There is a Humanitarian Pause in Gaza

Hassan Nasrallah: Defending Israel with Hezbollah in the Tribute of the October 7, Israel-Oct. 7 Attack

Four weeks ago, Israel began its military campaign to defeat Hamas, in retaliation for the attack on Oct. 7 that killed more than 1,400 people, kidnapped some 240 others and destroyed a fundamental sense of security for all Israelis. The United States, Israel’s closest ally, has promised to stand by Israel until it regains its sense of security.

For any such measure to be effective, both sides in this conflict must abide by it. Hamas would have to agree, through its interlocutors, to stop launching rockets at Israel. Arab countries in the region should also put pressure on Hamas to release all of its hostages, which include many women and children.

People in the US who have defended the Hamas attacks would do well to understand why the group continues to stand for.

In the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel in October, people across the region fear that a second war may break out between Israel and Hezbollah.

That is not Hezbollah’s plan, the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said in a widely anticipated address to his followers on Friday, his first public remarks since the start of the war.

Israel and Hezbollah have clashed repeatedly along the Israel-Lebanon border since the war began, targeting each other’s positions and killing combatants on both sides. The address by the leader of Hezbollah, Mr. Nasrallah, lasted for more than an hour and was not a call for peace.

The Hezbollah leader said that the Lebanon front lessened some of the forces that were going to escalate the attack on Gaza. “Some in Lebanon say that we are taking a risk, it’s true. The risk is part of a correct calculation.

Hezbollah is a more powerful and sophisticated military force than Hamas, with tens of thousands of trained fighters, an arsenal of more than 100,000 rockets and a stock of precision-guided missiles that can strike sensitive targets deep inside Israel. Military analysts believe that the group may also have other military capabilities that it has yet to unveil.

Mr. Nasrallah did not rule out anything, however, warning that he was keeping Hezbollah’s forces ready should hostilities with Israel escalate. “All the possibilities on our Lebanese front are open,” he said. We could use all the choices at any time.

The speech delivered by Mr. NasrAllah offered a small amount of relief for those who felt that the region was about to get even more violent.

Mr. Nasrallah is a highly respected figure inside a group that calls itself the “axis of resistance,” a network of Iranian-backed militias in several Arab countries that share an anti-American and anti-Israeli ideology and have come to coordinate their operations more closely in recent years. A Hezbollah war with Israel would most likely prompt attacks from allied militias in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

Mr. Nasrallah told Hezbollah supporters that President Biden had lied in telling Israel that it had the right to defend itself but that it had to respect.

He also said the group was not intimidated by the two aircraft carriers that the United States had dispatched to the eastern Mediterranean, which could strike Hezbollah targets.

“Your fleets in the Mediterranean do not scare us and will never scare us,” Mr. Nasrallah said. “Your fleets that you threaten us with, we are prepared for them as well.”

Hezbollah could try to attack its bases in Iraq, Syria and other places, if the United States intervenes in the war.

The U.S. military has said the carriers were sent to deter a wider regional war — a fear that has grown alongside mounting anger in Arab countries over the crisis facing Gazan civilians and the death toll in the strip, which has risen into the many thousands since Israel’s bombardment began. Israel has faced international criticism over the dire conditions in Gaza but has so far resisted calls for a cease-fire.

The leader of the Hezbollah group in Lebanon praised the fighters from his groups for launching daily attacks on Israeli military positions. Those attacks had forced Israeli civilians to flee and drawn Israeli military resources to the north so that they could not contribute to attacks on Gaza.

Thousands of Hezbollah supporters gathered to watch the speech on giant screens in locations throughout Lebanon. The largest site in southern Lebanon was decorated with Hezbollah and Palestinian flags. When he appeared on screen, supporters chanted “We are here for Nasrallah.”

He said a great event was needed to return the Palestinian cause to its former position of being the top issue in the world.

The Gaza City Operation as a Probe of Israel’s Borders in the Middle East, as Revealed by Satellite Images and Pentagon Experts

In Lebanon, Sbeti fired a volley of celebratory gunshots into the air after Mr. Nasrallah ended his speech. He said he would fight to the death for Hezbollah.

A driver who had grown poorer during Lebanon’s deep economic crisis in recent years, Mr. Sbeti was not overly worried about the vast damage that Israel could do to Lebanon in a new war.

A second satellite image from a European Space Agency satellite taken on Nov. 1 showed evidence that Israeli armor had advanced to within three-quarters of a mile (a little over a kilometer) of the coast. There are tapes of fighting in the Tal Al Hawa neighborhood, on the southern end of Gaza City.

Based on the satellite imagery, the Israelis probably have a brigade consisting of several thousand troops operating in the northwest part of the city alone, says Sean MacFarland, a retired three-star general in the U.S. Army who conducted operations against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

He believes that they’re starting to push in to establish a presence on the outskirts that they can use to launch operations deeper into the city. Iraqi forces employed a similar tactic when attempting to regain control of the city of Ramadi from ISIS forces in 2015.

But even if the other two axes also contain about a brigade, that wouldn’t be nearly enough to fully occupy or even conduct a building-by-building sweep of a dense, urban environment like Gaza City, says Gentile.

He says that they may choose to control the city from the outskirts and conduct operations inside. The tunnels could be destroyed without committing to a full occupation.

Satellite images, as well as bystanders and the Israel Defense Force, were examined by NPR. Based on those images and conversations with military experts, here’s what can be gleaned about the operation so far.

High-resolution satellite imagery taken by the company Planet on Oct. 31 shows roughly two-dozen Israeli armored vehicles stationed near the road, presumably to control access.

He believes that Israel is more likely to use airstrikes, armor and dismounted infantry to strike at individual targets. “I think that is what they’re doing, it’s very specifically designed to go after infrastructure,” Jones says.

On October 31, Israel launched a massive airstrike on a part of the refugee camp north of Gaza City. According to the Israel Defense Forces, the strike was conducted with intelligence gathered by Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service.

A senior Hamas commander and dozens of his fighters were killed in a battle with the Israeli military. Photos from the site showed a massive crater, consistent with a collapsed tunnel beneath the site, and many injured civilians. The health ministry in Gaza says that almost 200 people have died and 120 are still missing.

The incident underscores a dangerous new phase in operations, says Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon intelligence officer who now works for Pax, a Dutch nonprofit working to protect civilians against acts of war. The war began when Israel conducted strikes on targets. Now they’re striking quickly at “dynamic targets” with little warning or no warning for civilians in the area.

Alex said that Israel tried to warn civilians of the need to leave northern Gaza. “They’ve attempted to clear the battlefield; they’ve asked people to leave,” he says.

“Israel is not going to win their war against Hamas, which they have every right to fight, by military means alone,” Mr. Moulton said. “And often the wrong military means, like bombs that kill too many civilians, make the political endgame harder to reach.”

In a statement Wednesday, the United Nations’ human rights office appeared to echo those concerns, warning that strikes on the Jabalia camp “could amount to war crimes.”

Hamas, Israel, and the War in Gaza: The Challenge of Warfare and the Security of the Middle East and the Continuum

Those numbers will inevitably grow, says Gentile, who participated in urban warfare in Iraq in 2006. Both Hamas and Israel view this as an important battle.

They were only treating burns with the two radioactive substances, iodine and saline. Hospitals were performing surgery without anesthesia because they had no choice, and there was no post-wound care.

He thinks that it’s hard to imagine that Israel will retain broader international support unless it proves that it is trying to help civilians and minimize casualties.

Humanitarian conditions on the ground are an “Achilles heel” for the operation. “That needs to be fixed very, very quickly.”

Asked about the U.S. request to use smaller bombs, a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces, Maj. Nir Dinar, said: “We don’t comment on munitions and our conversations with allies.”

In the first two weeks of the war, roughly 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in Gaza were satellite-guided bombs of 1,000 to 2,000 pounds, according to a senior U.S. military official. The rest were smaller bombs.

The pressure will build on Israel’s leaders to end the military operation when the Palestinian death toll increases. A more targeted campaign, U.S. officials tell them, could go on for longer and do more sustained damage to Hamas’s military wing.

The United States has also increased the amount of intelligence that it is collecting in Gaza: American drones are flying over the enclave, searching for hostages held by Hamas and other groups, and U.S. military satellites have been redirected to monitor the enclave. The US is using aircraft on the two carriers in the Mediterranean to collect additional intelligence.

While the United States has increased the amount of intelligence that it is sharing with Israel, U.S. officials stressed they are not helping Israel pick targets for strikes.

Iddo Ben-Anat, a deputy brigade commander leading part of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, said that they do their best to destroy Hamas, without harming the civilians.

Defending Hamas in the Mideast: Palestinian Resentment and the State of the Union at the Gaza Consequences

A cease-fire was demanded by the Arab leaders during a meeting with Mr. Blinken in Amman, Jordan.

Mr. Blinken said that Hamas must be fought not just with military might, but also with “a better future, with a better vision” for the Palestinian people.

Democratic lawmakers and terrorism experts have said the higher the civilian casualty toll, the greater the resentment that will build in Gaza, resentment that Hamas can use to build further support.

Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts and an Iraq war veteran, said the America’s biggest mistake in that conflict was trying to provide “military solutions to fundamentally political problems.”

At the news conference in Tel Aviv, Mr. Blinken appeared to obliquely acknowledge that risk, arguing that while Hamas needed to be defeated “physically,” the international community needed to ensure that Hamas does not gain more followers in the process.