TITLE: ‘The writing was on the wall,’ says counterterror expert who saw war looming
https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-writing-was-on-the-wall-says-counterterror-expert-who-saw-war-looming/
EXCERPT: “We did not need cameras, nor cyber, to see it coming. It would have sufficed to look at our reckless policy for the past decade with regards to Hamas.
“I consider Netanyahu personally responsible for this policy. He formulated it. All the blood that was spilled is on his hands,” Yigal Carmon [a former adviser on counter-terrorism to prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin] charged.
Israel’s error is twofold, he said. Firstly, over the years it enacted a policy of separation between Hamas in Gaza and the Fatah-run PA in the West Bank, in the misplaced certainty that the continued discord between the two factions would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. The two parties have been mired in conflict since 2007, when Islamist Hamas took over the Gaza Strip from the control of the secularist Fatah.
The second fatal mistake, Carmon argues, was the idea that Israel could buy peace from Hamas, paying for it with Qatari money. Since 2012, Qatar has disbursed about $1.5 billion to the Gaza Strip, with Israel’s tacit approval despite the blockade. Since 2018, the Gulf monarchy has provided $30 million monthly assistance to the coastal enclave, in three tranches of $10 million to pay for salaries for Hamas government employees, fuel, and aid for needy families.
“We Israelis thought we could buy Hamas, but we didn’t buy anyone. Instead, Netanyahu sold out our lives and our security,” Carmon said.
With the false reassurance that the terror group could be paid into submission, Israel became complacent, from the top echelons of government down to the army commanders and the soldiers, Carmon claimed. “Politicians said we are preventing the creation of a Palestinian state, and [Palestinian factions] will just fight with each other.”
That complacency, he argues, is the reason the Israeli army took six hours before intervening to stop the invasion from Gaza, and why so many failures occurred at one time. “Soldiers from the infantry’s Gaza Division were not in their positions, the surveillance systems were shut down, and the separation fence turned out to be a joke. It only took a bulldozer to tear it down,” Carmon notes.
Hamas, ruling over an impoverished Gaza Strip blockaded by Israel and Egypt since 2007 and isolated from the rest of the world, would not have the resources and the capabilities to carry out its attacks against Israel were it not for international support.
The foreign power that is most often accused of propping it up is Iran. While there is no denying that Tehran contributes to the terror group in various ways – with funding, armaments and military training – the real financial lifeline for Hamas is provided by Qatar.
TITLE: Netanyahu is drawing the US into war with Iran
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/9/netanyahu-is-drawing-the-us-into-war-with-iran
EXCERPT: Netanyahu has both a political and a personal stake in all this. A drawn-out regional conflict would block or at least postpone any official accountability for his utter failure to prevent Hamas’s attack from happening in the first place and could also put his multiple indictments on corruption charges on an indefinite hold.
Overnight, he transformed from a failed and embattled prime minister to a wartime leader, with opposition parties clamouring to join him in a national unity government.
He declared war and ordered an immediate retaliation against Hamas’s stronghold in Gaza. The Israeli army unleashed a vicious campaign of bombardment on the overpopulated Gaza Strip, killing more than 500 people, and preparing for a potential land invasion.
Netanyahu has not elaborated on the next phases of the war, but he has received the unconditional support of Western governments to do what it takes, as long as it takes, to “defend Israel”. The administration of US President Joe Biden has gone even further, providing Israel with more arms and ammunition, dispatching its most modern and sophisticated aircraft carrier, the Ford, along with a number of destroyers to the Eastern Mediterranean, and beefing up other forces stationed in the region, enough to start World War III.
Biden’s motivation for the escalatory deployment is, reportedly, strategic deterrence, meant to ensure that “no enemies of Israel can or should seek advantage from the current situation”. But historically, Israel has never allowed any foreign boots on its soil, and is in no need of the US armadas to take on Hamas.
Biden’s incentive, therefore, could also be political, ie to ensure that the GOP doesn’t exploit the Israeli drama at his expense ahead of the presidential elections in 2024. Already, Republican opponents have tried to link Biden’s recent prisoner swap deal with Iran, which involved the unfreezing of $6bn in Iranian assets, to the Hamas attacks.
But Netanyahu and his fanatic ministers may have something very different in mind for the US deployment, that goes beyond military deterrence and political posturing. He may try to widen the scope of the war to include Iran.
His government has already accused Iran of supporting and directing Hamas’s operation, as it has previously done about other Palestinian attacks on Israelis. Scores of Israel supporters and neoconservatives, as well as media pundits in the US and Europe, have joined in by making the case for Iranian involvement.
The Wall Street Journal even reported – based on interviews with unnamed local sources – that Iranian officials and members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps were directly involved in orchestrating and planning the attacks over several weeks.
US officials have said they haven’t seen evidence of Tehran’s involvement, yet.
For its part, Iran has called the attack a spontaneous Palestinian action in self-defence, but officials have not tried to hide their glee at Israel’s misfortune. They have expressed confidence that the attack will deter further Arab, meaning Saudi, normalisation with Israel, and eventually lead to its downfall.
Meanwhile, Iran’s ally the Lebanese Hezbollah has praised the Hamas operation and engaged the Israeli forces in the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms, threatening greater involvement if Israel enters Gaza.
Iran and its allies’ temerity may well come back to haunt them, just as Israel’s hubris did – leading to its utter humiliation at the hands of Hamas fighters. Neither Iran nor Israel is learning from history, as they continue to escalate their proxy conflict towards war.
TITLE: No evidence yet of Iran link to Hamas attack, says Israeli military
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/09/no-evidence-yet-of-iran-link-to-hamas-attack-says-israeli-military
EXCERPT: “Iran is a major player but we can’t yet say if it was involved in the planning or training,” said R Adm Daniel Hagari, a spokesperson for the Israel Defence Forces.
The Wall Street Journal, citing a variety of sources, claimed in a report on Sunday that the Revolutionary Guards, the main political branch of the Iranian military, had attended biweekly Hamas planning meetings in Beirut since August, including two also attended by the Iranian foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.
At least one of those two meetings – on 31 August – was publicised at the time by the Iranian official press. It has not been proven that Hamas military operations were discussed.
Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, said on Sunday that Hamas was acting as a proxy for Iranian interests, including Tehran’s desire to derail a possible peace accord between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Tehran openly and enthusiastically supports the attacks by Hamas, but at a weekly press conference the Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanani said: “We have no role in making decisions on behalf of any party in the region, including the Palestinian nation … what concerns us is that we consider the resistance of the Palestinian people to be a legitimate resistance.”
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has said the US has no direct knowledge of Iran being behind the attack. US intelligence agencies will be pressed on the subject in the days ahead.
In June, Iran hosted a delegation of “Gaza Strip-based resistance movements’ officials”, the WSJ said, including the secretary general of Islamic Jihad, the second largest militant group in Gaza. The delegation was led by Hamas’s politburo chief.
More recently, Hamas’s representative in Lebanon was in Tehran for an Islamic unity conference. In a report published on 4 October, the Tasnim news agency said the representative spoke to participants about the need for “all Islamist parties to do everything in their power to liberate al-Quds [Jerusalem]”.
Senior Israelis such as the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, have long claimed that Hamas is funded by Iran. In April, Gallant claimed that Tehran sent $100m annually to Hamas, $700m annually to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, and tens of millions to Islamic Jihad.
Hamas used Iranian technology and logistical support to produce arms locally, he said, but it is thought to be mainly reliant on smuggling weapons from its tunnels under its border with Egypt.