Israel: end of the beginning?

By Richard North - October 28, 2023

It stands to reason that the Israelis would start their full-blown ground offensive on Shabbat, just because that might be the least expected time for operations to commence.

At the time of writing, it is too early to be certain that this is the big push, but the IDF was saying late on Friday – after sunset and the official start of Shabbat – that it was “expanding its operation in Gaza”. Predictably it was leaving vague the precise scope, so we will have to wait to see how the situation develops.

However, with multiple reports of communications down, including the internet and even some satellite phones, and with local agencies describing the current wave of Israeli strikes across the enclave as “intense and unprecedented”, the most significant since the war began, it is clear that something out of the ordinary (if that is the right phrase to use) must be happening.

From the Guardian we hear from the Israel Defence Forces spokesman, R Adm Daniel Hagari, who said: “In the last hours, we intensified the attacks in Gaza”, adding that aerial attacks had been targeting Hamas tunnels and other targets. “In addition to the attacks that we carried out in recent days, ground forces are expanding their activity this evening”, he said. “The IDF is acting with great force … to achieve the objectives of the war”.

The new thing, according to one source, is that in addition to the intensive bombing from the Israeli Air Force, there is heavy artillery fire, especially in the border strip to the north. It is not clear, though, whether troops or armoured vehicles have been deployed, although Hamas claims its fighters are confronting Israeli troops in various locations.

Apart from the loss of communications, the IDF has told Reuters and Agence France Presse (and possibly others) that it cannot guarantee the safety of their journalists operating in the Gaza Strip, so direct news on what is happening may be hard to come by for a while, leaving official Israeli statements as the main (if not the only) source of information.

From the BBC, we learned that an Al Jazeera reporter in the southern Gazan city of Khan Younis, Tareq Abu Azzoum, was for while able to deliver sporadic segments to his TV station via digital satellite.

Speaking to camera, Azzoum said that he couldn’t tell whether his producers or the studio could hear him: “We are talking now without having any kind of contact with the newsdesk… We might even lose this contact at any moment”.

His final words were: “If you can hear us, send out that message to the world – that we are isolated in Gaza. We don’t have any phone signal, we don’t have any internet connection, we had difficulties even contacting our relatives in different parts of the territory”.

Just after midnight (BST) the Al Jazeera live feed – quoting a Hamas source – was again claiming that Hamas fighters were engaged in clashed with Israeli sources and three points, two in the east and one in the north. Israel has warned people in the north to leave immediately to the south for their own safety.

And, as the war of words continues alongside the violence, Israel has accused Hamas of using the main hospital in Gaza as a shield for its tunnels and operations. Journalists have been shown photographs, diagrams and audio recordings which reveal how Hamas was using the hospital system, and Al Shifa hospital in particular, to hide command posts and tunnel entry points.

This is denied by Hamas, yet even the Guardian concedes that there is evidence that the terrorist group has in the past taken advantage of cover provided by civilian objects, including hospitals.

All this activity continues, despite an earlier United Nations General Assembly vote calling for an immediate “humanitarian truce” between Israel and Hamas, on a motion proposed by Jordon. The resolution gained 120 votes, with 45 abstentions – amongst them the UK – and 14 rejections, including Israel and the United States.

This resolution does not have the weight of a Security Council resolution, which has already been defeated. As such, it is not binding and carries little practical weight, apart from allowing guilt-free virtue signalling by sundry nations and Hamas allies.

Nevertheless, António Guterres – Mr “global boiling” himself – has issued a statement saying that the humanitarian system in Gaza was “facing a total collapse with unimaginable consequences for more than two million civilians”.

He added that that “as the bombing intensifies, needs are growing ever more critical and colossal”. Before the conflict, he said, at least 500 aid trucks went into Gaza per day and now, on average, twelve trucks cross the border causing needs for essential items, such as water and food and medicine to grow significantly.

As of late evening, local UN officials were saying that public order has completely broken down. However, that has not stopped Hamas (and possibly other groups) continuing to fire rockets from Gaza into Israel.

Elsewhere, opinion – expert or otherwise – is mixed on whether this latest series or military strikes do represent the awaited offensive, or are merely part of the process, which has seen raids on the preceding two consecutive days, of “shaping” the battlefield, creating the conditions for a successful full-scale attack some time in the near future.

There is also a suggestion that the current action is part of a new strategy of gradually escalating the violence – boiling frog style – in order to minimise the chance of the conflict spreading to precipitate a full-scale regional war.

There is already a scent of this in the air, after US air strikes were carried out in eastern Syria, against a weapons storage facility and an ammunition depot, said to have been used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – the Pentagon’s way of sending a message to Tehran telling it to keep out of the Gaza war.

But, there is also a more sinister suggestion that talks on the release of the Israeli hostages, being brokered by Egyptian and Qatari officials, have irretrievably broken down, opening the way for the ground offensive.

In any event, the Times of Israel is reporting that Israel believes that Hamas has been dragging out hostage negotiations as a tactic to delay a ground offensive. With little prospect of seeing a breakthrough, the Israeli government has lost patience.

On the other hand, CNN is reporting that negotiations are ongoing, citing anonymous diplomatic sources who say that they are going very well, adding that, although there are issues still remaining, “we remain hopeful”.

Essentially, in terms of an appreciation of what is going – across the board – you pays your money and you makes your choice. Struggling to tease the details out of the thicket of competing reports, one confronts the law of diminishing returns.

In what is a volatile and fast developing situation, therefore, I will keep this post open and add to it from time to time through the day, as well as expanding on events via the comments.

ADDS: The IDF have said they struck 150 underground Hamas targets overnight, with about 100 aircraft involved in the strikes. Residents report clashes with Israeli armoured vehicles and infantry overnight. Video footage released by the IDF today showed tanks, Namers and D9s.