By Maj Gen Jagatbir singh, VSM (Retd)
07 October Israel’s long-standing security doctrine crumbled in the face of the Hamas attack. Its intelligence and military institutions were unable to keep citizens safe. The attention of the West once again shifted to the Middle East and the Palestinian cause and Russia – Ukraine Conflict is no longer dominating the front pages.
The Gaza Strip
The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated areas on the planet. It’s also one of the most heavily locked down, surveilled, and suppressed. Palestinians in occupied territories, including the West Bank and Gaza Strip, have faced surveillance and controls for years, with many calling the conditions an apartheid.
In September 2021, Israeli forces completed a barrier around the Gaza Strip—that is essentially a “smart wall” equipped with radars, cameras, underground sensors, and an array of other surveillance instruments. Palestinians are subjected to multi-layered surveillance,” as per Mona Shtaya, a non-resident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. Yet Hamas was able to plan and execute an attack which shocked the world.
Hamas War Aims
Hamas was probably encouraged by the impression that Israel’s internal political crisis—sparked by extensive protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to curtail the power of the Israeli Supreme Court—had diverted attention from Gaza and significantly undermined Israel’s social cohesion and military preparedness. This probably led a previously constrained Hamas to challenge the existing Israeli balance of power.
Hamas’s fundamental aspiration was to inflict harm on Israel and undermine the state. But Israeli intelligence and decision-makers had felt that Hamas’s responsibilities in Gaza had tempered its extremism. Hamas encouraged this misperception, posing as a reliable actor and warning of escalation if Israel did not allow funding from Qatar to arrive in Gaza and did not permit more Gazan workers in Israel.
This failure to properly comprehend Hamas’s nature and its intentions dates back to the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the subsequent Hamas coup against the Palestinian Authority there. Since then, Israel had operated on the premise that a deterred and weakened Hamas was preferable to a governance vacuum in Gaza and would allow Israel to focus on what it perceived as more critical strategic challenges, such as Iran’s nuclear aspirations and Hezbollah’s military buildup. Accordingly, each time a flare-up occurred in Gaza; Israel’s aim was to reestablish deterrence through a limited use of force. This allowed Hamas to carry out a long-term buildup of arms and military infrastructure and to improve its operational capabilities.
Over the years there have been viewpoints regarding being a terror organization or a governance organization. al-Omari, who served as an Advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team during the 1999-2001 permanent-status talks, has said; “What we saw on October 7 … is that ultimately, [terror] seems to be part of their DNA. Using terror and violence for achieving political means won the debate within Hamas.”
In the past decade, the IDF has succeeded in mitigating two central threats from Gaza: rocket attacks (which Israel’s Iron Dome defence system intercepts) and tunnels infiltrating Israeli territory (which were neutralized by an underground anti-tunnel barrier that Israel completed along the border with Gaza in 2021). But Israel failed to imagine an aboveground invasion and did not reinforce defences around Gaza in proportion to Hamas’s growing military capabilities.
The Hamas ultimate war aims are possibly the destruction of Israel and the retention of power in Gaza. Hamas will exert a total effort—diplomatically, economically, politically, and militarily—in order to win, or, not lose. Hamas obviously views its existence as vital; however, the question being asked is whether this is the view held by the majority of the Gaza populace, who Hamas is offering as human shields. Because Hamas views the Israeli war aims as unlimited, with its complete destruction as Israel’s goal, it will try to convince the people of Gaza that this translates to their destruction as well.
Accordingly, Hamas will try to convince its Arab neighbours that any attack against Hamas is an attack against Islam and the Palestinian people. Hamas and its supporters will use the media to foster the image.
Israel : The End of Status Quo
From the moment Hamas broke through Israel’s security barrier with the Gaza Strip on 07 October and began its rampage, it was clear that Israel would never be the same. Israel cannot return to the status quo that existed. Israelis were forced to confront the reality of many of the assumptions that had long guided Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. The state’s policy of blockading Gaza had failed to make them safe. The government’s calculation that it could lure Hamas into pragmatism, whether by allowing Qatari funding for Hamas or by giving work permits for Gaza labourers—had lured Israel into complacency. And the belief that most threats from Hamas could be neutralized by high-tech surveillance, deep underground barriers, and the Iron Dome missile defence system had proved wrong.
Its task now is to bring all the hostages back home and to make it impossible for Hamas and other adversaries, notably the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, to carry out further terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens or pose direct threats to their security. In order to bring the hostages back Israel entered into a ceasefire which brought a halt in their momentum of attack and disrupted the tempo of operations but the ceasefire though extended only has so far seen 105 hostages released from Hamas captivity in Gaza which includes 81 Israelis, there are reports that 137 hostages still remain.
Israel’s national security doctrine was initially crafted in the mid-twentieth century under the country’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion. Over the decades, it has been updated to include four main pillars: deterrence, early warning, defence, and decisive victory.
In the wake of Hamas’s attack, Israel has come to see that it cannot coexist with a jihadi Islamist state at its doorstep in Gaza. The era of intermittent cycles of fighting and cease-fires in Gaza is over. What will replace it is a continuous, protracted military campaign, driven by Israel’s paramount security interests and an unwavering commitment to the safe return of the hostages being held by Hamas.
However, in the wake of the public opinion the world over following Israel’s military action and bombing of Gaza, there is an outcry against further loss of innocent lives. The question that needs to be answered is can the world move beyond the revolving pattern that has become apparent over the past two decades: support for Israel to defend itself at the onset of a conflict; followed by mounting international and domestic pressure on leaders for a ceasefire and diplomatic solutions; and Israel’s withdrawal before the completion of its objectives.
Israel’s Perceived Strategy
An effective Israeli strategy demands the integration of several interrelated, parallel endeavours—military, civilian, and political—executed methodically within a structured framework, which must be continually realigned with the expectations of the Israeli public and combined with a diplomatic campaign that will secure the assistance and support that the country will need from allies and partners.
The broad Policy/Strategic Objectives of Operations in Gaza could be; a stable Gaza, with a broad-based government that renounces the use of terrorism to threaten Israel or the Israeli people. The outcomes in Gaza should convince or compel other countries in the region to cease support to terrorists. Finally, a restoration process to reach an Agreement with Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel, and an expansion of the Abraham Accords.
If these are the broad strategic objectives, the military objectives of Operations in Gaza which flow are to destabilize, isolate, and destroy Hamas and provide support to a new, broad-based government in Gaza. This includes destroying Hamas’s military capability and infrastructure. It must aim at protecting Israel from Gaza-based threats and attacks and
Finally destroying Hamas and its supporting nations’ terrorist networks, gathering intelligence on regional and global terrorism, capturing or killing terrorists and war criminals, and freeing hostages detained by the Hamas regime.
Plans for pushing the two million Palestinians, sheltering in South Gaza, into a small area called al-Mawasi, which is just 2.5 kilometres wide and 4 kilometres long as reported by Paul Adams of the BBC will have disastrous humanitarian fallouts.
Palestinian Frustrations
The initiation of violence by Hamas was triggered by the deep frustrations the Palestinians felt towards their plight. Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas leader has been quoted in the New Yorker Magazine saying; ‘We rolled down all of the pathways to get some of our rights — not all of them. We knocked on the door of reconciliation and we weren’t allowed in. We knocked on the door of elections and we were deprived of them. We knocked on the door of a political document for the whole world — we said, ‘We want peace, but give us some of our rights’ — but they didn’t let us in.” He added, “We tried every path. We didn’t find one political path to take us out of this morass and free us from occupation… We spoke to the Americans, Europeans and all of the people in order to achieve the Palestinian people’s rights, without any benefit. Nothing has been achieved towards the idea of two states, from 1948 until today. We are a people under occupation. We tried every path; we did not find one path to take us out of our morass”.
Hamas designed its attack to bring the Palestinian issue to the fore and stoke an overreaction from Israel that would undermine international sympathy for Israel, stoke an uprising in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and rally support for Hamas, notably from Iran and Hezbollah.
Has Israel played into Hamas’s hands by the scale of its response which was inevitable.There is of course a school of thought that feels that the intensity of the Israeli reaction was necessary to prevent other non-state actors from joining in. But social media has also had a comparable effect on terrorism. Hamas is now on a similar footing with Israel in its ability to project its own narrative about the war.
Conclusion
The attacks no doubt have revealed the terrible failure of the idea that the Palestinian political question could be sidelined indefinitely without any cost to Israel. There had been no Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on a final status peace deal for years, even as Israel pursued normalization with a growing number of Arab states.
Over the course of more than two decades, the right-wing parties dominating the Israeli political scene had promised voters that the country was more secure than it would be under any other policy, and the majority of voters agreed. But Hamas’s attack has crushed the status quo.
Even as fighting rages, questions abound about what happens when it finally stops. As per the Economist; ’the visible dilemma facing America Israel’s staunchest ally is for how long it can support the war’.
There are many questions that need to be answered including; ‘What can be salvaged from the wreckage? Will Hamas survive, if not as an organization, then as an ideology? Who will govern Gaza? What will be needed by both Israelis and Palestinians to broker any type of lasting peace’?
Unfortunately, violence cannot be a solution even for an intractable conflict.
The author is an Indian army Veteran.
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