Israeli Defense Forces are mobilizing for “a long war” against Hamas, according to Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, who characterized the looming campaign as a “fight for the Western world.”
“Israel is the last frontier of the West. Israel is the last place — when you go east, you will find terror organizations,” Cohen said on Monday. “We will fight for humanity. We will fight for the Western world. We will fight against demons.”
ISRAEL ORDERS ‘TOTAL SIEGE’ OF GAZA IN AFTERMATH OF UNPRECEDENTED TERROR ATTACK BY HAMAS
That message represented a frank argument for sustained international support ahead of a showdown in the Gaza Strip, where 2.3 million Palestinian civilians live in close proximity to untold thousands of terrorists. Israeli media reports suggest that 1,500 of the Hamas terrorists were killed inside Israel over the weekend during a rampage that raises the specter of a protracted conflict in Gaza.
“It’s very important for us to say we are at war,” Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Lior Haiat said in a question and answer session following Cohen’s remarks. “This is a war against a terrorist organization. Our main goal is to ensure that Hamas and other terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip will not ever have the capability to do these kind of atrocities again.”
Hamas raiding parties poured into Israel after breaking through or even flying over the border fence between the Jewish state and the Gaza Strip. Having caught Israeli Defense Forces and law enforcement by surprise, they “attacked the Israeli army’s southern Gaza headquarters and jammed its communications, preventing personnel from calling commanders or each other,” according to Reuters, slowing the Israeli response.
“It was five hours before they fired at us,” a captured Hamas terrorist was quoted by Israeli media as saying during interrogation. “We were ready with 1,000 fighters. We breached the fence in 15 places.”
They inflicted “ISIS-level savagery” on lightly defended Israeli communities, as a senior U.S. official put it, and their “ISIS-level style tactics and techniques” have galvanized trans-Atlantic support for Israel.
“In recent days, the world has watched in horror as Hamas terrorists massacred families in their homes, slaughtered over 200 young people enjoying a music festival, and kidnapped elderly women, children, and entire families, who are now being held as hostages,” the White House said in a joint statement with France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. “Our countries will support Israel in its efforts to defend itself and its people against such atrocities.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly has notified Biden that Israeli forces will launch a ground offensive into Gaza, 18 years after the IDF pulled out of the strip on the theory that they could contain the terrorist elements inside the Palestinian-populated areas.
“They need a new model, a new strategy for Gaza,” a senior central European official based in Israel told the Washington Examiner. “I really don’t know what the strategy will be because I think any kind of permanent military presence in Gaza is highly unpopular because it will be costly in terms of casualties of the military.”
The conflict will raise the conundrum of how to fight a terrorist organization in an urban area. Israeli tactics frequently have drawn condemnation from international human rights observers such as Amnesty International, which has accused Israeli forces of imposing “a form of collective punishment against the civilian population” of the Gaza Strip.
Cohen sought to preempt such criticism on Monday as he welcomed the “solidarity and the firm support of Israel” evinced by world leaders in recent days.
“We trust this support will continue as we meet the challenge of fighting terror,” the Israeli foreign minister said. “And it will take time. It will not take a few days. It will take a long time.”
Cohen offered little insight into how Israel plans to proceed, but his spokesman emphasized that their plans going forward will be unlike “the other military operations” that Israel has conducted in Gaza, which typically have been short-duration bombardments aimed at Hamas’s infrastructure and leadership.
“Israel left the Gaza Strip 18 years ago with no intention of going back,” Haiat said. “We will not allow this reality to continue.”
U.S. and European powers have made repeated efforts to broker a “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but a peace deal has proven elusive for decades. In 1993, Israel’s then-prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, signed the Oslo Accords with Palestine Liberation Organization negotiator Mahmoud Abbas, who won a four-year term as president of the Palestine National Authority in 2005 and has not organized an election ever since.
“They rule the territories without legitimacy, without a mandate from elections,” the senior central European official said. “If there are elections, probably Hamas will win the election. So this is a really difficult situation.”
The haunting footage of Israeli victims that Hamas terrorists published on social media throughout the attack may galvanize European powers to take a more supportive posture towards Israel going forward, the official added.
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“We can, I think, not just watch but actively work with Israelis to discuss with them what can be done,” the senior Central European official said. “It could be that people start … thinking more creatively. And, just will not be that much fixed to the old paradigm, to Oslo Accords, to a model developed in a very different situation in the 80s and 90s, and will come up with new ideas, a new model that can, in the end, help also Palestinians have more secular lives and to live without terrorism, without Hamas, and without violence.”
Israel’s top diplomat sounded skeptical that such an outcome could be possible. “They don’t want to live next to us,” Cohen said. “They want to destroy Israel.”
