The basic truth is that Israel has no real solution to the hardship of Gazans – or to the security threats the Hamas regime poses ■ Killing of innocent Palestinians raises questions over intel or Israeli decision-making
Israel has carried out no fewer than 15 military operations in the Gaza Strip since disengaging from it in 2005. What have all these campaigns, from First Rain to Guardian of the Walls, achieved? Not much, even if it’s very possible that in some of these cases Israel had no choice other than a military operation.
It was clear from the start that there was little prospect that the latest offensive, Operation Shield and Arrow, would achieve radically different results.
In their press conference on Wednesday evening, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant heaped praise on the operation’s achievements and significance. With all good will, it was hard to be impressed by what was said. Not when Gallant expressed public admiration for Netanyahu’s performance – a month and a half after the prime minister tried to fire him because he spoke the truth about the dangers latent in the regime coup; and not when Netanyahu claimed, without foundation, that more Islamic Jihad terrorists had been killed in the present operation than in the previous efforts.
The Israeli public doesn’t appear to be buying his hyperbolic excitement, just as they didn’t fall for the exclamatory media gushing over Operation Breaking Dawn against Gaza, which was conducted by the previous government last August. If the operations were really all that successful, we wouldn’t need them once a year on average, with the time between them becoming shorter in the past few years.
The simple truth is that Israel has no concrete solution for the plight of Gaza or for the security dangers that emanate from the Strip under Hamas rule. Most of the Israeli moves, military and economic, involve managing the conflict, or at most just delaying the next eruption. At this stage, with the rotating governments launching de rigueur offensives against Gaza, they are only hoping that things won’t get tangled up and go on too long.
In the best case, they expect that the military bashing the Palestinian organizations will endure will reset the balance of deterrence – in other words, it will increase the chances of imposing quiet on the border for a few months.
Brig. Gen. Nimrod Aloni was the commanding officer of the Gaza Division during the two previous operations, Guardian of the Walls (May 2021) and Breaking Dawn. In an article he published last November in the military magazine Bein Haktavim, he noted that the second operation “reinforced the trend we saw a year earlier, in which Hamas is restraining Islamic Jihad and other organizations, and is avoiding a recourse to strong force as a matter of routine.
“The restraint stems first and foremost from the apprehension of being dragged into a situation of war with Israel without Hamas intending it … and also from a desire to bolster itself politically in Gaza, to divert efforts toward encouraging terrorist activity outside the Gaza Strip, and to enable the continued rehabilitation of Gaza both in terms of the military arm and of the local economy, from which Hamas profits both in taxes and politically.”
This analysis by Aloni, who calls both of the previous two operations successes, reflects the commonly held view in the political arena and in the security establishment. According to this approach, it’s possible to get along with Hamas, at least for a limited time, despite its fierce ideological enmity toward Israel. The main danger stems from Islamic Jihad, which once every few months tries to spark a confrontation in the Gaza Strip itself. Meanwhile, Hamas, for its own reasons, prefers to see conflagrations in arenas that are not under its control, notably Jerusalem and the West Bank.
In the present operation, too, the Israeli army has made a point of noting that Hamas is not involved actively in the firing of hundreds of rockets at Israel. It’s Islamic Jihad and smaller Palestinian groups that are behind this. Hamas gives them authorization in principle to launch the rockets and issues statements of support via the joint operations room of the Gaza organizations. The communiqués of the Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit have even dropped the traditional sentence that holds Hamas responsible for what happens in Gaza by dint of being the ruling power there.
At the same time, both the military and the political decision-makers are refraining from addressing whether the separation that Israel is drawing between Hamas and Islamic Jihad serves it, or is actually an exercise in self-deception.
At the end of the day, despite all of Israel’s self-congratulations, it’s understood in Gaza, too, that Jerusalem prefers not to clash directly with Hamas. The organization is succeeding in striking at Israel via the smaller organizations, without paying a price itself.
Intelligence gap, faulty behavior
Operation Shield and Arrow was launched overnight between Monday and Tuesday, May 9, when Israel assassinated three top Islamic Jihad personnel in the Gaza Strip. On Israel’s part, that was a belated response to the firing of more than 100 rockets by the organization into Israel a week earlier, which for its part was an immediate response to the death of Islamic Jihad operative Khader Adnan, following a lengthy hunger strike in an Israeli prison.
This time, the Egyptian-led mediation efforts began within a few hours. On Wednesday evening there were optimistic reports about an impending ceasefire. Islamic Jihad continued its massive firing of rockets, including at Tel Aviv, in an attempt to etch an image of a struggle to the last minute.
Before dawn on Thursday, the IDF and Shin Bet were able to kill three more Islamic Jihad operatives in an aerial attack on a safe house in Gaza. One of those killed was the head of the organization’s rocket program. If Islamic Jihad needed to advertise for senior commanders, it would be able to take pride in the chances for rapid promotion in its ranks – once every few months. The only problem is that the likelihood of survival in the job, once you’re appointed, is pretty low.
The direct hit to a house in Rehovot by a rocket Thursday night, which killed one person, can be regarded as Islamic Jihad’s first achievement of the war. The question is whether this will encourage the group to now agree to a ceasefire. Thursday morning, with Israel’s consent, a delegation of top officials from Islamic Jihad’s political wing left for Cairo for direct talks with the Egyptians. Israel believes the group is ready to end the conflict, although Ziyad al-Nakhalah, its secretary general, appears to prefer to keep fighting.
Amid the debate within Islamic Jihad, a known phenomenon from previous rounds – Hamas’ lack of involvement – stands out. Defying Islamic Jihad’s expectations, the larger organization has chosen to sit on the fence.
Interestingly, Israel has not threatened a ground incursion into Gaza. The reason is simple and perhaps reflects a certain maturation on Israel’s part. Islamic Jihad has no “centers of gravity” that could be conquered. Therefore, from the army’s perspective there’s no reason for a ground operation this time; the entire business is focused on long-range fire, mostly from the air.
The second assassination strike was relatively clean, and did not kill civilians. That was very different from the first round of assassinations, on Tuesday in the middle of the night, which, in addition to the three targeted men, killed another 11 Gazans, including women, children and members of neighboring families who had no connection to Islamic Jihad. The killing generated severe criticism in the Arab world, in the international media and to a lesser extent in Israeli media outlets. Former leading figures in the security establishment, who were involved in many such operations, raised an eyebrow. Did the IDF and the Shin Bet stretch the limits of the permissible here, knowing clearly that the attack would cause civilian deaths?
Contrary to some reports, this is not the first case of its kind. Some of the assassinations that were carried out in the Gaza Strip during the second intifada, and operations there afterward, were done with clear knowledge that there were family members – women and in some cases children – in close proximity to the senior figures being targeted.
The most recent strike was postponed twice, on the grounds that it would endanger civilians. Even so, it appears that the final authorization for Tuesday’s strike included broader risk margins. Missiles were aimed at specific parts of the apartments in the not-well-grounded hope of avoiding children.
The more optimistic risk assessment proved to be wrong. The result was the killing of a relatively high number of innocent bystanders, because three assassinations were carried out simultaneously. That has happened in the past, too: The expectation of “surgical” strikes in Gaza is a vain one, because of the population density there. But it looks as though no one was sufficiently resolute in the decision-making chain to tell Netanyahu and Gallant about the risks and demand a postponement, in the hope that a better opportunity would arise.
This is apparently of no special interest to anyone in Israel, apart from some Haaretz writers and readers, but the suspicion arises here of an intelligence gap, a hitch in the behavior of the top figures, or both. What happened should be investigated with all seriousness, instead of making do with complaints about the hypocritical international community and the obnoxious left-wingers.