000 “excess deaths” in Iraq from 2003 to 2006 as a result of the war.

The Washington Post at the time noted that this was “more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December [2005] and was “more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group”.

• ‘AN F-MINUS FOR GENOCIDE’ •

Col Collins also hit out at “huge intellectuals like Gary Lineker with his two O levels” who have commentated on the Gaza conflict, and questioned why the Israeli actions have led to a groundswell of global condemnation when other global conflicts have not.

“For the last 12 years there's been a war going on in Syria,” he said.

“Half a million Syrian Sunni Muslims have died, two million have been displaced …

“No-one marched when the hospitals were being deliberately struck in Sana'a, in Yemen ... no-one marched then.

“No-one marched when children were starving in Yemen.

“No-one marched when barrel bombs and poisoned gas was being used in Syria.

"What we're seeing really is a Russian/Iranian orchestrated media campaign which is being willingly swallowed by the west.”

As for the use of the term genocide to describe Israeli actions, he is wholly unconvinced.

Taking the case of the Syrian regime’s slaughter of its own people, “if you were in the School of Genocide for Dictators, you would probably get a C-plus or a B for that,” said Col Collins.

"Whereas the population of the Palestinian Authority has increased five-fold – you'd get an F-minus or a flat fail in the School of Genocide, but it's broadcast as genocide on behalf of the Israelis.”