The huge force that Israel has amassed along Gaza’s border over the past three weeks began to roll forward on Friday night, accompanied by a barrage of airstrikes and the pounding of artillery.
The Israel Defence Forces called it “an expansion” of ground operations, but a spokesperson for the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, went further, describing it as the beginning of the “turnaround” against Hamas.
“Hamas will feel our anger tonight,” the spokesperson, Mark Regev, told MSNBC.
It was not immediately clear whether Friday night’s incursions into Gaza marked the start of a major ground offensive, or its precursor, a ratcheting-up of presssure on Hamas. Whatever the tactical nature of the operation, the impact on Gaza’s population of 2.3 million will undoubtedly be to worsen the devastation wrought by the past three weeks of airstrikes.
Netanyahu has been cagey about the nature of the campaign in Gaza. He gave a speech on Wednesday night that sounded like a rallying cry for a ground assault, but it was carefully drafted, committing to nothing specific.
Whatever happens, Netanyahu – down in the polls and widely blamed for allowing the 7 October attack by Hamas – is making sure he does not take sole responsibility for whatever comes next.
“There is one group that supports a ground operation and one that is less enthusiastic,” said Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat. “It’s not just the military versus Netanyahu. The division is within the war cabinet and within the military.”
There has been no shortage of reasons to delay the assault. Many in the security establishment, supported by the Biden administration, have wanted to give more time to efforts to extricate more than 200 hostages from Gaza.
The US also reportedly needed breathing space to bring in more munitions to defend its bases in the region in anticipation of a backlash from its enemies and their backers in Tehran. The IDF, meanwhile, is using the time to train reservists in urban warfare and top up their arsenal.
The plight of the 2.3 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza does not seem to have been a factor in the pause. Only a thin dribble of aid has been allowed in so far, the small relief convoys have brought no fuel to power hospitals or the water system, and the bombardment of Gaza, north and south, has been maintained.
‘The Americans have their doubts’
The pause has given Israel time to reconsider its war aims and its ability to achieve them. The initial impetus to charge into Gaza was based on a desire for quick retribution and the generals’ quest for redemption in the eyes of the population after the appalling lapse of 7 October.
US military leaders were reportedly shocked at the vagueness of Israeli planning for the offensive, the blithe optimism about the urban warfare it faced, and the wishful thinking about Gaza’s long-term future post-Hamas.
“The Americans have their doubts,” Pinkas said. “And what they are questioning is the quality of Israeli decision-making. I think they are looking at gross incompetence on several levels here.”
The US was sufficiently concerned to send a Marine lieutenant general, James Glynn, and a team of urban warfare experts to sit alongside their counterparts.
It is an unprecedented melding of the US and Israeli militaries, with profound implications for both. It becomes much harder for Israel to act independently of the US – a calculated decision by Netanyahu, his critics say, to give him someone else to blame when things go wrong.
The Biden administration believes being inside the room will give it more of a restraining influence, but that has not been the case in Gaza and makes it impossible for the US to sidestep shared responsibility for the civilian death toll.
Meanwhile, Israel’s war aims have come into sharper focus. The military leadership realises that “destroying” Hamas – as an ideology and an affiliation – is impossible. In his speech on Wednesday, Netanyahu defined the goal as “destroying its military and governing abilities”. Those are two very different, and very difficult, goals, each with substantial complications.
“These two objectives cannot be achieved without the ground offensive,” said Shlomo Brom, a former general and director of IDF strategic planning. “So that’s why I believe that the government already decided on the ground campaign.”
‘It is hard to imagine a more challenging context’
While Hamas has ruled the entire Gaza Strip, the IDF believes the bulk of its military infrastructure – its “centre of gravity”, was how one general put it – is in the north.
That is why the Palestinian civilian population in northern Gaza, more than 1 million people, were ordered south of the Wadi Gaza River, which bisects the strip. The IDF plans to hold ground in the north long enough to destroy Hamas’s heavy weaponry and the tunnel network it has spent 16 years building. The southern half will not be spared bombing, as the people there have discovered, and the IDF is expected to mount “search and destroy” attacks aimed at Hamas members, civilian and military.
Holding the north will be hard enough. “It will be slow, very hard, and will require a great deal of preparation if we want to minimise our own casualties,” Brom said.
The Americans have come with cautionary tales from battles such as Falluja and Mosul in Iraq, or Raqqa in Syria, of how hard it is to fight in densely populated areas. In Gaza the military problems will be multiplied by Hamas’s extensive network of tunnels.
“It is hard to imagine a more challenging context for operations than Gaza City,” said David Petraeus, the US general who led US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and went on to become CIA director.
“Urban operations are always very difficult, but those in this case likely will be fiendishly so – with snipers, suicide bombers, 300 miles of tunnels, and improvised explosive devices, against terrorists who do not wear uniforms, know the area intimately, will use civilians and hostages as human shields, and have been preparing for this fight for months, if not years,” Petraeus said.
A report earlier this month by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Washington thinktank, compared the coming fight to the battles for western Mosul and Raqqa in 2017.
An estimated 13,000 buildings were destroyed in west Mosul over 180 days of fighting and the capture of all of Mosul took 277 days, during which an estimated 9,000 civilians were killed. The authorities in Gaza say more than 7,000 Palestinians have died already, and the number is likely to increase rapidly as living conditions collapse and the ground offensive begins.
‘I hope there will be political change’
One option discussed between US and Israeli officers was a series of limited incursions targeting bits of Gaza at a time, on “search and destroy” missions. On the other end of the scale, some warn that the IDF will have to occupy the whole of the Gaza Strip for a time to do the job properly. Whatever option is chosen, Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, has said Israel has no intention of occupying the territory permanently.
Once Israeli forces enter Gaza, however, it may be hard for them to leave and still claim to have succeeded. That will depend on the ultimate political aims of the war, which appear to be the haziest part of the whole plan.
“Let’s assume that we invade Gaza and succeed in destroying most of the military capabilities of Hamas,” Brom said. “One thing that’s clear is that Israel doesn’t want to return to being the government in Gaza indefinitely. So it will wish to transfer the government to someone else. And there is a lot of thinking going on about who this will be.”
An Israeli general spoke hopefully in private of regional powers stepping in with investment to rebuild Gaza, and somehow overseeing a transition to a non-Hamas regime, possibly the Palestinian Authority.
It is hard to imagine who would send in peacekeeping troops after an Israeli invasion, and the authority is weak and discredited in the eyes of much of the population. It is highly unlikely that it would want to return to power in Gaza on the back of Israeli tanks.
For the Arab world, it could conceivably be a moment of leverage to demand a return to a real two-state solution.
That would involve the dismantling of settlements and the complete reversal of Netanyahu’s political project of destroying the two-state solution as a reality and as an idea. It was in pursuit of that project that Netanyahu, boosting the standing of Hamas in Gaza, sliced up the West Bank with settlements and gave radical settlers free rein to prey on the Palestinian inhabitants.
It is this project that has led Israel to its current security crisis. Finding a way out of it would involve a complete change of direction.
“There will be political implications as a result of the disastrous failure to government policies. So I hope that there will be political change,” Brom said.
There is little wonder in Israel, then, that Netanyahu has had his foot firmly, albeit surreptitiously, on the brakes. The logic of Israeli success requires him to relinquish power, while failure means a bloody morass in Gaza and perhaps the West Bank too, with the very real possibility that whatever comes next will be worse than what came before.
Nimrod Novik, who served as a foreign policy adviser to Shimon Peres when he was prime minister, said: “History tells us that when one extreme version disappears, the successor tends to be a lot more extreme and violent than the one it replaces.”
Dan Sabbagh contributed to this report
