US officials say Israeli forces have limited time in Gaza
The Oct. 7 Attack Against the Qassam Brigades: The Case of Sinwar and the Generals of the Aqsa Mosque
Some factions had signed accords with Israel, meant to pave the way for a two-state solution. The Palestinian Authority, envisioned as a Palestinian government in waiting, had limited authority over parts of the West Bank and remained officially committed to negotiating an end to the conflict.
The displacement of Palestinians in Palestine by Israel and the occupation of the West bank and Gaza by Israel, were historical wrongs that had to be righted by force. Hamas dismissed peace talks with Israel as a betrayal, viewing them as a capitulation to Israel’s control over what the group considered occupied Palestinian land.
Violence continued to break out. In 2021, Hamas launched a war to protest Israeli efforts to evict Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem and Israeli police raids of the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City.
In 2012, Mr. Sinwar became the armed wing’s representative to Hamas’s political leadership, linking him more tightly to the leaders of the military wing, including Mr. Deif, the mysterious head of the Qassam Brigades. Arab and Israeli officials say the two men were involved in the Oct. 7 attack.
The axis of resistance in Gaza: Hamas as a plan of resolving Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians
“I am not saying I won’t fight anymore,” he said. “I am saying that I don’t want war anymore. I want the end of the siege. You walk to the beach at sunset and you see all these teenagers on the shore chatting and wondering what the world looks like across the sea. What life looks like,” he added. I would like them to be free.
Hamas also issued a political program in 2017 that allowed for the possibility of a two-state solution, while still not recognizing Israel’s right to exist.
Israel granted some concessions, agreeing in 2018 to allow $30 million per month in aid from Qatar into Gaza and increasing the number of permits for Gazans to work inside Israel, bringing much needed cash into Gaza’s economy.
“The Israelis were only concerned with one thing: How do I get rid of the Palestinian cause?” Mr. Hamdan said. They were not even thinking about the Palestinians as they headed in that direction. And if the Palestinians did not resist, all of that could have taken place.”
Still, in 2021, Israeli military intelligence and the National Security Council thought that Hamas wanted to avoid another war, according to people familiar with the assessments.
The security establishment in Israel believed its defense of its borders to shoot down rockets and prevent incursions from Gaza were enough to keep Hamas contained.
By Oct. 7, Hamas was estimated to have 20,000 to 40,000 fighters, with about 15,000 rockets, mainly manufactured in Gaza with components most likely smuggled in through Egypt, according to American and other Western analysts. The group had mortars, anti-tank missiles and portable air-defense systems as well, they said.
That restoration deepened the relationship between Hamas’s military wing in Gaza and the so-called axis of resistance, Iran’s network of regional militias, according to regional diplomats and security officials. In recent years, a stream of Hamas operatives traveled from Gaza to Iran and Lebanon for training by the Iranians or Hezbollah, adding a layer of sophistication to Hamas’s capabilities, the officials said.
At the center of post-crisis governance should include the Palestinian people’s voices and desires. “It must include Palestinian-led governance and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority.”
Mr. Biden wields a key leverage as a world leader strongly allied with Israel, and his administration tries to unite the region around a vision that looks beyond the fighting and the deep emotions that have divided the region for years.
Mr. Biden and his assistants inside the White House are anxious about the conflict entering its second month, according to remarks made by Mr. Blinken on Wednesday. What started in the days after Oct. 7 as an unambiguous rush to the defense of an ally has become a much more complicated diplomatic challenge for the president to help define an alternative to open-ended war in the Middle East.
John F. Kirby is a spokesman for the National Security Council. “And I don’t know that it would be reasonable for us to think that we could, at this particular point, one month into the conflict. But we know that it has to be something different than what it was under Hamas.”
But as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza deepens, Mr. Biden has tried to balance his support for Israel with calls for the protection of Palestinian noncombatants and for “humanitarian pauses” in the fighting.
There is about 2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and Mr. Blinken did not mention the presence of Israeli forces there.
After traveling around Israel and the West Bank, I now understand why so much has changed. It is crystal clear to me that Israel is in real danger — more danger than at any time since its War of Independence in 1948. And it’s for three key reasons:
I am amazed by how many Israelis feel the same way, starting with a friend who lives in Jerusalem telling me that she and her husband got gun licenses to have pistols at home. No one is going to snatch the children and take them into a tunnel. Hamas, alas, has tunneled fear into many, many Israeli heads far from the Gaza border.
The level of carnage has deeply shaken Israel and shaped its military response. The country has vowed to eliminate Hamas and kill anyone associated with the Oct. 7 atrocities.
The US Vice President has not agreed to a full cease-fire because Israel has a right to destroy Hamas after it killed over 1,400 people. He ruled out the prospect of a cease-fire again on Thursday, saying: “None. No possibility.
Kiryat Shmona is one of the most important Israeli towns on the border with Lebanon. The father told him that his family was among thousands of other Israeli families who had fled the northern border line after Hezbollah and Palestinian militias started attacking each other in support of Hamas.
When might they come back? They had no idea. Like more than 200,000 other Israelis, they have taken refuge with friends or in hotels all across this small country of nine million people. It took Israelis a few weeks to start driving up real estate prices in some central Israeli towns. That alone is the mission accomplished for Hezbollah. They are controlling Israel along with Hamas.
I asked Liat Admati, 35, a survivor of the Hamas attack who ran a clinic for facial cosmetics for 11 years in Be’eri, what would make it possible for her go back to her Gaza border home, where she was raised.
“The main thing for me to go back is to feel safe,” she said. I had a lot of trust in the army. I think the trust is broken. I don’t want to feel that we are covering ourselves in walls and shelters all the time, while behind this fence there are people who can one day do this again. I don’t know what the solution is.
Before Oct. 7, she and her neighbors thought the threat was rockets, she said, so they built safe rooms — but now that Hamas gunmen came over and burned parents and kids in their safe rooms, who knows what is safe? “The safe room was designed to keep you safe from rockets — not from another human who would come and kill you for who you are,” she said. The most dispiriting thing she said is that it appeared that some Gazans gave Hamas maps of the layout.
A lot of Israelis listened to a recording of a man who killed a woman and called his parents from the phone.
“Look how many I killed with my own hands! According to an English translation, he says that his son killed Jews. He said your son is a hero. His mother can be heard rejoicing.
This kind of chilling exuberance — Israel was built so that such a thing could never happen — explains the homemade sign I saw on a sidewalk while driving through the French Hill Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem the other day: “It’s either us or them.’’
This conflict is now back to its most biblical and primordial roots. This seems to be a time of eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. The policy will have to wait until the mourning is over.
Really? The Times of Israel reported last year that 9.450 million people live in Israel as of the end of 2021, including Israelis in West Bank settlements. “Of those, 6.982 million (74 percent) are Jewish, 1.99 million (21 percent) are Arab and 472,000 (5 percent) are neither. The Palestinian Bureau of Statistics puts the West Bank Palestinian population at a little over three million, and the Gaza population at just over two million.”
Netanyahu says that seven million Jews will be controlling the lives of five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, while offering them no political horizon, nothing, by way of statehood one day.
Netanyahu has been slammed by the public for his recent attack on his army and intelligence chiefs in the middle of a war. “I was wrong,” he wrote, adding that “the things I said following the press conference should not have been said, and I apologize for that. I fully support the heads of [Israel’s] security services.”
But the damage was done. How much trust do those military leaders have in Netanyahu? What leader would start a war of survival that way?
The society is better than its leader. It is so bad it took a war to get that home. A retired member of Israel’s most elite special forces unit and founder of Brothers in Arms is Ron Scherf who fought Netanyahu’s judicial coup. Immediately after Hamas invaded, Brothers in Arms made plans to mobilize aid workers and reservists and get them to the front.
It’s a remarkable story of grass-roots mobilization that showed how much solidarity is still buried in this place and could be unlocked by a different prime minister, one who was a uniter, not a divider. You are overwhelmed by the power of what you lost when you go to the front.
Israeli Operation Hamas in Gaza During the Decelerator of the Salah al-Din Road: Mr. Netanyahu and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken
During lulls in fighting this week, residents of northern Gaza used the Salah al-Din Road as an escape route to southern Gaza.
The White House announced on Thursday that Israel will put in place daily four-hour pauses in its bombing of Hamas in selected areas of northern Gaza, in order to allow civilians to flee.
The announcement of the daily pauses in two corridors came after days of efforts by Mr. Biden and his team to persuade Israel to do more to minimize civilian casualties. Mr. Biden asked Mr. Netanyahu during a call on Monday to pause its assault on Hamas. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, lobby their counterparts during Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s visit to the region.
The pauses in the fighting will allow civilians to escape the violence but also allow for the delivery of more humanitarian supplies and the release of hostages held by Hamas, including a few Americans. He said that 106 trucks of humanitarian aid crossed into Gaza on Wednesday, with a goal of 150 trucks a day.
The office of Israel’s prime minister said in a statement that his country’s forces allowed safe passage to the south of Gaza and 50,000 people had taken that route on Wednesday alone. “The fighting continues and there will be no cease-fire without the release of our hostages,” the statement said, adding, “We once again call on the civilian population of Gaza to evacuate to the south.”
Mr. Biden requested a pause longer than three days as he prepared to go to Illinois. Asked if he was frustrated that Mr. Netanyahu took so long to agree, the president hinted at some impatience. He said it took a little longer than he had hoped. As for the fate of the hostages, he said, “We’re still optimistic.”
Mr. Kirby said that they won’t support a cease-fire at this time.
Israel’s response to Hamas attacks in the Gaza Strip has failed to provoke a wider war, the United States and the Biden administration
The Israeli military has limited time to carry out its operations in Gaza before anger among Arabs in the region and frustration in the United States and other countries over the spiraling civilian death toll constrain Israel’s goal of eradicating Hamas, U.S. officials said this week.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Wednesday that he was worried that Hamas would use civilian deaths in Gaza to recruit new members.
His comment offered a rare glimpse of divisions between Israel and the Biden administration, which has declared its support for Israel’s military campaign even as the civilian death toll has increased. The number of civilians killed in the Gaza Strip shows there is something wrong with the Israeli military operations, according to the Secretary General of the United Nations.
Several officials in the Biden administration say the longer the Israeli military campaign continues, the more likely it will be to cause a wider war. Several officials said that the Israeli response to the Hamas attacks has made people sympathetic for the Palestinians even as Israel continues to bury its dead.
