Operation Iron Swords - Day 6 - 12 October 2023

Palestinian armed group Hamas launched thousands of missiles at Israel and deployed its militants to infiltrate Jewish settlements near the country’s border with Gaza on 07 October 2023. The 1,200 Israelis killed on the first day would be the equivalent of 36,000 Americans killed in an attack, as a proportion to Israel’s population of 9.3 million people (compared to 332 million in the USA). Israeli President Isaac Herzog stated: “Not since the Holocaust have so many Jews been killed in one day".

Sources report that 360,000 reservists had been activated, the largest such compulsory mobilisation since 400,000 were mobilized for the 1973 Yom Kippur War. They will supplement an active military force of more than 150,000, giving Israel half a million men and women in uniform. Key elements that allow for such quick massing of forces include the population’s awareness of the need to actively participate in defence, intensive training during compulsory military service that lasts three years for males and two for females, refresher periods in active reserve of several weeks every year, good planning, tested and proven in numerous past international and internal conflicts, and fairly small territory with short distances between even the furthest points.

Conventional military calculations indicate that whatever the final aim of the forces set against Gaza, their size will be well under 100,000, possibly just half of that number. Each military force needs a certain manoeuvring space and putting more soldiers than optimally needed into any territory does not increase the chances of success, on the contrary, often it can lead to chaos on the battlefield.

The latest death toll provided by the Gaza health ministry stood at 1,417. More than 6,200 have also been wounded. In Israel, the number of people killed in Hamas’s attack has reached 1,300, with more than 3,200 others wounded.

The aerial bombardment of Gaza intensified. Israel said it had dropped 6,000 bombs weighing 4,000 tonnes in six days of bombardment, hitting 3,600 targets. Just two days after Israel ordered a complete blockade of Gaza, closing off access to electricity, food, and water, Gaza has now been left without electricity, as its only power plant has shut down after running out of fuel. The head of the Gaza power authority says that people are using generators for electricity, but even the fuel needed for them is running out. Hospitals have also been affected, with a large number of patients currently relying on electricity-powered oxygen generators to breathe. With thousands of Palestinians displaced and in need of medical care in the area, hospitals are flooded with the wounded, many of them children.

More than 2,500 houses were destroyed in Gaza, about 23,000 were damaged so much that living in them is impossible, the UN reported. More than 338,000 people had been forced to flee their homes in Gaza since the outbreak began.

While the Israeli attacks on Gaza continue, Syria’s state television reported that the airports in Damascus and Aleppo are out of service following what it said were Israeli strikes. It said there had been damage but no casualties at the Aleppo airport but did not give any information about the situation in Damascus. Israeli strikes repeatedly caused the grounding of flights at the airports in the capital Damascus and the northern city Aleppo. The "simultaneous" strikes "damaged landing strips in the two airports, putting them out of service", regime media said, citing an unidentified military source.

Yair Lapid, who is the leader of the main opposition party in this country, and he was actually quite critical about this emergency unity government. He had called for [far-right politicians] Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir to actually be expelled from the government. That had not happened, so at the moment, Lapid was not joining the emergency unity government. Lapid had previously said he was open to forming an emergency government in a show of unity but only if far-right parties in Netanyahu’s coalition government were not included in the security cabinet.

Jon Alterman, the head of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, addressed the strategic value of Hamas’s attack, saying it could change the status quo in Gaza. “Hamas aimed to penetrate Israel in a way that would give it centrality and relevance for decades to come, but by killing hundreds of Israelis and taking 150 hostages in the first days, Hamas has put itself in an impossible position. Israel is united in its determination to change the status quo ante and completely push Hamas from power,” Alterman wrote.

“It is hard to imagine that Hamas will be able to retain power in Gaza when the dust settles. There may be hope for the Palestinian national cause, but there’s very little hope for Hamas.” He added that this week’s unprecedented attacks could change the status quo in Gaza.

“Since Hamas took power in 2007, the Israeli military periodically would go into Gaza, fight with Hamas, and destroy some of its infrastructure. Hamas would rebuild for a few years, and then the cycle would repeat itself,” Alterman continued. “Israelis called this ‘mowing the grass,’ an unpleasant but necessary repetitive task.”

“This cycle is no longer going to be acceptable to the Israeli public or political leadership. Now, the question is what kind of government will emerge in Gaza after the war.” Alterman said it might entail greater control for the Palestinian National Authority based in Ramallah, some sort of new local governance, governance under the tutelage of the Israeli military, or perhaps a coalition of Arab states.

Alexander Palmer, a research associate with the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, said while Hamas has taken hostages before, this has never happened anywhere approaching this number, which remains unknown but is likely around 150.

“Israel is extremely sensitive to hostage-taking, as demonstrated by its decision to trade more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for IDF soldier Gilad Shalit in 2014 and the fact that negotiations over two Israeli civilians and the bodies of two IDF soldiers held by Hamas have remained unresolved for almost a decade. The hostages taken also include an unknown number of foreign nationals, further complicating the situation.”

According to Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Transnational Threats Project at CSIS and a professor at Georgetown University, the legitimacy of Hamas as a political entity hinged on a combination of service provision in Gaza, where it effectively governs, and its use of violent resistance against Israel. Byman said this approach sets it apart from the Palestinian Authority (PA), which administers the West Bank. Hamas positions itself as a less corrupt alternative to the PA, “a claim that isn’t hard to support.”

It also, he said, offers public services like waste disposal and law enforcement in Gaza. However, Israeli economic pressures have constrained its ability to enhance the well-being of Palestinians, resulting in persistently high levels of unemployment and poverty in the region. This has amplified the significance of armed resistance for Hamas’ political agenda, especially as PA President Mahmoud Abbas ages without a clear successor.

Saleh Al-Arouri, deputy head of the political bureau of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), confirmed that Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, which was initiated by the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, came in anticipation of an attack that Israel intended to launch on the Gaza Strip immediately after the end of the Jewish holidays. He said that the defensive plan for the operation was stronger than The offensive plan that stunned Israel and surprised the world.

Al-Arouri revealed - in contact with Al Jazeera - that the Al-Aqsa Flood Plan was based on 122 Al-Qassam members storming the Gaza Strip, and attacking the “Gaza Division” responsible for the siege of the Gaza Strip and the assassinations and murders carried out against Palestinians in the Strip. Although the plan expected that “the battles with the Gaza Division would continue for long hours, the Qassam fighters were surprised when the entire division collapsed within a few hours, and they were able to easily reach its command center, the airport, the kibbutzim, and the nearby settlements,” after the surviving Israeli soldiers fled, while the Israeli soldiers were killed. Many of them were captured.

The Hamas official stressed that the Qassam fighters were instructed from the beginning to adhere to the instructions of the Islamic religion in wars, which are not to kill civilians, women, children and the elderly, not to harm people’s civil interests, and to be content only with fighting soldiers and militants. But what happened, according to Al-Arouri, was that when some of the people of the Gaza Strip heard of the collapse of the border with the Gaza envelope, they rushed to enter the envelope, and some chaos occurred there, while some Al-Qassam fighters were forced to clash with some security guards and gunmen in the settlements, which led to civilian deaths.

He stressed that the Hamas movement "cannot harm civilians or prisoners and acts in accordance with international laws of war," and that the West, which accuses the Palestinian resistance of committing crimes against humanity, ignores that the war launched by Israel against them was based on targeting civilians, stressing that the Palestinians are fighting to ensure that the world has the right to live on the lands of their country like the rest of the peoples of the world.

Sultan Barakat, a professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, outlines four scenarios that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet are contemplating for their next move against Gaza.

1. “Number one would be to continue this bombing and siege in an effort to quench the bloodthirst, but then he risks the international public opinion.
2. “The second possibility is he’ll push into Gaza with a ground war. The Israelis are the most aware of the fact [that] all their military capability is not good for urban warfare, and again they’ll end up with more casualties. Worst still for him, he’ll then have the responsibility of managing Gaza.
3. “The third – which I think is really playing on his mind – is to just try and extend this situation as far as possible to achieve his real target. His real target is not Gaza. It is the West Bank. His extremist government, their eye is on the annexation of the West Bank.
4. “And finally, I think the worst would be to continue the bombing and hope the Palestinians will simply pack and leave. Under the current call for humanitarian aid, it is quite likely some entities may put up camps across the border in Egypt, and he achieves his objective of pushing the population out.”

In the summer of 2014, during Operation Protective Edge which targeted Hamas and Islamic Jihad, an Israeli army memo was conveniently leaked to the press, detailing the risks of a ground offensive in Gaza. According to military intelligence, such an operation would take five years, result in a catastrophic human toll and endanger peace agreements with Egypt and other Arab countries in the region. A further complication is the network of tunnels, dubbed the "Gaza Metro" by Israeli security experts. Some tunnels are as deep as 30 or 40 metres, allowing militants a level of mobility underground while the skies rain down tonnes of explosives. Israel's army and intelligence are certain to know about a portion of the network, and bombarded it heavily in 2021, but other parts remain secret and will make any Israel Defense Forces (IDF) ground operation in Gaza more difficult. In these difficult conditions, there remains the question of how to extricate hostages being held by Hamas. Acting straight away means taking into account the fact that a large number of hostages will probably be sacrificed.

Military and strategic expert Major General Fayez Al-Duwairi said that there are difficulties hindering Israel in carrying out the ground attack on the Gaza Strip, including the lack of preparedness of its forces, and its awareness of the high cost of such an attack, describing the brutal bombing taking place in the Strip as outside all military logic.

Al-Duwairi said in statements to Al-Jazeera that the brutal and continuous Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip aims to eliminate the capabilities of the resistance factions, or at the very least cause significant damage to them, so that they are unable to attack or confront any Israeli aggression, in addition to their attempt to destroy the social incubator of the resistance factions in Gaza. By attacking civilians and destroying infrastructure and services in the Strip.

The goals of the brutal Israeli attack do not stop there. Rather, Israel wants to evacuate the Gaza Strip towards the Egyptian Sinai desert and later evacuate the West Bank of Palestinians, according to Al-Duwairi.

Regarding the possibility of Israel launching a ground attack on the Gaza Strip, Al-Duwairi saw that all data indicate that this incursion is coming, perhaps within hours or perhaps days. He spoke of 3 scenarios indicated by Israeli research centers. The first relates to the reoccupation of Gaza, and Al-Duwairi believes that Israel can do that. Theoretically, but in practice it cannot do so due to social and geographical complexities.

The second scenario relates to dividing Gaza into 5 cantons, and this is very difficult, according to the military expert. The likely scenario - in the event of a ground attack - is for Israel to control the agricultural areas and their depth to create a new negotiating card regarding the prisoners.

From the point of view of the military expert, “Lebanese Hezbollah can intervene if a ground war occurs, but only after it receives a signal from its authority,” referring to Tehran. However, if the fighting between the Palestinian resistance and the occupation forces continues as it is currently taking place, Al-Duwairi ruled out Hezbollah’s intervention, suggesting that the Palestinian factions present on Lebanese soil and near the occupied Golan will intervene.

Al-Duwairi described the war waged by Israel in the Gaza Strip as outside all military logic, pointing out that the Geneva Conventions’ main axis is the protection of civilians and respect for human humanity, and in the same context, he criticized the Western countries’ race to provide political, material and moral support to Israel, which gives it the green light to commit massacres.

The British magazine The Economist discussed the possibility of Israel invading the Gaza Strip by land, warning at the same time of a “harsh” war awaiting it there. She pointed out that eliminating the Islamic Resistance Movement " Hamas " in Gaza may not be possible without direct occupation of the land. The magazine explained in a report that a third ground incursion attempt in response to the Hamas attack against Israeli civilians is imminent.

It said that Israel had penetrated into limited areas in the Gaza Strip twice before, the first was in the framework of the operation called “ Cast Lead ” that lasted 15 days in January 2009. The second was in Operation “ Protective Edge ” in 2014, where its army was killed there. 19 days. The newspaper suggested that the ground invasion attempt this time would be "larger, longer, and more violent" than the previous two attempts. The resistance called its confrontation with Israel’s attack in 2009 “The Battle of the Criterion,” while Hamas called its operations in 2014 “The Devouring Storm,” while the Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad Movement, chose the name “ Al - Bunyan Al-Marsoos” for its operation.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian stated 12 October 2023 that officials in some countries are contacting us and asking about the possibility of opening a new front in the region. We told them that our clear answer regarding future possibilities is that everything depends on the actions of the Zionist entity in Gaza, explaining that no one in the region is asking us for permission to open new fronts.

Amir Abdollahian, who was in Baghdad, met with Iraqi Prime Minister Muhammad Shiaa al-Sudani. During this meeting, the two sides discussed bilateral relations and developments in the current Palestinian arena. During this meeting, Amir Abdullahian stated that he was in Baghdad to conduct consultations in view of the developments in Palestine, adding that it is no secret that we are facing war crimes committed by the Zionist entity in Gaza against the Palestinian people.

The Foreign Minister indicated that the possibilities are open and new events may occur in the region given that the United States and some parties are sending weapons to Israel and have allowed this criminal entity to brutally kill Palestinian citizens and civilians in Gaza, in light of the situation in which the Zionist entity is completely besieging Gaza and cutting it off from it. Water, electricity, and fuel, and the delivery of food and medicine is prohibited.

Amir Abdullahian also stated that officials in some countries are contacting us and asking about the possibility of opening a new front in the region. We told them that our clear answer regarding future possibilities is that everything depends on the actions of the Zionist entity in Gaza. He added that what the Palestinian resistance factions did in Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood” was a completely spontaneous and independent Palestinian act, and the Westerners themselves confirm that it was Netanyahu’s extremist behavior that created these conditions.

The Iraqi Prime Minister stressed that this visit shows Iran’s confirmation of its firm position towards the Palestinian issue. In turn, Al-Sudani stressed that the Palestine issue is an ideological issue and not a political issue, and support for Palestine reflects the conscience of every Muslim and every free person in the world. He continued by expressing that Iraq was not surprised by the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation, because the rights of the Palestinian people cannot be ignored, and it is a mistake to believe that by normalizing relations with the Zionist entity, the rights of the Palestinian people will be forgotten.