Israeli soldiers moving through the Gaza Strip - Photo credit: Telegram: Documenting Israel
Hamas’s assault across southern Israel on October 7 and the subsequent Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip has sent shockwaves across the Middle East. After a devastating surprise attack by Hamas operatives left nearly 1,200 Israelis dead and seized hundreds of hostages, the Israeli military has responded in full force bludgeoning Gaza with airstrikes and sending four divisions into the tiny strip with the aim of ‘eliminating’ Hamas. Ordinary Palestinian men, women, and children are paying a terrible price as grueling urban warfare has taken hold in an area of less than 350 square kilometers.
It is the deadliest war in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1948 with alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed by both sides and a humanitarian catastrophe deepening as Palestinian civilians face the looming threat of starvation as food, clean drinking water, and fuel run scarce. Not since the initial expulsion of refugees in 1947 and 1948 and the founding of the state of Israel have so many Palestinians been displaced. Hospitals, refugee camps, mosques, and schools have been reduced to rubble with parts of Gaza resembling Grozny during the Chechen Wars as Israel systematically levels streets and buildings in its pursuit of Hamas’s political leadership and its military wing, the Qassam Brigades, which has planted itself in a honeycomb of tunnels and buildings to fight the Israeli military. According to recent satellite imagery analysis, at least half of buildings in northern Gaza have been damaged or destroyed in the fighting while aid workers, medical personnel, and journalists have been killed in extraordinary numbers by the Israeli army in murderous bombing raids and artillery barrages.
At this time of writing, more than 14,000 Palestinians have been killed with thousands more missing and wounded while 380 Israeli soldiers have died in the fighting (69 in operations in Gaza so far). In the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority governs, Israeli settlers and soldiers have run amok killing and wounding hundreds of Palestinians in a wave of terror and expelling many communities from their homes under the cover of the war to seize Palestinian territory. Tens of thousands of Israelis have also been displaced by fighting in southern and northern Israel, with Israeli society reeling from the atrocities committed against civilians by Hamas operatives and death squads in the early hours of October 7. As war rages in Gaza, a smaller conflict between Hezbollah and Israel in southern Lebanon and northern Israel is threatening to ignite an all-out regional war between Iran and the United States. More than seventy Hezbollah and Hamas fighters have been killed as well as dozens of Israeli soldiers with many Israeli and Lebanese civilians caught in the crossfire as the Israeli government struggles to reassert its military deterrences after the catastrophic intelligence failures of October 7.
As Israel prepares for an assault on southern Gaza and the brutal conflict enters its forty-fifth day, I corresponded by email with Ahron Bregman to discuss the ongoing fighting. The author of Cursed Victory: A History of Israel and the Occupied Territories and Israel’s Wars: A History Since 1947, among other books, and a senior teaching fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, Bregman also served in the Israeli army for six years and fought in the 1982 Lebanon War, where he reached the rank of Major. We discussed Israel’s war in Gaza, the hostage crisis, and the future of the decimated strip as the Middle East stands on the brink of regional conflict.
What do you make of Israel’s operation in northern Gaza so far from a military standpoint? Has it been successful so far?
Traditionally, the Israeli way of fighting is the Blitzkrieg, a “lightning war” aimed at avoiding a long war by defeating the enemy in a series of short campaigns. The best example is the Six-Day War in 1967 which the IDF seized the Sinai, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and West Bank in just under six days. In the Gaza Strip, at the moment, the Israeli method of fighting is very different.
In fact, it is the opposite of the Blitzkrieg method, by which I mean that the forces are moving slowly, like a herd of elephants in a jungle. Bulldozers are sent ahead of them to clear obstacles - mines and so on, and when the troops and tanks do move forward to tackle Hamas, they do so behind a screen of artillery fire. The latter takes time.
Hamas, on the other hand, is employing the classic guerrilla war principles: they don't get into a set piece battle with the Israelis; instead, they slip away, moving under the ground in tunnels from which they emerge, every now and then, to strike and retreat back underground.
At the time of writing, the Israelis are still operating in the northern and eastern sections of the Gaza Strip, mainly near Jabalia and Zeitun. Overall, the Israelis are doing alright in places where they are fighting, but they haven't even started fighting in the southern Gaza Strip where it would be way more complicated, as there are so many civilians there, as well as, Israeli hostages, and many Hamas combatants.
One of the Israeli hostages, Yehudit Weiss, was found dead near Al-Shifa Hospital, several were released by Hamas and one was rescued by Israeli soldiers. Do you think the invasion is hampering attempts to retrieve the hostages?
There is an in-built tension between the Israeli war objective of toppling Hamas and trying to release the 239 Israeli hostages held by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. You would expect the Israelis to halt the war, negotiate the release of their hostages, and only then resume the fighting and proceed to topple Hamas. But, if they do so, they will then lose momentum. So, for now, what the Israelis are trying to do is work to fulfil the two objectives simultaneously.
The danger, however, is that in the course of the war, they might bomb the Israeli hostages by mistake, or if Hamas is pushed too much to the wall, they might hurt the hostages. Qatar, which is close to Hamas, is trying to clinch a deal in which Israel pauses its operation, releases Palestinian prisoners held in its jails and, in return, Hamas releases some of the Israeli hostages. I'm expecting Hamas to play for time. They are unlikely to release all the hostages in one go. Their best card is the hostages.
Do you see a military occupation similar to that in southern Lebanon taking hold in northern Gaza once fighting concludes?
An Israeli soldier in a ruined street in the Gaza Strip - Photo credit: Telegram: Documenting Israel
For now, it is not the stated aim of the Israelis to stay physically inside the Gaza Strip when the war is over. I believe that what they will do is what they do on the West Bank, namely, letting someone else run the place, but leaving themselves the option of going in and out of the Strip to tackle emerging dangers.
Much has been made of the Palestinian Authority taking over from Hamas after the war in Gaza concludes. Do you think that can realistically happen?
Yes. This is the logical long-term solution, as I see it. It is not easy as the PA is not popular at all in the Gaza Strip. But if you reform the PA and put at its head a strong leader like, say, Marwan Barghouti, who is locked up in an Israeli jail, or even someone like Mohammed Dahlan, who is a real, authentic, Gazan, and then, gradually, introduce this body into the Gaza Strip then this might work. Gaza will also need money and a lot of it. It will take at least five years, I believe, to rebuild the Gaza Strip, parts of which resemble Dresden.
What do you make of the small war taking place in southern Lebanon and northern Israel? Do you think there will be a conflict between Hezbollah and Israel after Gaza?
For now, the Israelis, under strong American pressure, are trying to focus only on the Gaza Strip. But when Gaza is done, Israel will have no other option but to deal with Lebanon. We should remember that Security Council Resolution 1701 which ended the 2006 Lebanon War requires Hezbollah to deploy north of the Litani River, which means away from the Israeli-Lebanese border.
At the time of writing, Hezbollah's Radwan force is deployed along the border with Israel. From an Israeli perspective, Radwan could, just like Hamas on 7 October, cross the border, enter Israeli villages, and kill its people.
I believe that Israel will first try to use diplomacy to impose 1701 on Hezbollah, but I doubt Hezbollah agrees to pull back without a fight. If it refuses to pull back then we might witness direct clashes, perhaps even an all-out war between Israel and Lebanon.
Why doesn’t Egypt or the Arab states (at the moment) want to take responsibility or ‘political bribes’ for the Gaza Strip?
Nobody wants to take responsibility for the Gaza Strip. The place is cursed! It is the black hole of the Middle East as it is poor and crowded. The Gaza Strip resembles a pot of boiling water; to keep the lid on such a thing is not an easy matter.
Any initial thoughts on the assault on Al-Shifa Hospital? What do you think is happening there, and why is there a massive information war taking place?
The Israelis have always assumed that under Al-Shifa Hospital is where Hamas keeps its headquarters, and that Al-Shifa is the beating heart of the Hamas command control. I am not sure whether this is an Israeli assumption (after all it makes sense to keep the headquarters there, as hospitals are relatively safe and there's almost always fuel, food and electricity there), or it is based on hard facts. At the time of writing, the Israelis are already inside the hospital and, so far, what they've found there - a few rusty Kalashnikovs - is not convincing. We have to wait and see. They might find more convincing evidence under the place; who knows? Al-Shifa is a symbol, particularly for the Israelis, namely: we will go after Hamas even if we have to enter into hospitals.
Can the Israelis topple Hamas?
Israeli tanks moving through ruins in the Gaza Strip - Photo credit: Telegram: Documenting Israel
No, they cannot do that and they are doomed to fail. Toppling Hamas is a bridge too far. Hamas is present not only in the Gaza Strip but also in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and more. Above all, Hamas is an idea and if the Israelis want to "uproot Hamas" or "topple it", as they put it, then they must come up with a better idea and offer it to the Palestinians.
A better idea, as I see it, is for instance offering Palestinians a state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, perhaps linked by a long bridge or a tunnel. It might be that, at a certain stage, the Israelis declare victory over Hamas and say “We've defeated them”, but these will be empty words.