Unlike the last series of clashes with Palestinian forces in Gaza over the past three years, this appears to be a full-scale conflict mounted by Hamas and its allies, with rocket barrages and incursions into Israel proper, and with Israelis killed and captured.<\/p>\n
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Rocket contrails in the skies over Gaza City.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>NYT<\/cite><\/p>\n The psychological impact on Israelis has been compared with the shock of 9\/11 in America. So after the Israeli military repels the initial Palestinian attack, the question of what to do next will loom large. There are few good options for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has declared war and is being pressured into a major military response.<\/p>\n Given that dozens of Israelis have died so far and more have been taken hostage by Hamas, an Israeli invasion of Gaza \u2013 and even a temporary reoccupation of the territory, something that successive Israeli governments have tried hard to avoid \u2013 cannot be ruled out.<\/p>\n As Netanyahu told Israelis in declaring war: \u201cWe will bring the fight to them with a might and scale that the enemy has not yet known,\u201d adding that the Palestinian groups would pay a heavy price.<\/p>\n Mikhail Shvetz surveys the damage to cars gutted by fires set when a rocket from Gaza struck the parking lot of an apartment complex in Ashkelon, Israel.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>NYT<\/cite><\/p>\n But a major war could have unforeseen consequences. It would be likely to produce sizeable Palestinian casualties \u2013 civilians as well as fighters \u2013 disrupting the diplomatic efforts of US President Joe Biden and Netanyahu to bring about a Saudi recognition of Israel in return for defence guarantees from the United States.<\/p>\n There would also be pressure on Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group that controls southern Lebanon, to open up a second front in northern Israel, as it did in 2006 after an Israeli soldier was captured and taken prisoner in Gaza.<\/p>\n Iran, a sworn enemy of Israel, is an important backer of Hamas as well as Hezbollah and has supplied both groups with weapons and intelligence.<\/p>\n The conflict will unite Israel behind its government, at least for a while, with the opposition cancelling its planned demonstrations against Netanyahu\u2019s proposed judicial changes and obeying calls for reservists to muster. It will give Netanyahu \u201cfull political cover to do what he wants,\u201d said Natan Sachs, the director of the Centre for Middle East Policy of the Brookings Institution.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, he added, Netanyahu has in the past rejected calls to send thousands of troops into Gaza to try to destroy armed Palestinian groups like Hamas, given the cost and the inevitable question of what happens the day after.<\/p>\n \u201cBut the psychological impact of this for Israel is similar to 9\/11,\u201d he said. \u201cSo the calculus about cost could be quite different this time.\u201d<\/p>\n The question will always be what happens afterward, said Mark Heller, a senior researcher at Israel\u2019s Institute for National Security Studies. Nearly every year there have been limited Israeli military operations in the occupied territories, but they have not provided any solutions.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a lot of heavy pressure already for a large-scale incursion, to \u2018finish with Hamas\u2019, but I don\u2019t think it will solve anything in the longer run,\u201d Heller said.<\/p>\n Young Palestinians chant and celebrate atop a car that was burned after being taken from Israeli territory and brought back to Gaza.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>NYT<\/cite><\/p>\n But Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister, said a major Israeli assault on Gaza was almost inevitable, particularly if Israeli soldiers were taken hostage. \u201cIf Hamas has taken Israeli soldiers as prisoners and taken them to Gaza, a full-scale Israeli operation into Gaza looks highly likely,\u201d he said on X, formerly known as Twitter. \u201cAnother war.\u201d The same presumably would hold true for Israeli citizens.<\/p>\n Israel and Netanyahu have been wary of sending ground forces into Gaza. Even in 2002, when Ariel Sharon was prime minister and Israeli forces crushed a Palestinian uprising in the West Bank, the government chose to avoid sending significant extra forces into Gaza, where it then had Israeli settlements.<\/p>\n Israel unilaterally withdrew its soldiers and citizens from Gaza in 2005, while retaining effective control of large parts of the occupied West Bank. The failure of that withdrawal to secure any sort of lasting peace agreement has left Gaza a kind of orphan, largely cut off from other Palestinians in the West Bank and almost entirely isolated by both Israel and Egypt, which control Gaza\u2019s borders and its seacoast. Palestinians often call Gaza \u201can open-air prison\u201d.<\/p>\n After the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the conflict of 2006, an internal struggle between the Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the more radical, Islamist Hamas movement ended with Hamas taking control of the territory in 2007, prompting Israel to try to isolate Gaza even further.<\/p>\n Even in an extended conflict of 2008 and 2009, Israeli forces entered Gaza and its population centres but chose not to move too deeply into the territory or to reoccupy it. A ceasefire was brokered by Egypt after three weeks of warfare.<\/p>\n Successive Israeli governments insist that after the 2005 withdrawal, it no longer has responsibility for Gaza. But given Israel\u2019s control over the borders and its overwhelming military advantage, many groups like B\u2019Tselem, which monitors human rights in the occupied territories, argue that Israel retains significant legal responsibilities and obligations for Gaza under international humanitarian law.<\/p>\n While Hamas has not been clear about why it chose to attack now, it may be a response to growing Israeli ties to the Arab world, in particular to Saudi Arabia, which has been negotiating a putative defence treaty with the United States in return for normalising relations with Israel, potentially to the neglect of the Palestinians.<\/p>\n That is the view of Amberin Zaman, an analyst for Al-Monitor, a Washington-based news website that covers the Middle East. \u201cIsrael\u2019s response to today\u2019s attacks will likely be of a scale that will set back US efforts for Saudi-Israeli normalisation, if not torpedo them altogether,\u201d she said in a message on X.<\/p>\n Palestinians inspect a destroyed building as emergency responders try to contain fires after Israeli jets bombed Gaza City in the Gaza Strip.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>NYT<\/cite><\/p>\n Saudi Arabia has not recognised Israel since it was founded in 1948 and until now had signalled that it would not even consider normalising relations until Israel agreed to allow the creation of a Palestinian state.<\/p>\n But recently even the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has gone public with affirmations that some sort of deal with Israel seemed plausible. In an interview with Fox News last month, he said that talk of normalisation was \u201cfor the first time, real.\u201d<\/p>\n That will now be in question, depending on how long this conflict lasts and with what level of dead and wounded.<\/p>\n The ramifications of the war and its aftermath will be \u201cfar-reaching and take a long time to manifest,\u201d Sachs said. There will be commissions of inquiry into the military and intelligence agencies \u201cand the political echelon won\u2019t escape blame, either.\u201d<\/p>\n But first, as Heller noted, comes the war. \u201cAnd these things tend to get out of control,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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