Israel to focus on Hamas tunnel system, then seek a “Syrian solution” to Hamas problem

The tunnel problem
The Israeli air strikes, supported by meticulously collected and collated intelligence, are effective, by they are limited by two factors, both related to underground tunnels:

• Defensive tunnel system: Since Hamas violently seized power in the Gaza Strip in summer 2007, the organization has done nothing to improve the lot of Gazans. It has invested nothing in infrastructure, economic development, or education, although it did build more mosques and a few religious schools as part of its agenda to impose a strict Islamic rule on the citizens. The organization did use millions of dollars of aid money to buy arms (especially from Iran and Syria), build machining facilities to manufacture rockets – and following Hezbollah’s example and Iranian tutelage, built vast “underground cities,” consisting of dozens of miles of an intricate system of tunnels and hundreds of bunkers. These parallel cities were built under residential areas, using the Palestinians living above ground as a human shield to the Hamas war machine underground. Israel cannot destroy these underground tunnel systems without destroying the cities above, in the process killing and injuring an untold number of Palestinian civilians.
• Offensive tunnel system: Hamas has not only built an intricate system of tunnels under residential area in which to hide its rockets and other arms – and to which the organization’s leadership escapes at the slightest sign of trouble – but it has also built about thirty deep tunnels along the Gaza Strip border with Israel. The purpose of these tunnels – some of which reaching the border – is to provide Hamas fighters with the capability of coming to the surface in a surprise move to kill Israeli civilians, capture Israeli soldiers, or engage in other commando-like operations (the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was kidnapped by Hamas fighters emerging from a secret tunnel near the military position he was in on the Israel side of the border). Last Tuesday, on the first day of the war, one such tunnel was destroyed when the explosives carried by six Hamas operatives inside it exploded.

Israel’s next moves
Israel appears to have decided on a two-pronged approach to dealing with the problems posed by these two tunnel systems:

• In a move similar to the tactics followed by Israel during the 2006 war with Hezbollah, the Israel Air Force (IAF) will drop leaflets and posters on cities in the northern part of the Gaza strip, instructing residents to leave their homes a and move south. These leaflets will be accompanied by automatic phone calls to everyone in these areas to reinforce the message that they must leave. Once the residents have left, in effect turning towns into ghost towns, the IAF will have the freedom to use much heavier ordinance in bombing and destroying large portions of Hamas’s defensive tunnel system underneath. Sections of the cities above will be destroyed in the process, but at least there will not be civilian casualties. Israel pursued this approach during the 2006 war with Hezbollah: It dropped leaflets on the Shi’a neighborhood of Dahiyeh in south Beirut – a neighborhood under which Iran built a system of fortified tunnels and bunkers for Hezbollah’s leaders – calling on the residents to leave. Once they left, the IAF methodically destroyed the neighborhood, including a few dozen high-rise buildings, in an effort to destroy the Hezbollah bunkers below.
• Israel will also send small military units into the Gaza Strip, but not in order to fight Hamas or re-occupy the Strip, but rather in an effort to find and destroy the thirty or so offensive tunnels leading into Israel. That work will be done along the border, and will not require deep penetration into the Strip’s heavily populated areas. We should expect to see many engineers – and a lot of engineering equipment – do the tunnel-finding-and-destruction work, while being protected on the perimeter.

The Syrian option
In 2002, following a year of devastating suicide attacks inside Israel, the Israeli military launched Operation Defensive Wall to put an end to terrorism from the West Bank. The IDF re-occupied the West Bank and spent the next year-and-a-half finishing off the terror threat from the West Bank.

The finish off the terror threat from the Gaza Strip will require something on a similar scale – an operation which few in Israel have the stomach for.

Israel thus appears to be looking at a “Syrian” solution to the Gaza problem. When the anti-Assad rebellion began in February 2011, Western powers boldly proclaimed that the only way to end the war would be for the Assad family to relinquish power. These Western powers, however, were unwilling to match Iran’s, Hezbollah’s, and Russia’s level of commitment to, and support for, Assad. The result is that Assad will remain in power – although only over a small part of Syria, a country which no longer exists – but without his chemical weapons.

Similarly, since Israel does not appear now to be willing to invest the resources and sacrifice it would take to remove Hamas from power, it will likely agree to a Hamas regime in Gaza – but a defanged Hamas. The organization may thus be allowed to continue with its dysfunctional rule over 1.7 million Palestinians, but it will have to disarm.

This would be easier to achieve now than it was in the previous two rounds, or three reasons:

• Hamas is more isolated than ever. Two of its main backers are gone:
  • Mohammed Morsi was removed from power last year and the Muslim Brotherhood has been declared illegal by the new Egypt regime.
  • A unified Syria under President Bashar Assad no longer exists – and, in any event, Assad kicked Hamas out of Damascus and stopped aiding Hamas when the Sunni fundamentalist movement sided with the Sunni rebels against his regime.
  • Other supporters have peeled off as well. Iran has shifted its support to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, while Qatar, a supporter of Jihadist movements in the region, had a change at the top of the royal family last year, and now appears to be inching back toward the mainstream Sunni fold led by Saudi Arabia. Turkey, too, is no longer as committed to Hamas as before.
• Not only does Hamas have no friend – it has gained a new, and determined, enemy in Egypt, which has declared Hamas a terrorist organization. There were hundreds of smuggling tunnels operating between the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip during the Mubarak regime and the one-year Morsi government. The military regime which toppled Morsi last July took two months to destroy all these tunnels, and close the Rafah border crossing which connected the Gaza Strip to Egypt. Israeli intelligence officials, who late last week were talking with their Egyptian counterparts about the outline of a possible agreement to end the fighting, were told by the Egyptians that they wanted Israel to hit Hamas even harder, and that they wanted the attacks on Hamas to go on for the time being.
• The stunning success of the Islamist ISIS in Iraq – following its successes in Syria – is now making it more difficult for an Islamist terrorist group such as Hamas to gain support among Arabs and Muslims, even when Hamas is fighting Israel.

The last two rounds between Hamas and Israel – 2008-9 and 2012 – ended in a cease fire, but with no meaningful limits on Hamas’s ability to rearm. The result was that Hamas was able to rearm and go to war against Israel when it thought the time was right. It is unlikely that this time around, Israel would agree to the same end-game.

The Syrian solution to Israel’s Hamas problem beckons.