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Israel’s New Strategy for Keeping Hamas on the Defensive

March 21 2018

For the past several years, the IDF’s approach to Gaza has primarily been reactive: it has responded to occasional rocket fire and other attacks with limited, precision strikes aimed at deterring Hamas from going any farther. But Israel’s response last weekend to the targeting of its border patrol by means of an explosive device speaks to a new strategy. Ron Ben-Yishai explains:

Now, the IDF [uses] every event and incident on the Gaza border to destroy Hamas’s most important military abilities, primarily the tunnels. These are no longer acts of retaliation, punishment, and deterrence, but real warfare against Hamas, which will make it easier for the IDF to manage the next round of fighting in the Strip and protect the Israeli communities in the Gaza vicinity.

This is a new type of “war between wars” [as the IDF terms this low-intensity conflict]. Whereas the war between wars in the north is aimed at preventing the delivery of high-quality, precision-guided weapons to Hizballah and the Iranian entrenchment in Syria, the new southern war between wars is aimed at thwarting the ability of Hamas and Islamic Jihad both to infiltrate Israel through underground tunnels and to fight IDF forces within the Strip by transferring fighters, weapons, and rockets through tunnels excavated in Gaza. . . .

This has all been made possible thanks to the quick development and use of new technologies [for the] discovery, detection, and location of tunnels both in the area close to the Israel-Gaza border and deep within the Strip, [along with the] modern technologies for close and remote neutralization of tunnels, both from the air and from the ground. . . . Furthermore, these technological abilities, whose nature has been kept strictly confidential, make it possible to destroy tunnels and target Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s most important military assets without killing Islamic Jihad or Hamas members, based on the calculation that these organizations won’t embark on a major escalation if none of their members have been killed.

Read more at Ynet

More about: Gaza Strip, Hamas, IDF, Islamic Jihad, Israel & Zionism

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic