We haven’t been told the whole story of Israel’s recent operations under Gaza
The current Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be blamed forever for its failure to protect the citizenry last October 7, despite receiving multiple specific intelligence warnings of Hamas’s planning for the cross-border attack. It will also be blamed for quickly undertaking the ongoing massive retaliation on all in Gaza, whether Hamas supporters or not, without some attempt to negotiate an immediate return of the 251 Israeli and foreign hostages that were seized by Hamas and other militant groups that day.
Netanyahu’s early promise of a full inquiry into the intelligence failure has not happened, and most likely never will. A ceasefire agreement with Hamas, which has been avidly sought by President Joe Biden, has also failed to materialize.
Israel’s fanatical right-wing government will further be blamed for Netanyahu’s misreading of Hamas. With its extensive tunnel complex and its ability to withstand Israeli air and ground attacks, Hamas has essentially left the vast majority of the two million citizens of Gaza to fend for themselves. History will not be kind to Hamas or to the religious leadership of Israel, or to the consistent support of the Israeli response in Gaza by Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic nominee for the White House.
So what happened sometime last week in a tunnel somewhere under Gaza? The initial Israel military account made no mention of the presence or the fate of Hamas guards. The New York Times reported Sunday, quoting Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani, an Israel Defense Force spokesman, that the dead hostages were not found as a result of “a specific mission to release hostages.”
That account was only partially accurate. The presence of any hostages in the tunnel was not known before an Israeli sapper team—a military unit composed of experts in demolition whose mission is to destroy Hamas tunnels—happened upon a reinforced door, blew it open, and found the bodies of six Israeli hostages (one of whom was the Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose parents spoke at the Democratic National Convention last month) who had been executed by their Hamas guards. The IDF team had no idea that the hostages were being held there. The lack of information has been at the core of acute internal dissent between the Israeli military leadership and Netanyahu.
Netanyahu believes that the continuing destruction of the Hamas tunnel system will eventually lead to the final underground hiding place of Yahya Sinwar, the senior Hamas leader. It has long been clear to the senior officers responsible for hostage recovery that the successful rescue of hostages kept underground is impossible because, as an Israeli insider explained to me, there is no way to hide the noisy preparations for blowing up the reinforced doors that are invariably present at underground hostage sites. The six hostages were slain, and their guards escaped two to three days before the IDF team found the reinforced door.
Most of the hostages Israel has rescued have not been in the tunnels. Seven of the eight hostages rescued in recent commando attacks inside Gaza were living above ground in apartments and homes of Hamas family members and sympathizers. The one hostage recovered underground, a 52-year-old Israeli Bedouin named Farhan al-Qadi, was discovered by an Israeli team searching an underground tunnel where he was found, alone. The Israeli insider told me what the Israeli military would not say—that al-Qadi initially reported that his Hamas guards had fled in a hurry, without laying a finger on him, after he and the guards overheard the obviously nearby Israelis chatting in Hebrew with each other via CCTV. Al-Qadi’s rescue was initially explained by Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, the military’s chief spokesman, as the result of “precise intelligence” that had been collected by Israeli security services.
“The IDF knows,” the insider told me, “that the element of surprise does not exist inside the Hamas tunnels.”
That Netanyahu sent the IDF sapper teams to destroy the Hamas tunnel system in the hopes of forcing a confrontation with Sinwar, who would likely surround himself with hostages in any final confrontation, could only mean, the insider said, that “Bibi was willing to sacrifice all the hostages because there is no way to rescue them in a tunnel. Not one hostage will survive the operation if and when Sinwar is cornered underground.” The Israeli insider, who was severely injured in combat for his country, asked, “Why is the leader of a country willing to sacrifice so many citizens of the country he leads? This is the question.” He added that Bibi “served in the Sayeret Matkal,” the covert Israeli commando unit that specialties in hostage operations and authorized assassinations. “So he knows.”
I relayed what I had been told to a second Israeli with long experience in the planning and analysis of military operations. He agreed with the insider’s account and offered an answer the insider’s question of why Netanyahu gave the orders. The answer is simple, he said. “If he agrees to any of Hamas’s demands, except for a limited ceasefire without any [military] withdrawals, his government will fail” because of the extreme stance of his coalition’s right-wing leadership. There is another reason, not tied to politics, the Israeli added. Netanyahu has “convinced himself, with his wife’s and son’s help, that he is the savior of Israel and the Jewish people. Ergo, he must not not fail.”
The underground hunt for Sinwar is monitored, I was told, by a specially assembled branch of the IDF that involves hundreds of analysts. The insider told me that “Bibi has a belief that they are getting close to Sinwar” because his movements inside the Hamas tunnel system would be limited daily as more tunnels are destroyed. “At some point,” the insider said, “it will be physically impossible for Sinwar to hide.” When the end comes, “In Bibi’s view, it will be like getting Hitler. It’s a trophy that will restore his reputation, and he will be beloved by the citizens of Israel.”
There are others, the insider added—naming Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defense minister and Netanyahu’s most bitter enemy within the government—who are known to believe the prime minister has been willing to sacrifice hostages for the purpose of his selfish needs. “Bibi has been told that getting close to Sinwar has come at the cost of killing Israeli hostages. When you try to rescue hostages kept above ground, there is always a chance that a few of them will be killed. When and if there is an underground operation to kill Sinwar, there is a certainty that all of them will be killed before you even reach them.”
At this point in his political life, the insider told me, “Bibi wants the war, any war, to go on because if the war ends, two things happen: an election in Israel, and an official investigative committee set up to examine the failure on October 7. Both these things will be bad for Bibi. They will result in him being removed from office, making it easier for the judges in his [still pending] corruption trials to send him to jail.
“To the extent there is a weak ray of light which might, just might, restore a smidgen of respectability to Bibi, it is capturing Sinwar, dead or alive. This is his only way to balance the very bad things both the voters and the investigation—and history—will say about him.”
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