Hamas gets truce to lick its wounds
By Victor Kotsev
TEL AVIV - Late on Sunday, after a weekend of heavy violence, Israel and
several Gaza militant factions reached a truce with the help of Egyptian and
United Nations mediation. This development came following an unprecedented
appeal by Hamas to the Israeli public ("We are interested in calm but want the
Israeli military to stop its operations," Hamas Deputy Foreign Minister Ghazi
Hamad said in Hebrew in an interview on Israel Radio) and an
unrealistic but passionate appeal of the Arab League to the United Nations to
impose a "no-fly zone" over the Gaza Strip.
Even as the truce tenuously took hold, new Gaza armed factions were ready to
challenge it, firing a missile and several mortar rounds into Israel. It is
doubtful that the ceasefire will last long. Hamas has been pushed into a
corner, and it is unlikely that its longer-term response will be of a peaceful
nature.
"Even if Hamas manages to negotiate a brief reprieve to rearm and regroup its
forces, however, the potential for a more serious escalation with broader
geopolitical implications remains," American think-tank Stratfor writes.
Israeli military officials hold a similar view. "The Hamas in the Gaza Strip
has been busy rebuilding its forces for the past two years, and this can only
mean that we are facing an all-out confrontation," a senior defense source told
Ynetnews.com.
The statistics are grim - more than 20 Palestinians, a third of them civilians,
died, and a similar number were critically injured since Thursday when an
Israeli school bus was hit with an anti-tank missile fired by Hamas (see
Israel and Hamas in a dangerous game Asia Times Online, 8 April).
Hundreds of rockets and mortar rounds rained on Israel, producing no casualties
(other then sporadic reports of light injuries) but extensive material damage.
Tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Israelis spent most of the weekend in
reinforced shelters, and the Israeli military launched numerous strikes while
the new Iron Dome missile defense system shot down altogether eight Grad
Katyushas fired at the cities of Beersheba and Ashkelon.
According to the Palestinian news agency Ma'an, the UN special coordinator for
the Middle East peace process, Robert Serry, was instrumental in brokering the
ceasefire. Despite calls by residents of the most affected southern communities
and some prominent former and current officials to expand the military
campaign, the Israeli government appeared ready to embrace the truce: all the
way back Thursday, government sources quoted in the press had estimated that
this flash of violence will last through the weekend at the most. On its part,
Hamas has asked for a cessation of hostilities all the way since Thursday
night.
The dominant militant organization in Gaza is in dire straits. Pundits have
highlighted two rifts that are threatening Hamas and have played a part in the
escalation. "The IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] has been warning for several
months of the growing rift within Hamas between the political echelon, led by
Ismail Haniyeh, and the military wing, led by Ahmed Jabari," Yaakov Katz, a
senior defense analyst, wrote in the Jerusalem Post. According to Katz, Haniyeh
and his camp are "currently more concerned about the possibility that the
unrest in the Arab world will spread to Gaza than they are with Israel", and
are busy suppressing internal dissent.
Jabari, on the other hand, wanted to avenge the death of another high-ranking
militant and close friend in an Israeli strike last Saturday, and to give his
subordinates a chance to vent their frustrations and show off their new
hardware, Katz argued. "They smuggled powerful and high-quality weaponry into
Gaza, but were not allowed to use it."
Katz and others point a finger at Hamas' rivalry with Palestinian
organizations such as Fatah and Islamic Jihad. Meir Elran, a senior fellow at
the Institute for National Security studies, told the Jerusalem Post that
Hamas' motivation in launching the attacks was that "they are the flag-carriers
of the struggle against Israel, this is the thing that makes them special ...
This is what preserves their existence; the fact that they are not like Fatah."
Palestinian reactions to the ceasefire, which Hamas wanted badly, illustrated
the latter point. "New Palestinian military groups surface in Gaza," Ma'an
reported on Sunday. One such group, the "Abdullah Azzam Brigades," took
responsibility for firing at the Israeli city of Ashkelon and a military base
after the truce was declared. Islamic Jihad, meanwhile, declared the ceasefire
to be "meaningless" and implicitly accused Hamas of begging for it.
Hamas' domestic standing is not improved by the hard to hide fact that it has
taken a serious beating in the Israeli operation. It lost a number of senior
operatives, its missile deterrent vis-a-vis Israel was severely eroded, and it
ranks were penetrated pervasively by Israeli intelligence.
The attack on an Israeli school bus backfired spectacularly; while Hamas meant
to punish Israel for the murder of a high-ranking military commander last
Saturday and to deter the Jewish state from future strikes, it merely shocked
world opinion and gave the Israeli military a window of opportunity to unleash
its potential.
The Hamas military leaders were severely embarrassed, and forced to toe the
line as the political wing sought to deescalate the conflict. According to
persistent though unconfirmed reports, Jabari did not know that a school bus
would be targeted, and had ordered a military target to be hit instead.
Hamas lost several high-ranking military commanders, including an area
commander in the south, Tayser Abu Snima, who allegedly took part in the
abduction of Israeli soldier Gilat Shalit in 2006. Another senior Hamas
military man, Mohammed ad-Dayah, was killed last Saturday, sparking the most
recent escalation. Several mid-ranking commanders were killed as well,
including "platoon commanders" who would usually have a lieutenant rank in a
regular military. Others were wounded seriously and incapacitated.
"The relatively large number of casualties in the organization's military wing
suggests that the group has become more vulnerable to Israeli intelligence,"
prominent Israeli analysts Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel wrote in Ha'aretz.
This helps explain Hamas' desperate appeals for a ceasefire: if the
organization's basic operational security is put into question, it cannot hope
to stand up to Israel in battle.
As a side note, Israel's intelligence successes against Hamas could be a sign
that Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009 was perceived as a clear victory for
Israel by the Gaza population, despite the militants' declarations of success.
A prominent Israeli intellectual with close ties to the Palestinians once told
this correspondent that Palestinian collaboration with Israel usually soars
after impressive Israeli victories. The reasons are less related to Israeli
efforts to recruit (pressure and incentives) than to the psychological impact
of Israel's perceived strength.
Perhaps most impressive, however, was the performance of Israel's Iron Dome
missile defense system. It has been credited with the lack of Israeli
casualties so far by the missile blitz, and residents of the southern
communities expressed their gratitude toward the soldiers operating the shield
with flowers and gifts. Despite that only two batteries of the system exist
(estimates about the number needed for a more complete protection range from
six to 13 batteries), it has proved spectacularly effective against the Grads
and Qassams at Hamas' disposal.
This means that rulers of Gaza are now in a particularly bad position. Their
main weapons against Israel - the missiles - have lost much of their
effectiveness. Their ranks are split and penetrated, and their domestic
legitimacy is challenged by other groups. This situation is hardly tenable for
them, and it is indeed likely that they see the calm only as an opportunity "to
rearm and regroup".
They have to revise their tactics, and Israeli analysts have already voiced
concerns that they are studying the Iron Dome closely to find its weaknesses.
It is also possible that, other options being blocked, Hamas will choose to
revive suicide terror, which it effectively abandoned with its deeper
engagement in politics in the mid-2000s.
A debate has been raging in recent years inside the militant organization about
the use of suicide bombings, and so far a major argument against them has been
that the missiles were similarly effective but produced less international
backlash. Now that argument has been weakened considerably, which may also help
explain the Israeli government's initial reluctance to purchase and deploy the
Iron Dome [1]. It bears noting that Israel took out a few major Hamas terrorist
cells in Jerusalem and the West Bank over the last months.
Clearly, Hamas needs to take radical and urgent action, but at least in theory,
this needn't entail more violence. An alternative, more hopeful, possibility
also exists. The organization could, for example, seek to scale down its
military wing and to embark on a political campaign to reconcile with the rival
Palestinian Authority in the West Bank; conceivably, it could even enter peace
talks with Israel.
The crisis, indeed, presents a moment of opportunity, but many opportunities
have gone to waste between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and there is
little probability that this time it will be any better. Hamas hardliners in
Damascus and among the military wing of the organization will do their best to
scuttle any peace initiative; other militants such as Islamic Jihad, who take
their orders from Iran, would help. Israel, alarmed by the prospect of
increased Hamas influence in the West Bank, could also react with force. In
fact, as I have reported previously, one of the hypotheses about the gradual
escalation of violence over the last month or so is precisely that an array of
players on the ground were alarmed by the possibility of internal Palestinian
reconciliation.
We can expect, if we are lucky, a brief period of calm near Gaza, but it is
clear that both sides are preparing for further violence. Israel is
intensifying its efforts to preempt international criticism. "The army has
updated its maps of the Gaza Strip since Operation Cast Lead with a massive and
unprecedented increase in the number of sensitive installations and buildings
marked as off limits for IDF attacks," Yaakov Katz reported on Sunday.
As Amos Harel and Avi Isaacharoff note, a new ground battle in Gaza could be
just around the corner.
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