Israeli troops with a variety of military vehicles at a gathering site at an undisclosed location along the Israel-Gaza border, in southern Israel, 17 October 2023. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Hannibal Hanschke) 
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been poised for more than a week to enter Gaza to destroy Hamas for the attack it launched into southern Israel on 7 October, killing about 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and taking about 200 hostages.
“The potential for this to become a broader war that would envelop the Middle East in conflagration and that could ultimately even end Israel is real in a way that the war on terror could not have threatened the US existentially,” Ian Bremmer, the president of Eurasia Group, replied when asked on TED if this was Israel’s 9/11 moment.
The feared scenario is that if Israel enters Gaza to annihilate Hamas, the latter’s close ally, Hezbollah, could attack from Lebanon in the north. Fighting a war on two fronts could overwhelm the IDF. Israel’s strongest ally, the US, which already has two aircraft carrier strike groups in the eastern Mediterranean, could intervene. Iran might then enter the fray to help its ally Hezbollah, bringing it into direct combat with the US.
Israel’s bombardment of Gaza over the past two weeks had by Thursday reportedly killed more than 3,500 people, but a ground attack would greatly increase civilian deaths. It would further inflame regional hatred, which is already running very high, especially after the explosion at the al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital in Gaza which killed hundreds on Tuesday. Both sides have blamed each other for the incident but, clearly, the Middle East mostly suspects Israel.
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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has engaged in frantic shuttle diplomacy in the region for the past fortnight and US President Joe Biden met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel on Wednesday. Biden pledged full US support, but he also tried to talk the Israeli leader down from overreaction.
“I caution this: while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it,” Biden said, calling for “clarity” about Israel’s war objectives and whether it was on course to achieve them.
“After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. When we sought justice and got justice; we also made mistakes,” he said.
Biden has been reported as having said he discussed with the Israelis “alternatives” to the expected ground invasion.
‘Diabolically difficult’
General David Petraeus, former commander of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and former CIA director, has warned that a ground invasion of Gaza would be “diabolically difficult” militarily and perhaps even more dangerous geopolitically.
He told Foreign Policy magazine that the Israeli military’s mission to destroy Hamas would be very difficult to accomplish, first because there would be “terrible civilian losses and staggering damage and destruction of civilian infrastructure”.
But also because Hamas would be fully prepared. “So, there will be improvised explosive devices, rooms that blow up, suicide bombs, car bombs, everything.
“And you have high-rises, not just small buildings, and you have to clear every building, every floor, every room, every basement, every tunnel. I can’t imagine a more diabolically difficult context for the Israeli soldiers.”
The task would be further complicated by Hamas militants hiding among the population.
“Its headquarters, bases and facilities, all of which have to be destroyed if you are to destroy Hamas … are positioned underneath hospitals; they’re in tunnels, they’re in mosques.
“This is an enemy that doesn’t observe the Geneva Conventions, to put it mildly.”
But Petraeus warned that “revenge is not a strategy” and that if the Israeli military destroyed Hamas, it needed to offer the Palestinians a vision of what would happen next. He noted that Biden had already cautioned Israel not to reoccupy Gaza, which it withdrew from in 2005.
Israel also needed a plan about who would run the Gaza Strip, and restore governance and services. He warned that Israel should not make the same mistakes as the US had made after the 9/11 attacks.
After it toppled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the US had implemented “some seriously bad big ideas, such as firing the Iraqi military without telling them how they were going to provide for their families and then firing the Ba’ath party, which included all the bureaucrats, to run the country”.
Petraeus’ predecessor as US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, told CNN — in a 2021 interview rebroadcast this week — that if he had been in charge of the US after 9/11 he would have taken no action for a year, but instead would have gone around the world building a global coalition against al-Qaeda.
Petraeus said the US had deployed two aircraft carrier strike groups and 2,000 extra troops, and beefed up anti-ballistic forces in the region mainly to deter any retaliation from Iranian-supported Shi’a militias or Iran itself.
“So, we want to warn the Iranians, we want to dissuade them and deter them from taking action against our soldiers and others. But then also to be prepared for what might be necessary in response to some kind of Iranian action.
“We’re also, of course, trying to stop this from becoming regional. Obviously, it would be terrible if Hezbollah were to enter this. They have 150,000 rockets they could rain down on Israel and overwhelm the Iron Dome system.”
However, even though Hezbollah has fired several rockets into northern Israel over the past two weeks, Petraeus thought they would be reluctant to mount a full-blown incursion after the pounding they took from Israel in 2006 when they entered Israel and captured two Israeli soldiers.
“But Hezbollah could come under pressure from Iran and their own members to attack Israel, depending on how Israel’s military operation in Gaza turned out.
“There’s a possibility of proxy Iranian Shi’a militia coming through Syria as well. There has to be a worry again about the Palestinians on the West Bank and even, to a degree, the Palestinians inside Israel proper. So, there’s a huge number of issues. The US having these forces available provides you [with] options if they are necessary.”
Yet he thought the most important thing now was the conversation that Biden and Blinken were having with Israel about its next steps.
Potential for escalation
The US risk analysis company Rane said this week that diplomatic sources had reported that Iran had “sent a backchannel communication through the United Nations to Israel saying that it does not seek escalation in the current Israel-Hamas war, but would be forced to intervene if Israel moves forward with its expected ground invasion of the Gaza Strip”.
It said Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian had publicly warned Israel against invading Gaza, with Iranian state media quoting him as saying that “Iran cannot remain a spectator” if Israeli troops go into the enclave and that the US would also face “significant damages” in the wake of such an incursion.
Ahmed Abdul-Hadi, the head of Hamas’ political bureau in Beirut, told Politico that Hamas and Hezbollah were in close coordination and that Hezbollah would not shy away from attacking Israel. The trigger would probably be an Israeli ground attack on Gaza.
Bremmer said it was understandable that Israel would feel the need to react in the harshest way to the Hamas attack, but hopefully Biden and Blinken would restrain “the worst impulses”.
He worried what a ground attack would mean for the people of Gaza, already suffering dire poverty and largely cut off from food, electricity and water.
And he said he worried what this would mean for Israel in the long term. “Ultimately, the population of Israel is most threatened by what the terrorists of Hamas unleash from Israel,” he said.
If Israel killed huge numbers of Palestinians, that would radicalise Palestinians not just in Gaza but also in the West Bank, while also radicalising the Arab street, Bremmer said.
“They want people in the region to be in uproar against Israel and in solidarity with the Hamas cause and in solidarity with the destruction of Israel … for what Iran’s leaders were saying on social media, essentially calling for a genocide against the Zionist regime.
“And Israel must do everything in its power not to allow Hamas to drag them there.”
However, Bremmer said he thought Tehran’s recent diplomatic behaviour suggested it was not seeking confrontation. This included reconciliation with Saudi Arabia; its engagement with the US, which unfroze $6-billion of Iranian assets and led to the freeing of five US hostages; and a reduction in the top limits of its uranium enrichment.
He noted that the US was very publicly saying it did not have any evidence that Iran had been directly involved in the Hamas attack on 7 October.
“The message from the US is very clear; do not expand this war to Iran because the consequences of that are $150 [a barrel of] crude at a minimum. The consequence of that are the world goes back into global recession. The consequences of that are conflagration in the region. And I do believe the Israeli government is quite aligned with the US in not wanting to go there.” DM