LOOKING AHEAD TO THE POST GAZA WAR ERA

In Sydney, on a visit from Israel, Ehud Yaari, author and commentator on Middle East politics, addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 27 March 2024. Ehud Yaari, who spent years reporting from Egypt, gave a prescient assessment of the continuing war in Gaza and the hopes for peace and resettlement in the post war era. Crucial to this assessment, is Ehud Yaari’s description of how Israel had become complacent in its view that Hamas no longer posed a danger for Israel – a view overturned by the events in southern Israel on 7 October 2013. That the invasion and attacks by Hamas did not become a more gruesome conquest was only prevented by a miscommunication between Hamas and Iran. Ehud Yaari’s appearance at the Sydney Institute was sponsored by the Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC)

LOOKING AHEAD TO THE POST GAZA WAR ERA

EHUD YAARI

I’m very happy to be here again at The Sydney Institute. It’s always a pleasure.

I promise I will be frank and, sometimes, blunt and I’m hoping that you will excuse me for that. I will start with where we are coming from. People lose sight of the fact that in the Middle East now, we have almost ten wars raging simultaneously in different levels of scope and intensity. Only one grabs much attention. That’s the war in Gaza. But there are other wars, and they are all linked together to the fight against, or for, the Iranian attempt to establish their predominance all over the region. I’m not going into the other wars that are going on. I’ll just give one or two examples. The Turks are about to invade Northern Iraq, to establish a 40 kilometres deep security zone, and they will also act again in Syria, militarily.

In Syria itself, we have an enormous number of clashes in the northeast of the country between different players, and we have a confrontation between Syria and Jordan. The Jordanian air force – a small air force with capable pilots – for the first time ever, beating targets inside Syria. The Syrian army, the fourth division, under the command of the brother of President Assad Maher, with Iranian sponsored militias, are smuggling huge amounts of drugs, mainly amphetamines, captagon, and weapons – rockets, anti-tank missiles etc. – across the border into Jordan trying to build a military infrastructure there. At this point, it is sleeping cells getting weapons across into the West Bank. I could go on and on without even mentioning the terrible civil war in Sudan. Gaza is but one front – a very important one – of what’s going on.

Now, what really happens in Gaza? The Israeli intelligence community had known since 2021, with indications before, about a plan called The Walls of Jericho – a plan for Hamas to invade Israel. They didn’t really take it seriously. They felt Hamas was deterred. Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, now deep in the bunker, was interested in improving the lives of the people in Gaza. Israel felt that by allowing Qatar to send to Gaza suitcases with millions of dollars in cash, they could buy quiet times or an extended ceasefire. On the night before the 7 October attacks, the IDF had increasing indications that something was imminent. For many months before, Hamas had been holding a major drill called the Strong Pillar, in which they would train their fighters, their terrorists, on how to get to Israeli military positions across the border with Gaza, how to capture a kibbutz or village and so on.

Our people were accustomed to seeing this drill. When they learned that the elite commando unit of Hamas, or Nukhba – Nukhba is “elite” in Arabic, the chosen ones – had been called to the mosques at 3 am, they thought it was just another stage of the drill they already knew a lot about. But it was not. So, there was a consultation at night between the generals heading our military intelligence, people who should not have been appointed to these sensitive positions in the first place. They had a consultation and they decided they would wait until the morning.

What they didn’t do was call on the division commander, the territorial division in charge of the 65 kilometres of the Gaza border, to deploy his troops and be on full alert at dawn. This is customary in the Israeli army. Worse than that, they did not call the commander of the air force, asking him to do the obvious – to get 10-12 attack helicopters close by and on the ready. I’m saying that 10-12 attack helicopters would have killed this invasion along the fence. But they were not there because the commander was not alerted. It took 40 minutes for two attack helicopters to get to the front from a base in northern Israel. That’s an intelligence failure of unbelievable proportions. All these people will need to resign at the first opportunity.

So, we have on the one hand a major failure of Israeli intelligence, based on a decade and a half of conviction that Hamas was deterred. The same way as Hezbollah, in Lebanon, had been deterred since the war of 2006, the second Lebanon war. Over the past two years, maybe more, there had been very intensive deliberations between the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps which is the organisation in charge of all the militias in the region. Qasem Soleimani, who was killed by the Americans outside the Baghdad Airport, was the father of this organisation.

In those deliberations, about which the Israelis knew, the leader of Hamas in Gaza was the only one who mattered – Yahya Sinwar, who had spent 22 years in an Israeli prison was released in an exchange deal. I met him quite a few times when he was in prison. He’s fluent in Hebrew and knows everything about Zionist history and the Jewish religion. Being in Gaza, Sinwar was not present at these deliberations. Instead, he had his loyal representatives there, and he was led to believe, or allowed himself to be convinced, that he had a promise from the Iranians and Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary General of Hezbollah, that if Hamas went on the attack, there would be a second and third front in Lebanon and Syria.

I don’t know whether the Iranians misled him intentionally. I suspect so. But I don’t have proof. So, for security reasons, Sinwar didn’t share the zero hour with the Iranians, nor the full scope of the attack he had in mind. There were only three people in the Hamas leadership – Yahya Sinwar, his brother Mohammed, and the chief of staff of Hamas Marwan Issa, who was probably killed last week. There were only three who knew that the people who were called to the mosques at 3 am would be sent home to pick up their weapons and report for duty.

The Hamas leadership went for the biggest possible operation. They could have decided to attack one or two villages, plus one or two military positions, grab hostages and then negotiate for an exchange with Palestinian prisoners and be victorious. But no. Because they had what they thought was an Iranian-Hezbollah guarantee, Sinwar decided to go big. How big? Three thousand on the attack and 60 points of entry crossing the Israeli barrier along the border of Gaza. They went after any and every kibbutz, settlement, village and town around the Gaza perimeter. In some cases it was a 5-10 minutes’ walk to their destinations, but they came with white Toyotas – the new camel, I call it – with many motorbikes, gliders and they went for everything.

Al-Aqsa is the holy mosque in Jerusalem. Hamas called the attacks the Al-Aqsa Flood. The West Bank is just 40 kilometres away from the border with Gaza, no more. The plan was to get to the city of Hebron and light up the West Bank. Can you imagine what the reaction would have been in the West Bank if they saw Hamas driving into Hebron and maybe beyond? The orders for the attackers and the kind of equipment they had with them were to stay, to barricade themselves inside Israel and keep fighting from there. Their instructions were to go all the way to the port of Ashdod and certain military and mainly   air force bases in the south. An extremely ambitious plan. But this did not happen.

I know Sinwar. He knew that this would force Israel to do what Israel never planned to do, and had no plan to, by the way, recapture the Gaza Strip. When the war broke out on 7 October, the IDF did not have a plan to take over the Gaza Strip. They had to improvise, call some generals from reserve and so on. But the question is, why didn’t the Hamas attackers reach the West Bank? That would have been a game changer. They did not get to the West Bank because they fell upon the Nova music festival. There were so many good-looking girls there and so many hostages to be taken, and people to be butchered. So, they stopped.

What happened to the Iranian promise? Hezbollah debated for about 24 hours what they would do. They decided to go for a confrontation restricted to around five kilometres across the border. That included my home village of Metula, which is at the northernmost point in Israel. It is now totally evacuated like many other towns and villages in the area. You can’t even visit the orchard because it’s now a restricted military zone. If you go there, you will be fired at by Hezbollah.

So, Hezbollah decided on a limited response. Syria, with its long front on the Golan Heights had another response and it involved Mr Putin of Russia. Whatever you  think or feel about him or Syria, he immediately told the Iranians it was a no go to respond militarily. Russia has invested so much in Syria since the outbreak of the civil war in 2011. It has two military bases there: one naval and one air force in Tartus and Khmeimim. So, the Iranians arranged for the Yemeni Houthis to close shipping to an extent at the Bab-el-Mandeb straits at the southern end of the Red Sea.

This is the background. The war in Gaza is mostly over. For example, at the height of fighting, Israel had five divisions in Gaza, 70,000 soldiers and that many tanks and armoured carriers. And, of course, the air force was always above. Now, Israel has maybe three and a half brigades; 7,000, and they are outside the cities. What they are doing is, when necessary, such as when Hamas squads pop up, they will go in, deal with them and get out. That is what is happening again at Shifa Hospital in Gaza, which is the jewel for the reporting from the ABC.

In the past 24 hours, Israel has captured another few hundred Hamas and Islamic jihad terrorists in al-Shifa, and killed some 170 in the bunker and tunnel system under the hospital. The Israeli army goes in there with the doctors for whom they give prior warning. It’s war; it’s ugly. But the IDF comes with medicine, with supplies, in order to get down to the tunnel system. This is the second time the IDF has operated in Shifa. The first time the IDF played a trick on Hamas. They destroyed much of the bunker system, which in places is 40-60 metres deep, but they left two big bunkers. In time, Hamas felt that they can go back to Shifa Hospital – it’s the biggest hospital compound in Gaza – and the IDF came for them. Again, you wouldn’t hear about it on the ABC.

I care about Australia; my wife is Australian. It’s not that we are not trying to tell Australians that they should look at other information than what media like the ABC are broadcasting. The answer is no. For example, we have the constant advertising of the numbers of civilian casualties, reported by Hamas, disguised as the Health Ministry of Gaza. What health ministry of Gaza? I know the guy; it is Hamas. The number they are giving – now 32,000 civilian casualties; more than two thirds women and children – is totally fabricated. According to the latest status of the casualties’ reports, the most is 18,000, out of which 12000 at least are Hamas and Islamic jihad fighters. That’s a ratio that was not achieved by the Americans when they were fighting ISIS in Raqqa, Mosul or Fallujah.

I’m not the spokesman for the government of Israel or the IDF, but I don’t know any army that had to fight this kind of urban warfare underground amidst very dense civilian populations, where your adversary is using almost every single house – family homes – as a weapons depot, a front from which to snipe, shoot and booby trap. The IDF made millions of telephone calls to civilians: “Get out of there, we are coming”, and sent out leaflets. All this to the point where the Israeli army provided, publicly, maps of their deployment and where they were going next. I don’t know any other war in which this has happened.

So, now, we are in a situation in which the war is basically over. The main campaign is over. We have converted Hamas from a well-equipped and well tunnelled terrorist army into an armed underground. There are still quite a few armed Hamas squads popping up here and there. To make it clear, out of 24 Hamas battalions – the battalions are territorial, and each neighbourhood has its battalion – 19 were dismantled. It doesn’t mean that everybody got killed or injured. There are four battalions remaining in the city of Rafah at the southern end of the Gaza Strip at the border with Egypt. And there you also have 1.2 million Palestinian civilians, many of them displaced from the north.

The Israeli army is not going to storm Rafah with so many civilians there. This is why the Security Council resolution, which was not vetoed by the United States, reflects the situation on the ground. Nobody is going to mount an attack on Rafah during the holy month of Ramadan. What the Israelis will need to do, and I think they will, is to take over the stretch of the border between Gaza and Egypt. Under this border, for years, the tunnels there allowed Hamas to get equipment and weapons, to get components for assembling weapons in workshops and so on. All manufactured and stored underground. And if you don’t seal the border with Egypt, what have you achieved?

Israel has very good cooperation with Egypt, but we cannot change Egypt. I’m speaking to you as somebody who lived for years in Egypt, and who loves Egypt. And there are ways to persuade Egyptian officers and police guards to cooperate with smuggling. It’s a fact of life. It is important to seal Rafah along the border with Egypt and from the north. If Israelis were to take my advice, they would offer terms for surrender and give the chance for leaders like Sinwar to exit Gaza like many of Hamas’ senior leaders. I don’t believe this remnant brigade is going to fight. I don’t believe we are going to see a Palestinian Masada in Rafah. But I may be wrong.

Where are we going from here? The number one question is to get the humanitarian aid flowing in. Air drops, even if King Abdullah of Jordan is in the cockpit, provide a nice photo. And the Americans are now building a floating pier off the coast of Gaza City. It’s not an adequate response because Gaza needs 600 truckloads a day of supplies. Only ten per cent can come through Egypt, because their crossing point is not equipped to deal with large traffic. But it can come from different crossings from Israel, and it does. I can report to you that the prices in the food markets of Gaza have dropped over the last few days by over 50 per cent, because whatever the convoys bring became part of a black market, mainly run by Hamas.

Hamas normally, at least in the Rafah region now, are working behind UNWRA, which was gutted by Hamas years ago. So, where is the humanitarian aid going? To the best of my knowledge – and I’m in touch with them, including Sinwar – there is no famine in Gaza, and I don’t think we are going there. There needs to be an understanding of what’s going to be the governance in Gaza, bearing in mind that whoever takes responsibility in Gaza – and it’s not going to be Israel – will have to cope with Hamas as an armed underground. They are not going away.

So, the Israelis, I assume, will keep the current level of military presence inside Gaza but outside the cities so as to demonstrate to everybody that they are there if needed. And, when needed, the IDF will go in and go out. Do their job and go out, like in Shifa. It’s one battalion of the 401 Brigade, which I was a proud member of in the 1973 war. Whatever government you have in Gaza, at least in the beginning, will have the guarantee that the IDF is there, and the drones and air force are in the sky if needed.

Who can take over Gaza? Nobody will come to police Gaza; not the Arabs, not the Europeans or Americans – nobody. It has to be some arrangement through which Palestinians can take over. The people with the big money – Saudi Arabia and the UAE – are not willing to deal with the Palestinian Authority. They detest President Abbas; they refuse to deal with him. They urge him, just like the Americans do, to reform, or as it’s called, “revitalise” the Palestinian Authority. That means cleanse it from corruption and fix the patronage system, or they are not coming. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have an interest in coming, because they want the port in Gaza as a port in Gaza fits the general American sponsored plan for the alternative trade corridor to the BRI: the India Middle East Corridor, eventually going through Saudi Arabia with railways, highways, pipelines, and cables to Israel.

The Saudis and the UAE, naturally, would like to have Gaza as part of this. It could be a big boost to the rebuilding of Gaza. You are not going to build back the refugee camps. You are going to build a different Gaza. This is the formula that I think will be the most reasonable. An agency, run by Palestinians, not the PA. An agency linked to the PA but not subordinate to the PA and supervised by the World Bank. It could be audited by whichever company you choose: PWC, Deloitte, whoever. It would be in charge of the reconstruction and rebuilding of the Gaza and I know Israel would cooperate.

In Israel, it’s very messy. We have a prime minister who has quarrelled with the chiefs of the military establishment and defence forces. We have a war cabinet with a lot of infighting between Bibi and his new partners who joined for the war. We have a build-up of resentment against Bibi and his coalition government that started before the war with his judicial reform, which he still clings to and which has now been reinforced. You have three reservoirs of political energy which are going to come into play – whenever people in Israel feel that the war is basically over, and hopefully hostages, or at least some, are back.

One reservoir is the hundreds of thousands who protested against the judicial reforms. Some of them are demonstrating now. But people don’t feel comfortable demonstrating when you have, every second day, a soldier killed in Gaza. The second reservoir is the civil society organisations, volunteers, hundreds of thousands who want to replace a dysfunctional government and are taking care of the population, especially those evacuated in the north and south, when the government ministries were absolutely not present. Organisations like Brothers in Arms; they did a wonderful job. The third is almost 300,0000 reservists who have been mostly released now. I have quite a few of them in my family. They are angry.

In 1973, after the October, it took a few dozens of thousands of demonstrators to get the great Golda Meir to resign. I thought it was unjustified then, I certainly think so now – especially after I’ve seen Helen Mirren act the part of Meir. But we now have a prime minister who was encouraged to resign by peaceful street demonstrations. Now, it will be bigger. To conclude, I think Bibi understands this. He sees the polls. But his departure, I’m afraid, is going to be ugly.