Saturday, November 17, 2012 10:50:24 PM
Arms With a Long Reach Help Hamas
A child watches from a field near Ashdod, Israel, as a missile is fired to intercept an incoming Palestinian rocket. About 30 rockets were fired from Gaza into southern Israel on Saturday morning.
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times
Photographs
Attacks Increase in Gaza
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/11/17/world/middleeast/20121117-Gaza-POD.html
Video
Tensions Grow Between Israel and Hamas
[embedded]
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: November 17, 2012
TEL AVIV — When Israel [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/israel/index.html ] assassinated the top Hamas [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/hamas/index.html ] military commander in Gaza [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/gaza_strip/index.html ] on Wednesday, setting off the current round of fierce fighting, it was aiming not just at a Palestinian [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/palestinians/index.html ] leader but at a supply line of rockets from Iran that have for the first time given Hamas the ability to strike as far as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
The commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, had shifted Hamas’s low-grade militia into a disciplined force with sophisticated weapons like Fajr-5 rockets, which are named after the Persian word for dawn and have significantly increased the danger to Israel’s major cities. They have a range of about 45 miles and are fired by trained crews from underground launching pads.
Hamas had perhaps 100 of them until the Israeli attacks last week, which appear to have destroyed most of the stockpile. The rockets are assembled locally after being shipped from Iran to Sudan, trucked across the desert through Egypt, broken down into parts and moved through Sinai tunnels into Gaza, according to senior Israeli security officials.
The smuggling route involves salaried employees from Hamas along the way, Iranian technical experts traveling on forged passports and government approval in Sudan, Israeli officials said.
Mr. Jabari’s strategy has been so effective and alarming for Israel that it is preparing for a possible next stage in the four-day-old battle: a ground war in which its troops would seek to destroy remaining rocket launching bases and crews and munitions factories.
Under Mr. Jabari, Hamas also developed its own weapons industry in Gaza, building long-range rockets as well as drones [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/u/unmanned_aerial_vehicles/index.html ] that they hoped to fly over Israel just as Israeli drones roam the skies of Gaza, sowing fear in its population.
The current operation to eliminate the Hamas rocket launchers could serve to cripple the ability of Iran’s allies in Gaza from retaliating should Israel ever carry out its threat to attack Iranian nuclear facilities.
“Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad are building weapons with experts from Iran,” one top security official said Saturday, speaking on condition of anonymity. “What we took care of last night was their own production facility for U.A.V.’s,” he added, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. “This was all the work of Jabari, who was a very sophisticated and strategic thinker.”
A number of recent Israeli military attacks were aimed at cutting the supply chain into Gaza. In late October, a munitions factory in Sudan was hit from the air. Israel did not acknowledge carrying out the attack, but the winks and nods of officials here make clear that it did. Israel has carried out several other such attacks on Sudan [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/world/africa/27sudan.html ], including on convoys, in the past few years.
In addition, Mossad agents killed a Hamas official in a Dubai hotel [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/world/middleeast/30dubai.html ] in early 2010 because he was thought to be crucial to the Hamas supply chain of weapons and rockets into Gaza.
One official here said that until Israel ended its military occupation of Gaza in 2005, there were only primitive weapons factories there. The Hamas rockets had a flight capacity of about a mile, they could not be aimed and they flew in a wild cylindrical pattern. Hamas then built better rockets that could fly up to 12 miles.
That changed little until 2007, when Hamas fighters pushed the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority out of Gaza into the West Bank and took over governing the coastal strip.
“At that point, Jabari turned his neighborhood defense operation into a real army,” said a retired Israeli general whose portfolio included Gaza and who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He organized what was a militia into companies, battalions and brigades. He sent commanders to Syria and to Iran to be trained by the Revolutionary Guards. And then he built up this whole new branch to develop military technology focusing on long-range missiles.”
The collapse of the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya last year created other supply options for Hamas as Libyan military storehouses were raided and the equipment sold off. Those weapons were driven across Egypt and into Gaza.
It remains to be seen whether Mr. Jabari’s death will truly cripple Hamas, or whether it will find someone equally adept to take his place, the officials said.
Either way, Hamas now has a range of rockets and weapons in its arsenal, said Jeffrey White, a former analyst with the United States Defense Intelligence Agency [ http://www.dia.mil/ ] and now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy [ http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/experts/view/white-jeffrey ].
In addition to the Fajr-5, Hamas has a few hundred of what are known as enhanced Grad rockets, which have a range of about 25 miles. The Grads are 122-millimeter rockets that have bigger warheads than the standard Grads, but their accuracy is relatively low. The Grads may also be coming from Iran, Mr. White said, but others are made in Gaza and imported from Libya.
In addition, Hamas has hundreds of standard Grads that have a range of about 12 miles, as well as thousands of homemade mortars and Qassam rockets with a range of about six miles.
Israeli officials said the movement of the Fajr-5 rockets through Egypt could not go unnoticed there, given their size. Each is 20 feet long and weighs more than 2,000 pounds — the warhead alone weighs 375 pounds — and the trucks carrying them across Egyptian bridges and through roadblocks into Sinai would be hard to miss.
In the current conflict, Israel’s antirocket system, known as Iron Dome, has been more effective than expected, but still dozens of rockets have landed.
Whether the military operation against Gaza is a dress rehearsal for any future attack on either Iran or Lebanon — where Hezbollah has thousands of rockets pointed at Israel — is a matter under debate here. Some see it as clearing away any possible trouble from Gaza. Others say that makes little sense, given the difference of scale in the conflict in Gaza and any war against Iran or Hezbollah. Hamas’s arsenal is tiny compared with what Hezbollah in Lebanon is thought to have: thousands of rockets capable of hitting Tel Aviv.
Yonatan Touval, an analyst with Prime Source, a private Tel Aviv risk-assessment company, said, “The Iron Dome system is ineffective in intercepting longer-range projectiles, such as those that would be launched from Lebanon toward the Tel Aviv area. To address this threat, Israel is currently developing the Magic Wand system, but it is not expected to become operational before 2015.”
He added that the fighting now was therefore not really a test of a future conflict involving Iran and Lebanon. “If Israel’s political leadership is treating the current operation in Gaza as something of a rehearsal for a future war with Hezbollah and Iran, it is rehearsing the wrong play,” he said.
Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting from Washington.
*
Related
Israel Broadens Its Bombing in Gaza to Include Government Sites (November 18, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-conflict.html
As Battlefield Changes, Israel Takes Tougher Approach (November 17, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/world/middleeast/israel-sticks-to-tough-approach-in-conflict-with-hamas.html
U.S. Fears a Ground War in Gaza Could Hurt Israel and Help Hamas (November 17, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/world/middleeast/us-fears-a-ground-war-in-gaza-would-hurt-israel.html
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/world/middleeast/arms-with-long-reach-bolster-hamas.html [with comments]
===
Israel’s Shortsighted Assassination
By GERSHON BASKIN
Published: November 16, 2012
JERUSALEM
AHMED AL-JABARI — the strongman of Hamas [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/hamas/index.html ], the head of its military wing, the man responsible for the abduction of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit — was assassinated [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/15/world/middleeast/israeli-strike-in-gaza-kills-the-military-leader-of-hamas.html ] on Wednesday by Israeli missiles.
Why? Israel [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/israel/index.html ]’s government has declared that the aim of the current strikes against Gaza [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/gaza_strip/index.html ] is to rebuild deterrence so that no rockets will be fired on Israel. Israel’s targeted killings of Hamas leaders in the past sent the Hamas leadership underground and prevented rocket attacks on Israel temporarily. According to Israeli leaders, deterrence will be achieved once again by targeting and killing military and political leaders in Gaza and hitting hard at Hamas’s military infrastructure. But this policy has never been effective in the long term, even when the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, was killed by Israel. Hamas didn’t lay down its guns then, and it won’t stop firing rockets at Israel now without a cease-fire agreement.
When we were negotiating with Hamas to release Mr. Shalit, members of the Israeli team believed that Mr. Jabari wouldn’t make a deal because holding Mr. Shalit was a kind of “life insurance policy.” As long as Mr. Jabari held Mr. Shalit, Israelis believed, the Hamas leader knew he was safe. The Israeli government had a freer hand to kill Mr. Jabari after Mr. Shalit was released in October 2011. His insurance policy was linked to their assessment of the value of keeping him alive. This week, that policy expired.
I believe that Israel made a grave and irresponsible strategic error by deciding to kill Mr. Jabari. No, Mr. Jabari was not a man of peace; he didn’t believe in peace with Israel and refused to have any direct contact with Israeli leaders and even nonofficials like me. My indirect dealings with Mr. Jabari were handled through my Hamas counterpart, Ghazi Hamad, the deputy foreign minister of Hamas, who had received Mr. Jabari’s authorization to deal directly with me. Since Mr. Jabari took over the military wing of Hamas, the only Israeli who spoke with him directly was Mr. Shalit, who was escorted out of Gaza by Mr. Jabari himself. (It is important to recall that Mr. Jabari not only abducted Mr. Shalit, but he also kept him alive and ensured that he was cared for during his captivity.)
Passing messages between the two sides, I was able to learn firsthand that Mr. Jabari wasn’t just interested in a long-term cease-fire; he was also the person responsible for enforcing previous cease-fire understandings brokered by the Egyptian intelligence agency. Mr. Jabari enforced those cease-fires only after confirming that Israel was prepared to stop its attacks on Gaza. On the morning that he was killed, Mr. Jabari received a draft proposal for an extended cease-fire with Israel, including mechanisms that would verify intentions and ensure compliance. This draft was agreed upon by me and Hamas’s deputy foreign minister, Mr. Hamad, when we met last week in Egypt.
The goal was to move beyond the patterns of the past. For years, it has been the same story: Israeli intelligence discovers information about an impending terrorist attack from Gaza. The Israeli Army takes pre-emptive action with an airstrike against the suspected terror cells, which are often made up of fighters from groups like Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees or Salafi groups not under Hamas’s control but functioning within its territory. These cells launch rockets into Israeli towns near Gaza, and they often miss their targets. The Israeli Air Force responds swiftly. The typical result is between 10 and 25 casualties in Gaza, zero casualties in Israel and huge amounts of property damage on both sides.
Other key Hamas leaders and members of the Shura Council, its senior decision-making body, supported a new cease-fire effort because they, like Mr. Jabari, understood the futility of successive rocket attacks against Israel that left no real damage on Israel and dozens of casualties in Gaza. Mr. Jabari was not prepared to give up the strategy of “resistance,” meaning fighting Israel, but he saw the need for a new strategy and was prepared to agree to a long-term cease-fire.
This war is being presented in Israel, once again, as a war of “no choice.” The people of Israel are rallying around the flag as would be expected anywhere in the world. The United States government has voiced its support of the Israeli operation by stating, “Israel has the full right to defend itself and protect its citizens.” It certainly does, but we must ask whether there is another way to achieve the same goal without the use of force.
Israel has used targeted killings, ground invasions, drones, F-16s, economic siege and political boycott. The only thing it has not tried and tested is reaching an agreement (through third parties) for a long-term mutual cease-fire.
No government can tolerate having its civilian population attacked by rockets from a neighboring territory. And the firing of thousands of rockets from Gaza into Israel must end. There was a chance for a mutually agreed cease-fire. The difference between the proposal I drafted in cooperation with my Hamas counterpart and past proposals was that it included both a mechanism for dealing with impending terror threats and a clear definition of breaches. This draft was to be translated and shared with both Mr. Jabari and Israeli security officials, who were aware of our mediation efforts.
In the draft, which I understand Mr. Jabari saw hours before he was killed, it was proposed that Israeli intelligence information transmitted through the Egyptians would be delivered to Mr. Jabari so that he could take action aimed at preventing an attack against Israel. Mr. Jabari and his forces would have had an opportunity to prove that they were serious when they told Egyptian intelligence officials that they were not interested in escalation. If Mr. Jabari had agreed to the draft, then we could have prevented this new round of violence; if he had refused, then Israel would have likely attacked in much the same way as it is now.
The proposal was at least worth testing. Moreover, it included the understanding that if Israel were to take out a real ticking bomb — people imminently preparing to launch a rocket — such a strike would not be considered a breach of the cease-fire and would not lead to escalation.
Instead, Mr. Jabari is dead — and with him died the possibility of a long-term cease-fire. Israel may have also compromised the ability of Egyptian intelligence officials to mediate a short-term cease-fire and placed Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt at risk.
This was not inevitable, and cooler heads could have prevailed. Mr. Jabari’s assassination removes one of the more practical actors on the Hamas side.
Who will replace him? I am not convinced that Israel’s political and military leaders have adequately answered that question.
Gershon Baskin [ http://gershonbaskin.com/ ] is a co-chairman of the Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information, a columnist for The Jerusalem Post and the initiator and negotiator of the secret back channel for the release of Gilad Shalit.
*
Related
As Battlefield Changes, Israel Takes Tougher Approach (November 17, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/world/middleeast/israel-sticks-to-tough-approach-in-conflict-with-hamas.html
Mistaken Lull, Simple Errand, Death in Gaza (November 17, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/world/middleeast/in-gaza-tragic-result-for-misplaced-hopes-of-cease-fire.html
Related in Opinion
Op-Ed Contributor: I’m Losing Hope for a Peaceful Israel (November 17, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/opinion/hope-for-a-peaceful-israel-dwindles.html
Op-Ed Contributor: Trapped in Gaza (November 17, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/opinion/trapped-in-gaza.html
Room for Debate
How Can Targeted Killings Be Justified?
Are government-sponsored assassinations ever appropriate?
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/11/14/how-can-targeted-killings-be-justified/
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/opinion/israels-shortsighted-assassination.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/opinion/israels-shortsighted-assassination.html?pagewanted=all ]
A child watches from a field near Ashdod, Israel, as a missile is fired to intercept an incoming Palestinian rocket. About 30 rockets were fired from Gaza into southern Israel on Saturday morning.
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times
Photographs
Attacks Increase in Gaza
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/11/17/world/middleeast/20121117-Gaza-POD.html
Video
Tensions Grow Between Israel and Hamas
[embedded]
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: November 17, 2012
TEL AVIV — When Israel [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/israel/index.html ] assassinated the top Hamas [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/hamas/index.html ] military commander in Gaza [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/gaza_strip/index.html ] on Wednesday, setting off the current round of fierce fighting, it was aiming not just at a Palestinian [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/palestinians/index.html ] leader but at a supply line of rockets from Iran that have for the first time given Hamas the ability to strike as far as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
The commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, had shifted Hamas’s low-grade militia into a disciplined force with sophisticated weapons like Fajr-5 rockets, which are named after the Persian word for dawn and have significantly increased the danger to Israel’s major cities. They have a range of about 45 miles and are fired by trained crews from underground launching pads.
Hamas had perhaps 100 of them until the Israeli attacks last week, which appear to have destroyed most of the stockpile. The rockets are assembled locally after being shipped from Iran to Sudan, trucked across the desert through Egypt, broken down into parts and moved through Sinai tunnels into Gaza, according to senior Israeli security officials.
The smuggling route involves salaried employees from Hamas along the way, Iranian technical experts traveling on forged passports and government approval in Sudan, Israeli officials said.
Mr. Jabari’s strategy has been so effective and alarming for Israel that it is preparing for a possible next stage in the four-day-old battle: a ground war in which its troops would seek to destroy remaining rocket launching bases and crews and munitions factories.
Under Mr. Jabari, Hamas also developed its own weapons industry in Gaza, building long-range rockets as well as drones [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/u/unmanned_aerial_vehicles/index.html ] that they hoped to fly over Israel just as Israeli drones roam the skies of Gaza, sowing fear in its population.
The current operation to eliminate the Hamas rocket launchers could serve to cripple the ability of Iran’s allies in Gaza from retaliating should Israel ever carry out its threat to attack Iranian nuclear facilities.
“Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad are building weapons with experts from Iran,” one top security official said Saturday, speaking on condition of anonymity. “What we took care of last night was their own production facility for U.A.V.’s,” he added, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. “This was all the work of Jabari, who was a very sophisticated and strategic thinker.”
A number of recent Israeli military attacks were aimed at cutting the supply chain into Gaza. In late October, a munitions factory in Sudan was hit from the air. Israel did not acknowledge carrying out the attack, but the winks and nods of officials here make clear that it did. Israel has carried out several other such attacks on Sudan [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/world/africa/27sudan.html ], including on convoys, in the past few years.
In addition, Mossad agents killed a Hamas official in a Dubai hotel [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/world/middleeast/30dubai.html ] in early 2010 because he was thought to be crucial to the Hamas supply chain of weapons and rockets into Gaza.
One official here said that until Israel ended its military occupation of Gaza in 2005, there were only primitive weapons factories there. The Hamas rockets had a flight capacity of about a mile, they could not be aimed and they flew in a wild cylindrical pattern. Hamas then built better rockets that could fly up to 12 miles.
That changed little until 2007, when Hamas fighters pushed the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority out of Gaza into the West Bank and took over governing the coastal strip.
“At that point, Jabari turned his neighborhood defense operation into a real army,” said a retired Israeli general whose portfolio included Gaza and who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He organized what was a militia into companies, battalions and brigades. He sent commanders to Syria and to Iran to be trained by the Revolutionary Guards. And then he built up this whole new branch to develop military technology focusing on long-range missiles.”
The collapse of the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya last year created other supply options for Hamas as Libyan military storehouses were raided and the equipment sold off. Those weapons were driven across Egypt and into Gaza.
It remains to be seen whether Mr. Jabari’s death will truly cripple Hamas, or whether it will find someone equally adept to take his place, the officials said.
Either way, Hamas now has a range of rockets and weapons in its arsenal, said Jeffrey White, a former analyst with the United States Defense Intelligence Agency [ http://www.dia.mil/ ] and now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy [ http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/experts/view/white-jeffrey ].
In addition to the Fajr-5, Hamas has a few hundred of what are known as enhanced Grad rockets, which have a range of about 25 miles. The Grads are 122-millimeter rockets that have bigger warheads than the standard Grads, but their accuracy is relatively low. The Grads may also be coming from Iran, Mr. White said, but others are made in Gaza and imported from Libya.
In addition, Hamas has hundreds of standard Grads that have a range of about 12 miles, as well as thousands of homemade mortars and Qassam rockets with a range of about six miles.
Israeli officials said the movement of the Fajr-5 rockets through Egypt could not go unnoticed there, given their size. Each is 20 feet long and weighs more than 2,000 pounds — the warhead alone weighs 375 pounds — and the trucks carrying them across Egyptian bridges and through roadblocks into Sinai would be hard to miss.
In the current conflict, Israel’s antirocket system, known as Iron Dome, has been more effective than expected, but still dozens of rockets have landed.
Whether the military operation against Gaza is a dress rehearsal for any future attack on either Iran or Lebanon — where Hezbollah has thousands of rockets pointed at Israel — is a matter under debate here. Some see it as clearing away any possible trouble from Gaza. Others say that makes little sense, given the difference of scale in the conflict in Gaza and any war against Iran or Hezbollah. Hamas’s arsenal is tiny compared with what Hezbollah in Lebanon is thought to have: thousands of rockets capable of hitting Tel Aviv.
Yonatan Touval, an analyst with Prime Source, a private Tel Aviv risk-assessment company, said, “The Iron Dome system is ineffective in intercepting longer-range projectiles, such as those that would be launched from Lebanon toward the Tel Aviv area. To address this threat, Israel is currently developing the Magic Wand system, but it is not expected to become operational before 2015.”
He added that the fighting now was therefore not really a test of a future conflict involving Iran and Lebanon. “If Israel’s political leadership is treating the current operation in Gaza as something of a rehearsal for a future war with Hezbollah and Iran, it is rehearsing the wrong play,” he said.
Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting from Washington.
*
Related
Israel Broadens Its Bombing in Gaza to Include Government Sites (November 18, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-conflict.html
As Battlefield Changes, Israel Takes Tougher Approach (November 17, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/world/middleeast/israel-sticks-to-tough-approach-in-conflict-with-hamas.html
U.S. Fears a Ground War in Gaza Could Hurt Israel and Help Hamas (November 17, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/world/middleeast/us-fears-a-ground-war-in-gaza-would-hurt-israel.html
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/world/middleeast/arms-with-long-reach-bolster-hamas.html [with comments]
===
Israel’s Shortsighted Assassination
By GERSHON BASKIN
Published: November 16, 2012
JERUSALEM
AHMED AL-JABARI — the strongman of Hamas [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/hamas/index.html ], the head of its military wing, the man responsible for the abduction of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit — was assassinated [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/15/world/middleeast/israeli-strike-in-gaza-kills-the-military-leader-of-hamas.html ] on Wednesday by Israeli missiles.
Why? Israel [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/israel/index.html ]’s government has declared that the aim of the current strikes against Gaza [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/gaza_strip/index.html ] is to rebuild deterrence so that no rockets will be fired on Israel. Israel’s targeted killings of Hamas leaders in the past sent the Hamas leadership underground and prevented rocket attacks on Israel temporarily. According to Israeli leaders, deterrence will be achieved once again by targeting and killing military and political leaders in Gaza and hitting hard at Hamas’s military infrastructure. But this policy has never been effective in the long term, even when the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, was killed by Israel. Hamas didn’t lay down its guns then, and it won’t stop firing rockets at Israel now without a cease-fire agreement.
When we were negotiating with Hamas to release Mr. Shalit, members of the Israeli team believed that Mr. Jabari wouldn’t make a deal because holding Mr. Shalit was a kind of “life insurance policy.” As long as Mr. Jabari held Mr. Shalit, Israelis believed, the Hamas leader knew he was safe. The Israeli government had a freer hand to kill Mr. Jabari after Mr. Shalit was released in October 2011. His insurance policy was linked to their assessment of the value of keeping him alive. This week, that policy expired.
I believe that Israel made a grave and irresponsible strategic error by deciding to kill Mr. Jabari. No, Mr. Jabari was not a man of peace; he didn’t believe in peace with Israel and refused to have any direct contact with Israeli leaders and even nonofficials like me. My indirect dealings with Mr. Jabari were handled through my Hamas counterpart, Ghazi Hamad, the deputy foreign minister of Hamas, who had received Mr. Jabari’s authorization to deal directly with me. Since Mr. Jabari took over the military wing of Hamas, the only Israeli who spoke with him directly was Mr. Shalit, who was escorted out of Gaza by Mr. Jabari himself. (It is important to recall that Mr. Jabari not only abducted Mr. Shalit, but he also kept him alive and ensured that he was cared for during his captivity.)
Passing messages between the two sides, I was able to learn firsthand that Mr. Jabari wasn’t just interested in a long-term cease-fire; he was also the person responsible for enforcing previous cease-fire understandings brokered by the Egyptian intelligence agency. Mr. Jabari enforced those cease-fires only after confirming that Israel was prepared to stop its attacks on Gaza. On the morning that he was killed, Mr. Jabari received a draft proposal for an extended cease-fire with Israel, including mechanisms that would verify intentions and ensure compliance. This draft was agreed upon by me and Hamas’s deputy foreign minister, Mr. Hamad, when we met last week in Egypt.
The goal was to move beyond the patterns of the past. For years, it has been the same story: Israeli intelligence discovers information about an impending terrorist attack from Gaza. The Israeli Army takes pre-emptive action with an airstrike against the suspected terror cells, which are often made up of fighters from groups like Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees or Salafi groups not under Hamas’s control but functioning within its territory. These cells launch rockets into Israeli towns near Gaza, and they often miss their targets. The Israeli Air Force responds swiftly. The typical result is between 10 and 25 casualties in Gaza, zero casualties in Israel and huge amounts of property damage on both sides.
Other key Hamas leaders and members of the Shura Council, its senior decision-making body, supported a new cease-fire effort because they, like Mr. Jabari, understood the futility of successive rocket attacks against Israel that left no real damage on Israel and dozens of casualties in Gaza. Mr. Jabari was not prepared to give up the strategy of “resistance,” meaning fighting Israel, but he saw the need for a new strategy and was prepared to agree to a long-term cease-fire.
This war is being presented in Israel, once again, as a war of “no choice.” The people of Israel are rallying around the flag as would be expected anywhere in the world. The United States government has voiced its support of the Israeli operation by stating, “Israel has the full right to defend itself and protect its citizens.” It certainly does, but we must ask whether there is another way to achieve the same goal without the use of force.
Israel has used targeted killings, ground invasions, drones, F-16s, economic siege and political boycott. The only thing it has not tried and tested is reaching an agreement (through third parties) for a long-term mutual cease-fire.
No government can tolerate having its civilian population attacked by rockets from a neighboring territory. And the firing of thousands of rockets from Gaza into Israel must end. There was a chance for a mutually agreed cease-fire. The difference between the proposal I drafted in cooperation with my Hamas counterpart and past proposals was that it included both a mechanism for dealing with impending terror threats and a clear definition of breaches. This draft was to be translated and shared with both Mr. Jabari and Israeli security officials, who were aware of our mediation efforts.
In the draft, which I understand Mr. Jabari saw hours before he was killed, it was proposed that Israeli intelligence information transmitted through the Egyptians would be delivered to Mr. Jabari so that he could take action aimed at preventing an attack against Israel. Mr. Jabari and his forces would have had an opportunity to prove that they were serious when they told Egyptian intelligence officials that they were not interested in escalation. If Mr. Jabari had agreed to the draft, then we could have prevented this new round of violence; if he had refused, then Israel would have likely attacked in much the same way as it is now.
The proposal was at least worth testing. Moreover, it included the understanding that if Israel were to take out a real ticking bomb — people imminently preparing to launch a rocket — such a strike would not be considered a breach of the cease-fire and would not lead to escalation.
Instead, Mr. Jabari is dead — and with him died the possibility of a long-term cease-fire. Israel may have also compromised the ability of Egyptian intelligence officials to mediate a short-term cease-fire and placed Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt at risk.
This was not inevitable, and cooler heads could have prevailed. Mr. Jabari’s assassination removes one of the more practical actors on the Hamas side.
Who will replace him? I am not convinced that Israel’s political and military leaders have adequately answered that question.
Gershon Baskin [ http://gershonbaskin.com/ ] is a co-chairman of the Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information, a columnist for The Jerusalem Post and the initiator and negotiator of the secret back channel for the release of Gilad Shalit.
*
Related
As Battlefield Changes, Israel Takes Tougher Approach (November 17, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/world/middleeast/israel-sticks-to-tough-approach-in-conflict-with-hamas.html
Mistaken Lull, Simple Errand, Death in Gaza (November 17, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/world/middleeast/in-gaza-tragic-result-for-misplaced-hopes-of-cease-fire.html
Related in Opinion
Op-Ed Contributor: I’m Losing Hope for a Peaceful Israel (November 17, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/opinion/hope-for-a-peaceful-israel-dwindles.html
Op-Ed Contributor: Trapped in Gaza (November 17, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/opinion/trapped-in-gaza.html
Room for Debate
How Can Targeted Killings Be Justified?
Are government-sponsored assassinations ever appropriate?
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/11/14/how-can-targeted-killings-be-justified/
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/opinion/israels-shortsighted-assassination.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/opinion/israels-shortsighted-assassination.html?pagewanted=all ]
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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