How Gaza can still become Israel’s Achilles’ heel

Israel’s war in Gaza has ceased, though not in the manner Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had often bragged during the prolonged military campaign. Netanyahu had identified eliminating Hamas as his first goal and the return of hostages as the second, as he declared while addressing the soldiers of 8101 reserves—the Alexandroni Brigade on November 21, 2023. In reality, the last Jewish hostage was not recovered by hunting down the last Hamas terrorist and clearing the corpse-ridden path with heavy military boots. Israel had to engage in mediation in Qatar for a hostage-prisoner exchange deal, with possible consequences for the security of the Jewish state. Despite the elimination of its chief Yayha Sinwar, and large-scale damage inflicted upon the terror group’s cadres and assets, Hamas is far from being decimated.

Hamas continues to hand over the Israeli hostages to the International Red Cross in well-choreographed events in Gaza. It shows that the core of the terror group remains intact. The visuals of some Israeli captives were appalling, to say the least. The emaciated condition of the freed hostages drew comparisons with Holocaust survivors. That it would happen within a few miles outside Israel’s borders is unfortunate enough. More recently, Hamas’ macabre style of returning the dead bodies of four Jewish hostages has drawn international condemnation. The coffins of the deceased were put on display at Khan Younis, in front of a mural depicting Netanyahu as a vampire, with blood dripping from his fangs.

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Gaza recently featured in an “out of the box” solution by US President Donald Trump. Trump, a former real estate baron, sees the Gaza Strip (360 sq km) as a “big real estate”, which he fancies purchasing from its Arab population to ensure peace in Palestine. Gaza, devastated by the Israeli military campaign, is in need of extensive rebuilding. Where its teeming population—a bristling two million—will go is best left to imagination.

The Gaza Strip has the infamous distinction of being the world’s most densely populated zone. This overpopulation is the result of “catastrophe”—or Nakba as the Arabs term it—of 1948. Gaza became the receptacle of a huge influx of refugee population. The Gaza Strip is a remnant of a much larger Gaza district in the Ottoman Empire and British Mandate Palestine until 1947. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly, under its resolution 181 (II), adopted a plan for the partition of Palestine between the Jews and the Arabs. Whereas the Jews accepted the plan, the Arabs rejected it out of hand. The latter under the aegis of the Cairo-based Arab League (estd 1945) began a strident campaign to fight the scheme.

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In hindsight, had the Arabs accepted the partition plan, they would have been in untrammelled possession of a much larger Palestine today. The UN map of the Plan of Partition (1947) indicates that the Arabs would have secured a much bigger Gaza. Israel, on the other hand, would have been squeezed between large swathes of Arab lands.

However, the Arabs burnt their fingers by a) conducting a civil war against the Jews from November 1947 to March 1948 and again from April to mid-May 1948 when Palestine was still under the British mandate and b) launching a Pan-Arab invasion immediately after Israel declared its independence on May 15, 1948. On December 17, 1947, the prime ministers of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon adopted a declaration in Cairo on December 17, 1947, in which they pledged themselves to oppose the United Nations’ plan by force. The same announcement—says a memorandum by the Jewish Agency in Palestine (February 1948)—contained a threat by the seven prime ministers to throw the full force of the armies into “the battle … until victory is achieved” (Memorandum on Acts of Arab Aggression, P.5).

Abd ar-Rahman Azam Pasha, the then Secretary General of the Arab League, published numerous declarations assuring the Arab people that the occupation of Palestine and of Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade for the Arab armies. The Palestinian Arabs were given “brotherly advices” urging them to leave their land, homes, and property and go to stay temporarily in neighbouring, brotherly states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down.

They were assured that the war against the Jewish state would indeed be a short but stern affair, after which they would be in possession of the whole of Palestine. This was stated on good information by Habib Issa, the then editor of Al-Hoda, a Lebanese Arabic daily published from New York (1898-1972), in his editorial dated June 8, 1951—and quoted by an official Israeli publication (The Arabs in Israel, 1952, P.10-11).

The Pan-Arab invasion, as historian Benny Morris describes in his eminently readable work 1948:A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (2008) was driven more by rhetoric and less by any realistic appraisal of Israel’s military capability. The coalition campaign marked by disparate war goals, lack of coordination between various Arab armies, and mutual suspicion between leading actors like Egypt and Jordan, was doomed from the start. The Palestinian Arabs were denied a role in this campaign, though it was paradoxically being undertaken for their sake.

In the First Arab-Israeli War (1948), the real decision-makers were the Arab League and different governments of Arab nations, whereas the territorial and humanitarian cost of its failure was borne by the Arabs of Palestine alone. Gaza became the basket case, which lost its substantial territory in the war.

Operation Yoav—a military campaign undertaken by Israel between October 15 and 22, 1948, to repulse the Egyptian army in control of Negev and coastal areas—ended in a near-complete victory for the Zionist country. Subsequently, the Egyptian control crumbled in Isdud and Majdal. Only the Gaza Strip, with 41 km of Mediterranean shoreline but no natural harbour, remained in their hands. Even this coastal strip was in danger of being lost as the Israel Defence Force pursued Operation Horev aimed at Sinai and Gaza between December 22, 1948, and January 7, 1949. The Israelis had to withdraw under Anglo-American pressure, which tells a lot about the contemporaneous global dynamics.

The then Israeli Foreign Minister M Shertok told the Provisional Council of State at Tel Aviv on January 11, 1949, that Israel had cleared the entire central Negev from Egyptian forces and confined the latter to a narrow coastal strip from Rafah to a point north of Gaza, and one of its brigades was surrounded by the Israeli forces at Faluja (Major Knesset Debates 1948-1981, Vol-1, P.308).

The current boundaries of Gaza were formalised through a general armistice agreement signed between Israel and Egyptian authorities at Rhodes, Island of Rhodes, Greece, on February 24, 1949. However, apart from suffering territorial crunch, Gaza experienced a huge ingress of displaced Arab population fleeing the war. The population of the area, numbering 80,000 before the beginning of hostilities, had doubled due to the influx of refugees before the summer of 1948. Operation Yoav alone prompted the flight of 75,000 terrified civilians in Gaza, informs Jean-Pierre Filiu (Gaza: A History, P.69).

The Palestinians refer to this event as Nakba or catastrophe, for which the mourning bell is sounded every May 15. Ironically, however, it is not the declaration of Israeli independence, but the concerted Arab attack on the nascent Jewish state that prepared the ground for this nakba.

In the four Arab-Israeli Wars—1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973—Israel emerged as the decisive winner. Its performance in the Six-Day War in 1967 is the stuff of legend in 20th-century warfare. Somewhat overlooked is the Israeli Air Force (IAF)’s stunning single-day performance in Beqaa Valley on June 9, 1982, during the invasion of Lebanon, wherein David Ivry’s boys shot down 82 Syrian planes in addition to destroying 29 surface-to-air missile batteries of Soviet origin, leaving Hafez Al-Assad, the Syrian President and a former airman, in a state of utter shock. Israel did not lose a single fighter jet in this campaign named “Operation Mole Criket-19”.

No Arab country today dares to threaten Israel with war. Even Iran, for the first time in history, after raining down some missiles and abuses on the Jewish state twice last year, chose to de-escalate after Israel responded. Ironically, Gaza has become a source of constant harassment for Israel. The Islamist groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been using Gaza as a launch pad to fire rockets targeted at civilian areas of Israel since 2001. The range of these rockets has increased exponentially over time. While towards the beginning the Qasam rockets had a range of 16 km, Hamas has attained a range of 150 km with R160 rockets.

Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 did not improve the situation. Gaza soon became a nursery of terrorism. In June 2007, Hamas established itself in Gaza following an armed conflict with Fatah in the wake of Palestinian legislative elections (January 25, 2006). The advent of Hamas accentuated the acts of terrorism emanating from Gaza.

Israel had to undertake three military campaigns in Gaza—Operation Cast Lead (December 2008-January 2009), Operation Pillar of Defence (November 2012), and Operation Protective Edge (July-August 2014)—to contain the acts of terrorism. These campaigns failed to terminate the acts of terror. Israel, however, invested substantially in shelters, reinforced buildings, and early warning systems that translated into reducing civilian casualties in vulnerable parts of the country. On May 9, 2023—five months before the October 7 carnage by Hamas—Israel undertook Operation Shield and Arrow in response to Hamas’ rocket attacks. On May 2, 2023, Islamic Jihad fired at least 21 rockets towards Israel.

Despite a military campaign lasting for a year and a quarter in Gaza—resulting in the death of around 62,000 Arabs in Gaza—the body language of Hamas proves its backbone remains intact. The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is a fragile one, and the war can resume at any moment. Gaza becomes Israel’s Achilles heel?

The writer is the author of the book ‘The Microphone Men: How Orators Created a Modern India’ (2019) and an independent researcher based in New Delhi. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.