Soldiers sit on an artillery unit near the Israeli border with the Gaza Strip on Oct. 22, in Netivot, Israel.Amir Levy/Getty Images
As Israel continues to pound the Gaza Strip from above, while keeping its troops massed around the Palestinian enclave, the questions linger heavily in the air: When will Israel launch its anticipated ground invasion? And what’s the plan for afterward?
More than two weeks after Hamas launched its bloody attack on southern Israel, much of the Gaza Strip has been reduced to rubble by 16 days of retributory Israeli air strikes and artillery fire. On Thursday, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, visiting ground troops stationed near the border, told them “You see Gaza now from afar. Soon, you’ll see it from inside.”
And yet, more than 72 hours after he said that, the troops – a reported 360,000 of them – remain in place. And Hamas still holds some 200 hostages in conditions that can only be imagined.
On the streets of Tel Aviv, there are nightly protests by the hostages’ families and their allies, some demanding a ceasefire and the negotiated release of the captives, others that the Israeli military do whatever it takes to rescue their loved ones immediately.
So, what is Israel waiting for? Part of the answer appears to be that the military needed time to prepare itself for what is likely to be a dangerous and lengthy battle in Gaza. It takes time to get an army supplied and trained for a war that it didn’t expect.
As recently as August, Major-General Yitzhak Brik, a former military ombudsman, told a radio interviewer that the army was “not ready for war” as the country was angrily divided over domestic politics. “Our enemies are waiting for the right moment, they will not wait much longer,” he said.
Hamas, meanwhile, launched its assault knowing that it would draw ferocious retaliation from the Israeli military. If, as Hamas documents retrieved in the shattered towns and kibbutzim of southern Israel suggest, the Oct. 7 attack was a year in the making, the militant group has spent at least as long preparing for Israel’s anticipated response.
Palestinians with dual citizenship wait outside the Rafah border crossing with Egypt on Oct. 21, as they wait for permission to cross.MOHAMMED ABED/AFP/Getty Images
Israel’s military commanders have briefed their troops to expect Hamas fighters to emerge from anywhere, and for plentiful boobytraps. The military goal behind Israel’s call for all Palestinian civilians living in northern Gaza – some 1.1 million people – to move south, is to allow Israeli troops to treat anyone they see as a combatant.
But the Israeli military has been signalling for several days now that its preparations are over, that it is ready to launch the mission – which has already been assigned the name “Swords of Iron” – as soon as it gets the green light from the political leadership.
And that’s where things get truly complicated. Israel is under pressure to allow foreign citizens – including hundreds of Americans and Canadians – to leave the strip before it begins its invasion. But while the Rafah crossing that connects Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula opened over the weekend to allow aid convoys in, none of the foreign passport-holding Gazans who have been waiting near Rafah for more than a week have been allowed out so far.
Egypt, which blamed incessant Israeli attacks for the holdup in allowing aid in, appears to be using the leverage that it has in the region to seek guarantees from Israel about how this will play out in the longer term; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be worried about jeopardizing American support by attacking while U.S. citizens are in the line of fire.
A Palestinian with dual citizenship waits outside the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, in the hope of getting permission to leave Gaza, on Oct. 21.IBRAHEEM ABU MUSTAFA/Reuters
On Friday, Mr. Gallant said Israel envisioned a three-phase war. The first phase – “to defeat and destroy Hamas” – is already under way, and will include a ground component.
The second phase, he said, would see Israel “eliminate pockets of resistance,” suggesting that Israeli troops were expecting to face some kind of insurgency while they remained in Gaza for an undefined period of time while hunting down Hamas’s leaders and anyone else involved in the Oct. 7 attacks.
The third phase, Mr. Gallant said, “will be the creation of a new security regime in the Gaza Strip, the removal of Israel’s responsibility for day-to-day life in the Gaza Strip, and the creation of a new security reality for the citizens of Israel.”
But if Hamas is gone, and Israel doesn’t plan to reoccupy Gaza, what will take its place? One option might be to try and restore the Palestinian Authority of president Mahmoud Abbas to power in the strip. (Hamas ousted the PA from Gaza after violent clashes in 2007.) But Palestinian political analysts say returning to a ruined Gaza at the behest of the Israelis would be impossible for Mr. Abbas.
“The PA cannot rule Gaza after this war. The people will not accept it,” said Radi Jarai, a retired political-science professor who lives in Ramallah, the capital of the West Bank, which is under Israeli military occupation, with the PA having limited self-government powers.
Mr. Jarai said he didn’t see any political solution, unless the Israeli government was willing to do something bold – such as release Marwan Barghouti. He has been in prison since 2002 after being convicted of masterminding suicide bombings and other attacks against Israel, but is someone Mr. Jarai said is the only Palestinian political leader popular with both Hamas and Mr. Abbas’s Fatah movement.
While the Rafah crossing that connects Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula opened over the weekend to allow aid convoys in, none of the foreign passport-holding Gazans who have been waiting near Rafah for more than a week have been allowed out so far.MOHAMMED ABED/AFP/Getty Images
Releasing a genuinely popular Palestinian leader, he said, might give fresh impetus to long-stalled peace talks based on the principle of two separate states for Israelis and Palestinians.
Dahlia Scheindlin, a Canadian-Israeli political strategist based in Tel Aviv, said that so far, she saw nothing like a postwar plan from Mr. Netanyahu’s government.
“I still don’t know what we’re doing on the day after the war,” she said. “This idea that we’re just going to cut off responsibility for Gaza. It sounds very nice for a headline, but what does it actually mean?”
Simply leaving Gaza to its own devices, she said, would create a humanitarian disaster in the strip, and continuing security fears for Israel. And while Mr. Gallant’s words may suggest that he envisioned some kind of international force might take responsibility for Gaza, no one is publicly discussing how that might work.
Ms. Scheindlin said it was possible Israel hoped international peacekeepers would deploy to postwar Gaza, perhaps even to support the sort of United Nations-backed governing institutions that were established in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina after the Balkan wars of the 1990s. But no country, so far, is offering to be the force on the ground in Gaza.
“Which country would have any incentive for doing something like that? It’s going to be thankless, and it could lead to lots of terrible scenes and could look like Mogadishu,” she said, referring to a 1993 incident that saw a Somali militia attack UN peacekeepers stationed there during that country’s civil war.
“I still don’t understand the plan, I’m sorry,” Ms. Scheindlin said.
It seems clear that more war lies ahead. The entire region – first and foremost the people of Gaza – awaits word of what Mr. Netanyahu’s government has in mind for the day after the fighting is done.
Mark MacKinnon