The United States continues to set the tone for Israel’s response and yesterday President Joe Biden conveyed by telephone to Prime Minister Beniamín Netanyahu the importance of taking all possible measures to protect “innocent civilians”, as well as increasing humanitarian aid.
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and even Iran’s Foreign Minister have conveyed a similar message in recent hours: to prevent the conflict from spreading to the entire region, it is essential to minimize the death and suffering of civilians.
“We do not want the war to spread but [the military actions in Gaza] can force the whole world to take action,” warned the Iranian Foreign Minister, Hussein Amir Abdolahian, in an interview with CNN in which he also assured that Iran is outside the organization of October 7, a statement that is hardly credible given its sponsorship and relationship.
As cynical as it may seem, the 8,005 deaths in Gaza, according to the latest Hamas balance sheet, have not yet overwhelmed the regional balances, so merciless yesterday and today towards the Palestinians. It is the ground operation – yesterday, the third day – that will determine how far the status quo in the Middle East resists.
Tension and exchanges of projectiles remain on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where the Iranian Hizbullah militias have muscle. Hamas has asked these days to increase the level of confrontation, which has not happened. “A big question is whether Iran will support Hamas until the end or consider them amortized,” says a diplomatic source in Tel Aviv.
The request for containment and some “gesture” may explain why Gaza yesterday recovered telephone and internet connectivity, blocked for a day and a half. Likewise, the White House and Egypt announced a very significant increase in humanitarian aid entering Gaza. According to Israel, which adheres to the agreement and checks the trucks even though the Rafah border crossing is an Egyptian thing, at least a hundred will enter a day. Yesterday, thousands of people stormed the warehouses of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) in the center and south of the Strip to take away bags of flour and other products.
The advice from the United States is complex: it asks Israel for moderation and at the same time treasures – and shares – its experience in urban warfare, acquired these years in Iraq and Syria, where in less populated settings than Gaza the civilian deaths also reached chilling figures. . Thus, taking the Iraqi city of Mosul – less populated than Gaza – from the Islamic State took eight months, from October 2016 to July 2017, and claimed some 10,000 lives.
Officially, the United States does not have troops stationed in Israel or its own military base, although the coming and going of advisors is a constant, especially in some air bases, according to diplomatic sources. What happens with my neighbors on the floor of the Tel Aviv hotel, who have a VIP room, a luxury in an establishment full of modest Israeli families, evacuated from the bordering areas of Gaza. They don’t wear a uniform or any military insignia, they are guys you don’t want to fight with and they have a haircut that Mick Jagger would never wear. During one of the routine alarms that force you to take refuge in a spot in the hotel, it occurred to me to ask.
-We are tourists!
The Pentagon has sent senior officials to Israel with experience in Iraq and Syria, as does the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin. The glass half empty is that fighting in dense urban areas like Gaza requires time and casualties (Netanyahu reiterated on Saturday that this ground campaign will be “long and hard”). The glass half full is that the operations in Mosul or Fallujah in Iraq and Raqa in Syria provided valuable military lessons, which the United States now shares with Israel.
The reserve general and former head of the US Central Command who was directing the war in Iraq, Joseph Votel, has warned that “Hamas is better armed and organized than the Islamic State was and the labyrinth of tunnels in Gaza is incomparable to that of Raqa.”
