If reports this evening are correct, Israel is stepping up its ground operations in Gaza. The Jerusalem Post quotes IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari saying: ‘In the last few hours, we have severely increased our attacks in Gaza.’ For two weeks, a threatened ground invasion has failed to materialise. The Israeli press attributes the delay to diplomatic efforts with Washington and the need to assess the IDF’s capability for fighting on two fronts should Hezbollah decide to invade or shell from the north. Israelis, particularly though not exclusively on the political right, have been urging Benjamin Netanyahu to get a move on. ‘Tnu tzahal lenatze’ach’ runs the old Second Intifada era slogan. ‘Let the IDF win.’
The delay has been to Israel’s disadvantage diplomatically. Enough time has passed that the horrors of 7 October are fading from western minds, or at least those minds that felt horror in the first place. The rising death toll in Gaza, as claimed by Hamas and accepted uncritically by journalists and NGOs, has brought political pressure in countries with sizeable Muslim populations, as seen in the efforts to browbeat Sir Keir Starmer into an anti-Israel stance. Calls for a ceasefire or humanitarian ‘pauses’ were already growing before tonight, so Israel can expect to find itself with few friends relatively quickly if these ground operations expand further.
The world prefers weeping for dead Jews to seeing living Jews defend themselves
The Israelis will put such considerations out of their minds. The world prefers weeping for dead Jews to seeing living Jews defend themselves. It always was and always will be this way. The only diplomatic consideration Israel needs to take into account is what the Biden administration says. Biden will set the parameters of Israel’s response and given the strategic, military and diplomatic importance of the United States to the Jewish state, Israel will have to operate within them. This may foreclose on Jerusalem’s ambition of destroying Hamas completely but the Americans are likely to allow them to inflict meaningful damage to the terrorist organisation’s capabilities.
While accepting their scope of action is hemmed in, Israel will seek to inflict maximum pain on Hamas. This will undoubtedly result in significant loss of life in Gaza and where this means Palestinian terrorists, it is just and to be welcomed. However, there will be a not insignificant number of unwelcome civilian casualties because, while Israel’s rules of engagement stress avoiding civilian deaths, Gaza is a densely-populated territory. Hamas’s rules of engagement include routinely using civilians as human shields. Just today, the IDF presented what it claimed was evidence that Hamas is using Al Shifa hospital, the main medical facility in Gaza City, as a terrorist command and control centre. The Islamist group has repeatedly warned Gazans to stay in place and ignore Israeli notices to leave the north of the strip.
Piling up the Palestinian bodies is central to Hamas’s strategy, for it knows western elites are intrinsically hostile to Israeli self-defence, ignorant of the theatre of conflict they face in Gaza, and incapable of processing the depravity of Hamas. CNN and the BBC, Gaza’s leaders understand, will do their work for them, casting the Israelis as mass murderers (and worse), thus weakening western support for what is a military response to the worst single-day terrorist attack Israel has ever faced. The Israelis will follow their usual risk calculations about civilian proximity when engaging Palestinian terrorists but there is simply no way to prosecute this war that won’t result in civilian loss of life. Gaza is what it is and Hamas are what they are.
Operation Swords of Iron is not about simple revenge. It’s about removing Hamas’s capacity to carry out another attack like 7 October. If this current round of fighting ends with Hamas still strong enough to threaten Israel’s border communities from land, air and sea, Israel will have lost, no matter how many Hamas operatives it kills or weapons stockpiles it destroys. Not just Israel’s national security but its viability as a sovereign state with defensible borders is on the line. Israel has no option but to let the IDF win – as much as the Americans will let them.
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