2023-10-19 13:43:24
After the attacks in southern Israel on October 7, the Israeli government has been signaling for days that the forces it has accumulated are preparing to enter Gaza to eliminate the Hamas military force once and for all.
More than 300,000 reservists have been called up by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and the farms, fields and kibbutzim (agricultural communes) on the Israeli side of the Gaza border are packed with Merkava tanks, self-propelled artillery systems and thousands of infantry soldiers fully armed and equipped for combat.
The Air Force and the Navy have hit with their bombs every place suspected of hosting a hideout of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, combatant groups opposed to the State of Israel, killing and wounding a high number of civilians and a small group of Hamas leaders. .
The large number of casualties left this Tuesday by the explosion in a central hospital in Gaza, for which all sides accuse each other, has only increased tension in the region even more.
So why hasn’t Israel launched its announced ground offensive on Gaza yet?
The Biden factor
The US president’s hasty visit to Israel this week is a sign of the White House’s concern over the deteriorating situation. Washington fears the increasingly serious humanitarian crisis and a possible expansion of the conflict to the entire Middle East.
President Biden has already made clear his opposition to a new Israeli occupation of Gaza, from which Israeli troops withdrew in 2005. It would be, he said, “a big mistake.”
Miriam Alster / Getty Biden’s recent visit to Israel shows Washington’s concern about the conflict.
Officially, the visit sought to show the strategic support of the United States to its closest ally in the Middle East and to learn first-hand about Israeli plans for Gaza.
Unofficially, Biden has likely urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline government to show restraint. Washington will presumably also have wanted to know how Israel plans to get out of Gaza if and when it eventually gets involved.
An Israeli invasion of the Strip while Air Force One, Biden’s presidential plane, remains parked at the Tel Aviv airport, would not be a favorable image, neither for the United States nor for Israel.
The visit was overshadowed by the explosion at Gaza’s Al-Ahli Arab hospital and Biden has publicly backed the Israeli version of what happened. The Israeli government says a Palestinian rocket caused the explosion, while Palestinian authorities blame an Israeli airstrike. The BBC is working to find out the cause of the explosion and the actual death toll. It is feared that there could be hundreds.
Majid Saeedi/Getty Iran warned that an Israeli invasion of Gaza would not go unanswered.
Iran has issued warnings in recent days indicating that an Israeli invasion of Gaza would not go unanswered. But what does that mean exactly?
Tehran finances, trains and arms to a greater or lesser extent a series of Shiite militias in the Middle East. Hezbollah is by far the most powerful and has its fiefdom in Lebanon, just across Israel’s northern border.
Israel and Lebanon clashed in 2006 in a war that ended without a clear winner and in which some of Israel’s advanced tanks were neutralized by hidden mines and well-planned ambushes. Hezbollah has since rearmed with help from Iran and is believed to currently have around 150,000 rockets and missiles, many of which are long-range precision projectiles.
There is a threat in the air that if Israel launches its troops into Gaza, Hezbollah could open hostilities in the north, forcing the Israeli army to fight on two fronts.
However, it is not at all clear that Hezbollah wants a war now, especially with two US Navy aircraft carrier groups and their respective strike groups positioned in the eastern Mediterranean and ready to come to Israel’s aid if necessary.
This could give Israel peace of mind that a Hezbollah attack could trigger a devastating aftershock of US naval power. It is worth remembering that in the 2006 war, Hezbollah militants managed to hit an Israeli warship in the water with one of their sophisticated missiles.
Abed Zagout / Getty An Israeli ground offensive in Gaza would increase the number of civilian casualties.
The Israeli government’s notion of what a humanitarian crisis is seems far from that of the rest of the world when it comes to eliminating Hamas in Gaza.
As the toll of Palestinian civilian casualties continues to rise as a result of relentless Israeli bombing, much of the global solidarity with Israel sparked by Hamas’ savage and bloodthirsty actions on October 7 has given way to a growing clamor to stop the attacks. flights and protect the lives of Gazans.
If Israel launches itself with all its force against the Strip, the number of victims will only increase.
And Israeli soldiers would also die. Expect ambushes, sniper action and booby traps. Much of the fighting is likely to be fought in the thousands of underground tunnels that Hamas has dug in Gaza.
In any case, it can be assumed that the largest number of casualties would again be civilian victims.
A great intelligence failure
Israeli intelligence has not had a good month.
Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence agency, was singled out for its inability to detect the deadly Hamas attack. It is assumed that he has a vast network of informants and spies in Gaza and that he intervenes in the conversations of the leadership of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
What happened on that horrible Saturday morning amounts to the worst intelligence failure in Israel’s history since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
The Israeli services will have been frantically trying to make amends in the last ten days by helping the army identify the hostages kidnapped by Hamas, the places where they are hidden, and the shelters where the Hamas leaders are hiding.
They may have asked for more time to ensure that when ground forces enter Gaza, they head directly to precise locations rather than wandering through the rubble and ruins of northern Gaza, permanently exposed to attacks by Palestinian militants and amid of growing global condemnation.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad elements remaining operational after the sustained Israeli bombing campaign will have planned ambushes and traps for the Israeli vanguard, which is especially dangerous in the Hamas tunnel network. Israeli intelligence will be very interested in discovering where they put them in order to warn the military on the ground in advance.
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