Mirna Fahmy – Diplomatic Inside
The Israelis’s aggression on Gaza for seven months to eliminate Hamas along with its tunnels and release the hostages is quivering with insights of what has been achieved so far and what’s being on hold.
Since the Rafah military operation, Israel has been on a toppling hill about the fate of Gaza, rejecting it as being under Palestinian authority by all means. Despite all the calls for a foreign intermission to collaborate to operate the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt from Egypt, Gulf countries, and even U.S. companies, all have addressed rejection staunchly, ensuring that Gaza should be Palestinian. Egypt itself has threatened Israel to dissolve the treaty peace if Israel didn’t permit the Rafah crossing to be under Palestine, lubricating the passage of humanitarian aid to the sufferings.
From the Palestinian side, there is neither a clear vision nor a clear statement of what shall happen to Gaza and its people after the termination of the war, which is not yet outlined by Israel except that “all Hamas militias and leaders must be exterminated.”
“The October 7 attack carried out by Hamas unilaterally gave Israel more pretexts to attack Gaza, “Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas stated at the 33rd Arab Summit in Manama. “Our position is clear and explicit: we are against targeting civilians in any way.” Abbas has never made a speech against Israel since his presidency. He has already ascertained more than once, especially at the latest World Economic Forum of 2024, which was held in Riyadh, that Palestine is not intending to engage in violence with Israel and that its aim is to be on peaceful terms with the country. He even condemned Hamas’s attack on October 7 for launching such a horrific crime that will inflict Israel’s military ambush relentlessly. He added that Israel has the right to defend its national security.
All of this unclearness has incited Biden’s administration to threaten Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to impede military aid to Israel by allocating its side with Hamas, which he has been against since the October 7 attack. Unlikely for his nature, who has been backing Israel firmly throughout his youth’s days by getting it established in the Middle East by all means, quoting the famous phrase “If there is no Israel, we have to invent Israel,” Biden has passed a bill seeking to limit the president’s discretion over military aid to Israel, according to the Executive Office of the President.
Rebuking that, the US House of Representatives approved a bill prohibiting the US administration from withholding, stopping, or cancelling security aid to Israel.
Emphasising more of what’s behind the scenes of these official statements and tensions, a retired US Army general known as the architect of US victory in Iraq named David H. Petraeus gave insights on the ongoing Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza. In a Washington Post article, Petraeus describes this war as a “clear and leave” strategy, warning that it won’t work out. He took Iraq’s war as an example that when the U.S. pulled out its troops from Iraq, assuming they had defeated Al-Qaeda in Iraq by more than 90%, this terrorist organisation would be reborn as Islamic Iraq and Syria when the civil war broke out in Syria. Throughout the U.S. war in Iraq, the troops had been focused on killing and capturing as many insurgents as possible, only to discover that the military’s heavy-handed use of firepower and large-scale roundups of military-age males created more enemies than they eliminated. It is the same as what the Israeli army is doing, which is capturing many Hamas individuals through the operation in Gaza to know the mazes of Gaza’s tunnels, which are their shelters, and to rescue more hostages.
That was crystal clear when Israeli troops stormed al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on November 15, 2023, which they described as a Hamas stronghold. Then they left. After reports that the complex was once again being used as a terrorist base, the IDF returned on March 18 for another two-week operation.
The article quoted as well retired Col. Peter Mansoor, author of the definitive history of the surge and a professor of military history at Ohio State University, describing the aggression as “seeking a military solution to what is fundamentally a political issue. By pursuing the destruction of Hamas and ignoring the root causes of the conflict, the Israelis, by their actions, are creating more future combatants than they are eliminating in the near term. Inevitably, Hamas will rise from the ashes of the current fighting.”
Analogously in the lines of two strong Zionists,” Netanyahu, the current Prime Minister and leader of the Likud party, which is the National Liberal Movement, a significant right-wing political party in Israel, strongly adheres to Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s 1925 Zionism Revisionist movement.
The movement has become the chief right-wing opposition party to the dominant current Labour Party in the Zionist movement. Its main focus is to cultivate Jewish militarism by dismantling the idea of territorial compromise, meaning that they won’t recognise a non-Jewish political entity—an Arab state—known as Palestine.
Netanyahu’s father, Benzion Netanyahu, a historian who was elected head of the Likud in 1993 and later became Leader of the Opposition, contributed to this viewpoint rigidly.
What has happened in Gaza so far?
Approximately 80 percent of Gaza’s intricate network of tunnels remains intact despite weeks of Israeli attempts to destroy them, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
Israeli and American officials told the Journal that it is difficult to know the total number of existing tunnels, but it is estimated that between 20 and 40 percent of them have been destroyed or remain inactive; most of them are in the northern Gaza Strip. In December 2023, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) announced that its soldiers had located over 800 shafts to Hamas’ underground tunnels. About 500 of the tunnel shafts have been destroyed using a variety of operational methods, including explosives and blocks.
Rescuing the abducted 252 people from the Gaza Strip is the most sensitive part for Israel. As of February 14, 2024, 112 hostages had been returned alive to Israel, with 105 being released in a prisoner exchange deal, four released by Hamas unilaterally, and three rescued by the IDF.
Fifteen bodies of hostages were repatriated to Israel, with three of the hostages killed unintentionally in the IDFand the bodies of twelve hostages repatriated through military operations. 54 hostages were reportedly killed on October 7 or in Hamas captivity, according to Israel. Unconfirmed Israeli intelligence said at least 20 additional hostages may be deceased, with their bodies being held captive in Gaza. Recently, on May 17, 2024, the IDF announced the further discovery of three bodies in Rafah who were later revealed to the public: Itzhak Gelerenter, Amit Buskila, and Shani Louk.
Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007, said two years before this flammable conflict erupted that it had installed a network of more than 500 kilometres (310 miles) of tunnels-roughly equivalent to half the length of the New York subway system. The Israeli military has nicknamed it the Gaza metro.
In 2014, the Israeli military provided estimates that Hamas spent around $30 to $90 million and poured 600,000 tonnes of concrete in order to build three dozen tunnels. Retired Major-General Amos Yadlin, who headed Israeli Military Intelligence from 2006–2010, said Israel had been constrained by diplomatic considerations from acting earlier against the passages.
“We knew very well the tunnels were there,” Yadlin said. “It’s not an intelligence failure. If it’s a failure, it was a policy failure.”
Israel began limiting the already restricted entry of cement and other building materials into Gaza, drawing criticism from the United Nations and human rights groups, which say the restrictions are crippling a Gaza economy reliant on the construction industry.
The ongoing war to wipe out these tunnels and rescue many hostages has eliminated between 144,000 and 175,000 buildings across the whole Gaza Strip, according to a satellite data analysis obtained by the BBC. That’s between 50% and 61% of Gaza’s buildings. About 1.7 million people—more than 80% of Gaza’s population—are displaced, with nearly half crammed in the far southern end of the strip, according to the United Nations.