Israel bombs Gaza after Hamas attack
Israel vows to wipe out Hamas in a brutal assault on the Gaza Strip, but has no clear endgame in sight, with no clear plan for governing the devastated Palestinian enclave even as it triumphs on the battlefield.
The military campaign, codenamed “Operation Swords of Iron,” will be unprecedented in its brutality and unlike anything Israel has carried out in Gaza in the past, according to eight regional and Western officials with knowledge of the conflict, who declined to be named mentioned due to the sensitivity of the matter.
Israel has called up a record 360,000 reservists and bombed the small enclave non-stop after Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on October 7, which killed about 1,400 people, mostly civilians.
Israel’s strategy is to ‘destroy’ Gaza’s infrastructure
The immediate Israeli strategy, according to three regional officials familiar with discussions between US and Middle Eastern leaders, is to destroy Gaza’s infrastructure, even at the cost of many civilian casualties, pushing the population of the enclave towards the Egyptian border, and pursuing Hamas by blowing up weapons. through the labyrinth of underground tunnels that the group has built to carry out its activities.
However, Israeli officials have said they have no clear idea of what a post-war future might look like.
Some aides to US President Joe Biden are concerned that while Israel can put together an effective plan to inflict lasting damage on Hamas, the country has not yet formulated an exit strategy, according to a Washington source with knowledge of the matter.
Trips to Israel by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin this past week had emphasized the need to focus on the post-war plan for Gaza, the source added.
Arab officials are also alarmed that Israel has not drawn up a clear plan for the future of the enclave, which has been ruled by Hamas since 2006 and is home to 2.3 million people.
“Israel has no endgame for Gaza. Their strategy is to drop thousands of bombs, destroy everything and get in, but then what? They have no exit strategy for the day after,” said a regional security source.
3,500 Palestinians killed in the latest conflict between Israel and Gaza
An Israeli invasion has yet to begin, but Gaza authorities say 3,500 Palestinians have already been killed by the aerial bombardment, including about a third of them children – a higher number of deaths than in any previous conflict between Hamas and Israel.
Biden told Israelis during a visit to Israel on Wednesday that justice must be done to Hamas, even as he warned that the US had made mistakes after the September 11 attacks on New York.
The “vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas,” he said. “Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.”
Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Biden’s visit would have given him an opportunity to pressure Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu to think about issues such as the proportionate use of force and the longer-term plans for Gaza. before any invasion.
Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, have said they will wipe out Hamas in retaliation for the attack, the deadliest in Israel’s 75-year history.
What will follow is less defined.
“We are obviously thinking about this and dealing with this, and this includes assessments and includes the National Security Council, the military and others on the end situation,” Tzachi Hanegbi, director of Israel’s National Security Council, told reporters on Tuesday. “We don’t know for certain what this will be.”
“But what we do know is what will not be there,” he said, referring to Israel’s goal of eradicating Hamas.
This may be easier said than done.
“It is an underground city full of tunnels that make the Viet Cong tunnels look like child’s play,” the first regional source said, referring to the communist guerrilla force that defied US forces in Vietnam. “They are not going to end Hamas with tanks and firepower.”
Hamas has mobilized for an invasion of Israel
Two regional military experts told Reuters that Hamas’ armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, has mobilized for an invasion and set up anti-tank mines and booby-trapped explosives to ambush troops.
Israel’s coming offensive will be much larger than previous operations in Gaza, which Israeli officials previously called “mowing the lawn,” damaging but not eliminating Hamas’ military capabilities.
Israel has fought three previous conflicts with Hamas, in 2008-9, 2012 and 2014, and launched limited land invasions during two of those campaigns, but unlike today, Israeli leaders have never vowed to destroy Hamas once and for all.
These three clashes left just under 4,000 Palestinians and fewer than 100 Israelis dead.
However, there is less optimism in Washington that Israel will be able to completely destroy Hamas and US officials see little chance that Israel will want to hold or reoccupy any Gaza territory, the US source said.
A more likely scenario, the person said, would be for Israeli forces to kill or capture as many Hamas members as possible, blow up tunnels and rocket workshops, and then, after Israeli casualties mounted, look for a way to to declare victory and leave.
The fear across the region is that the war will explode beyond Gaza’s borders, with Lebanese Hezbollah and its backer Iran opening major new fronts in support of Hamas.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian warned of a possible “preemptive” action against Israel if it carries out its invasion of Gaza. He said last weekend that Iran would not watch from the sidelines if the US failed to contain Israel.
Arab leaders told Blinken, who toured the region last week, that while they condemn Hamas’ attack on Israel, they oppose collective punishment of ordinary Palestinians, which they fear will spark regional unrest.
Popular anger will increase across the region as the death toll rises, they said.
Washington has deployed an aircraft carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean and is concerned that Hezbollah could join the fight from Israel’s northern border. However, there are no signs that the US military would then move from a deterrent posture to direct involvement.
The regional sources said Washington proposed to revive the Palestinian Authority (PA), which lost control of Gaza to Hamas in 2007, although there are serious doubts whether the PA or any other authority would be able to take over the coastal enclave to govern if Hamas is driven out.
Miller, a former US Middle East negotiator, expressed deep skepticism about the potential for the establishment of a post-Hamas government to rule Gaza.
“I could paint you a picture better suited to a galaxy far, far away and not on planet Earth, about how you would see the UN, the Palestinian Authority, the Saudis and the Egyptians, led by the US and the Europeans, can combine to essentially take Gaza from an open-air prison to something much better,” he said.
Meanwhile, calls for the creation of humanitarian corridors within Gaza and escape routes for Palestinian civilians have provoked a strong response from Arab neighbors.
They fear that an Israeli invasion will lead to a new permanent mass wave of displacement, a repeat of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Millions of Palestinians who were forced to flee then have remained stranded as refugees in the countries who gave them shelter.
Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians
East Jerusalem, which was captured by Israel in the 1967 war and subsequently annexed, and the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territory are at the heart of the conflict with the Palestinians. Netanyahu has openly embraced the religious and radical far right and promised to annex more land inhabited by Jews.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since early this year in repeated clashes with Israeli soldiers and settlers, and there are widespread concerns that violence could engulf the area as nearby Gaza burns.
“Whatever worst-case scenario you have, it will be worse,” a second regional source said of the possibility of the conflict spreading beyond Gaza.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
