Day: October 19, 2023

DUBAI/WASHINGTON, Oct 18 (Reuters) – Israel is vowing to wipe out Hamas in a relentless onslaught on the Gaza Strip but has no obvious endgame in sight, with no clear plan for how to govern the ravaged Palestinian enclave even if it triumphs on the battlefield.

Codenamed “Operation Swords of Iron”, the military campaign will be unmatched in its ferocity and unlike anything Israel has carried out in Gaza in the past, according to eight regional and Western officials with knowledge of the conflict who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter.

Israel has called up a record 360,000 reservists and has been bombarding the tiny enclave non-stop following Hamas’s assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, which killed about 1,400 people, mostly civilians.

The immediate Israeli strategy, said three regional officials familiar with discussions between the U.S. and Middle Eastern leaders, is to destroy Gaza’s infrastructure, even at the cost of high civilian casualties, push the enclave’s people towards the Egyptian border and go after Hamas by blowing up the labyrinth of underground tunnels the group has built to conduct its operations.

Israeli officials have said that they don’t have a clear idea for what a post-war future might look like, though.

Some of U.S. President Joe Biden’s aides are concerned that while Israel may craft an effective plan to inflict lasting damage to Hamas, it has yet to formulate an exit strategy, a source in Washington familiar with the matter said.

Trips to Israel by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin this past week had stressed the need to focus on the post-war plan for Gaza, the source added.

Arab officials are also alarmed that Israel hasn’t set out a clear plan for the future of the enclave, ruled by Hamas since 2006 and home to 2.3 million people.

“Israel doesn’t have an endgame for Gaza. Their strategy is to drop thousands of bombs, destroy everything and go in, but then what? They have no exit strategy for the day after,” said one regional security source.

An Israeli invasion has yet to start, but Gaza authorities say 3,500 Palestinians have already been killed by the aerial bombardment, around a third of them children – a larger death toll than in any previous conflict between Hamas and Israel.

Biden, on a visit to Israel on Wednesday, told Israelis that justice needed to be served to Hamas, though he cautioned that after the 9/11 attacks on New York, the U.S. had made mistakes.

The “vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas”, he said. “Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.”

Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Biden’s visit would have given him a chance to press Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu to think through issues such as the proportional use of force and the longer-term plans for Gaza before any invasion.

‘CITY OF TUNNELS’

Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, have said they will wipe out Hamas in retribution for the Oct. 7 killings, the deadliest militant attack in Israel’s 75-year-old history.

What will follow is less defined.

“We are of course thinking and dealing with this, and this involves assessments and includes the National Security Council, the military and others about the end situation,” Israeli National Security Council director Tzachi Hanegbi told reporters on Tuesday. “We don’t know what this will be with certainty.”

“But what we do know is what there will not be,” he said, referring to Israel’s stated aim to eradicate Hamas.

This might be easier said than done.

“It’s an underground city of tunnels that make the Vietcong tunnels look like child’s play,” said the first regional source, referring to the Communist guerrilla force that defied U.S. troops in Vietnam. “They’re not going to end Hamas with tanks and firepower.”

Two regional military experts told Reuters that Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, has mobilised for an invasion, setting up anti-tank mines and booby-trapped explosive devices to ambush troops.

Israel’s coming offensive is set to be much bigger than past Gaza operations that Israeli officials had previously referred to as “mowing the grass”, degrading Hamas’s military capabilities but not eliminating it.

Israel has fought three previous conflicts with Hamas, in 2008-9, 2012 and 2014, and launched limited land invasions during two of those campaigns, but unlike today, Israel’s leaders never vowed to destroy Hamas once and for all.

In those three confrontations, just under 4,000 Palestinians and fewer than 100 Israelis died.

There is less optimism in Washington, though, that Israel will be able to completely destroy Hamas and U.S. officials see little chance that Israel will want to hold on to any Gaza territory or re-occupy it, the U.S. source said.

A more likely scenario, the person said, would be for Israeli forces to kill or capture as many Hamas members as they can, blow up tunnels and rocket workshops, then after Israeli casualties mount, look for a way to declare victory and exit.

CLOUDS OF WAR

The fear across the region is that the war will blow up beyond the confines of Gaza, with Lebanon’s Hezbollah and its backer Iran opening major new fronts in support of Hamas.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian warned of a possible “preemptive” action against Israel if it carried out its invasion of Gaza. He said last weekend that Iran would not watch from the sidelines if the U.S. failed to restrain Israel.

Arab leaders have told Blinken, who has been criss-crossing the region this past week, that while they condemn Hamas’s attack on Israel, they oppose collective punishment against ordinary Palestinians, which they fear will trigger regional unrest.

Popular anger will ratchet up across the region when the body count rises, they said.

Washington has sent an aircraft carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean and is concerned that Hezbollah might join the battle from Israel’s northern border. There has been no sign, however, that the U.S. military would then move from a deterrent posture to direct involvement.

The regional sources said Washington was proposing to re-energise the Palestinian Authority (PA), which lost control of Gaza to Hamas in 2007, although there is huge doubt whether the PA or any other authority would be able to govern the coastal enclave should Hamas be driven out.

Miller, a former U.S. Middle East negotiator, expressed deep skepticism about the potential for establishing a post-Hamas government to rule Gaza.

“I could paint you a picture more appropriate to a galaxy far, far away and not on planet Earth on how you could combine the U.N., the Palestinian Authority, the Saudis, the Egyptians, led by the U.S. marshalling the Europeans, to basically convert Gaza from an open-air prison to something much better,” he said.

In the meantime, calls for the creation of humanitarian corridors within Gaza and escape routes for Palestinian civilians have drawn a strong reaction from Arab neighbors.

They fear an Israeli invasion will spark a new permanent mass wave of displacement, a replay of the 1948 Israeli war of independence and 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Millions of Palestinians who were forced to flee then have remained stranded as refugees in the countries that hosted them.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said he rejected the forced displacement of Palestinians from their land into the Sinai peninsula bordering Gaza, adding that any such move would turn the area into a base for attacks against Israel. He said Egyptians in their millions would protest against any such move.

East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in the 1967 war and then annexed, and Israeli settlement expansion across occupied territory are at the core of the conflict with Palestinians. Netanyahu has openly embraced the religious and radical far-right, promising to annex more land to be settled by Jews.

Hundreds of Palestinians have died in the West Bank since the start of the year in repeated clashes with Israeli soldiers and settlers, and there is widespread concern that the violence might engulf the territory as nearby Gaza burns.

“Whatever worst-case scenario you have, it will be worse,” a second regional source said about the potential for the conflict to spread beyond Gaza.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Around 400 Russian nationals are seeking to evacuate the Gaza Strip as the Israeli military continues to bombard the coastal enclave in retaliation to Hamas’ surprise attack, Russia’s diplomatic mission in Palestine said Thursday.

Alia Zaripova, the spokeswoman for Russia’s representative mission in Ramallah, said Moscow was working to evacuate its citizens from the besieged territory, according to the state-run TASS news agency.

An additional 110 citizens of Palestine, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova and Kazakhstan have also requested assistance from the Russian office with evacuations, Zaripova said.

The United Nations humanitarian office OCHA says nearly 340,000 Palestinians have been displaced in the unfolding humanitarian crisis.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow was working with the Egyptian government to organize the evacuation of its citizens from the Gaza Strip.

At the same time, Israel’s Ambassador to Russia Alexander Ben Zvi said Tel Aviv was in talks with Cairo on opening the border post with Gaza to allow civilian evacuations.

It has been six days since Hamas fighters stormed into southern Israel, killing at least 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, and taking around 150 hostages in an unprecedented attack.

In retaliation, Israel has pounded Gaza with airstrikes, leveling entire city blocks and killing at least 1,100 people.

Palestinian and Israeli officials blame each other for the blast, which was the single deadliest incident for civilians in Gaza since the war began, coming 10 days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 cross-border attack on Israel.

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It’s not unusual that in times of major crises, analogies are often forced upon us to more easily come to terms with and understand the political reality we live in. 

With the world struck by one shock after another in rapid succession in recent years, it’s also hardly surprising to see some draw parallels with the run-up to World War II.

Yet, the period of time most resembling our own could be compared to the early stages of the Cold War instead.

And this time, Russia, as the only actor on the global geopolitical stage completely hollowed out from any true belief, is an even greater agent of chaos than it ever was in the past.

A menace in a world of partial disorder

The structure of the global order is unwinding, not because democracies in Europe and North America are weaker or less economically influential than they were, but because other regional players have grown in the meantime. 

In parallel, the institutional framework of the global order is outdated yet remains rigid to our contemporary needs due to clashing visions on the global stage, while no clear victor has yet emerged from the fray. 

Some of the major actors outside of the Western democratic world are more rational, desiring economic growth rather than waging wars, and not all of them ascribe to an ideological system that is antagonistic towards the West as a whole.

Russia, unfortunately for the rest of us, is the exact opposite.

It’s putting the concept of state power in front of the well-being of its citizens; framing victory through the lenses of war, instead of economic development; all the while propping its authoritarian regime with an eclectic ideological mashup bound together solely by the belief that Russia is the opposite of the imagined and imaginary West. 

Although other Russias did exist, like the strain of liberal thought in Russian culture going back all the way to the 18th century, we are dealing with a particular version of Russia which is highly minacious in a world of partial disorder.

Flashpoints outlining the Kremlin’s shadow

For the past two years, there have been three flashpoints all involving Russia: its invasion of Ukraine, the latest Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and the bloody incursion of the Hamas’ military wing into Israel. 

Russia plays various roles in all three. In Ukraine, it is the invader, in Nagorno-Karabakh it is the (intentionally) failed peacekeeper. 

And as for Israel, it’s a weak partner who colluded with the Iranian regime as well as with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, while acting as a meddling influence on the balance of power in the Middle East. 

Yet, it was Vladimir Putin whom Netanyahu officially spoke to over the phone after the attack, at the same time refusing an offer from Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for a state visit to Israel in its time of need. 

It can seem confounding, considering that the USSR armed the forces poised to destroy Israel on both occasions its very existence was at stake — the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War — as a Cold War flex to rattle the US.

But this time, Russia is not the USSR, especially not in terms of ideology, as much as it’s willing to toy with the idea whenever it thinks it’s useful.

Questions over Russia’s involvement in bloodshed

At the same time, Iran has been leading the charge in clamouring for war against Israel now — an aggressive stance most Arab countries have meanwhile given up on because of its futility and great cost. 

Meanwhile, Russia is undisputably buying weapons for its war against Ukraine from Iran while forging a tenuous alliance with Tehran in Syria, where Moscow intervened to keep Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarian regime in power by any means necessary. 

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Naturally, questions arose over Russia’s possible role in Hamas’ attack on 7 October.

Recently, it was uncovered that the Palestinian militants partially financed their operations by purchasing cryptocurrency in Russia in the lead-up to last Saturday’s incursion and the resulting atrocities. 

Millions of dollars were funnelled through Garantex, a Moscow-based crypto exchange, to various extremist groups connected to Hamas. 

Beyond that, there is no evidence that the Kremlin actually supplied Hamas or any other extremist group in Palestine with weapons, or that it took part in the planning of any of their operations.

Bullets for Kalashnikovs and conflicting narratives

Moscow, however, does enjoy close political ties to Hamas, seen again just last Saturday when its leadership publically waxed lyrical about Putin, saying it “appreciates Russian President Vladimir Putin’s position … and the fact that he does not accept the blockade of the Gaza Strip.”

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“We also affirm that we welcome Russia’s tireless efforts to stop the systematic and barbaric Zionist aggression against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip,” they said in a statement. 

In another interview with Russia’s state-owned RT in Arabic, a high-ranking Hamas official stated that “Hamas has a license from Russia to locally produce bullets for Kalashnikovs, that Russia sympathises with Hamas, and that it is pleased with the war because it is easing American pressure on it with regard to the war in Ukraine”.

On their end, Russian officials, state propagandists and organised bots have been peddling various narratives, some contradicting each other. 

The Kremlin officials have blamed the US for Hamas’ attack, while not condemning the militants’ incursion, especially not in such explicit terms. In fact, Putin himself labelled it “a failure of US policy in the Middle East”, while the ever-increasingly toxic former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said it was a part of Washington’s “manic obsession to incite conflicts”.

The state propagandists supported the same narrative and also added a new one: Russia’s war against Ukraine is much more benign than Israel’s reaction in Gaza. 

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Russian bots, on many social platforms, didn’t hold back from supporting Hamas and accusing Ukraine of supporting the “fascists” in the conflict — meaning, Israel.

Carving an empire in blood devoid of meaning

Yet on a much larger scale, Moscow’s hodgepodge of narratives shows it for what it really is — an agent of chaos, trying to fuel any conflict in the borderlands of the democratic world, all with the goal of apportioning a regional empire for itself. 

Russia’s leadership is not interested in peace and it doesn’t work towards it. 

Its social media bots and online influencers tell us the tale of the lowest common denominator in Russian society — a revanchist, disgruntled anti-Semite who has given up on his own life and wants to see the entire world crumble down to his level. 

The most striking part of it all is that Russia’s leadership doesn’t even have a stable, non-contradictory set of principles or values it adheres to.

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Carving out an empire in blood is immanently meaningless when one lacks a higher cause to aspire to, let alone a coherent narrative. The Kremlin, however, has demonstrated time and again it’s utterly devoid of that, left completely without a vision, and in the end, barren of any semblance of a soul or empathy for others. 

And that is what makes it more dangerous and unpredictable than ever — to its neighbours and to the rest of the world.

Aleksandar Đokić is a Serbian political scientist and analyst with bylines in Novaya Gazeta. He was formerly a lecturer at RUDN University in Moscow.

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Reporting By Nidal Mughrabi in Gaza, Steve Holland aboard Air Force One, and Jerusalem Bureau; Writing by Peter Graff, Mark Heinrich and Cynthia Osterman; Editing by Gareth Jones, Philippa Fletcher and Howard Goller