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MIDEAST: Not Another Ground Assault

Analysis by Peter Hirschberg

JERUSALEM, May 22 2007 (IPS) - Twice this week, Defence Minister Amir Peretz has warned that Israel will not refrain from launching a massive ground operation in Gaza if Palestinian militants do not halt the firing of rockets into southern Israel from the coastal strip.

Twice this week, Defence Minister Amir Peretz has warned that Israel will not refrain from launching a massive ground operation in Gaza if Palestinian militants do not halt the firing of rockets into southern Israel from the coastal strip.

The latest warning came Tuesday, when Peretz told European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, on a visit to the region aimed at dousing the latest surge of violence, that the government was restraining itself from sending troops in on the ground in response to the ongoing rocket fire.

Earlier in the week, Peretz said Hamas should “not delude itself. We will not be deterred from any decision – including a ground operation.”

Despite Peretz’s breast-beating, for now a major Israeli sweep into Gaza appears unlikely. Olmert, deeply scarred by the debacle of the Lebanon war last summer, seems disinclined to send in massive ground forces. So do most of his ministers, who wonder whether the public has the stomach for what would be a long, complicated operation.

Military officers have also been circumspect about a ground assault, wondering what the endgame would be, especially since Israel does not want to find itself again ensconced in Gaza. That doesn’t mean, however, that the latest escalation won’t ultimately end in an Israeli incursion into Gaza.

Pressure on the government to adopt an even harsher response to the rocket fire from Gaza intensified Monday evening when a 35-year-old woman was killed by a rocket in the southern town of Sderot – the first Israeli fatality in the latest round of violence, which has seen some 140 rockets launched into Israel in the last week.

For now, the government is likely to keep up its aerial strikes in Gaza – a policy it renewed last week in the face of daily rocket salvos into Israel. Over 30 Palestinians, most of them militants, have been killed in the aerial raids so far.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants have again become targets as Israeli planes hunt them from the skies. In one lethal strike, four militants belonging to the Islamic Jihad group, which has been responsible for many of the rocket attacks on Israel, were killed Sunday when a missile slammed into their car as they drove near the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza.

In the deadliest attack so far, eight Palestinians were killed when a missile fired by an Israeli military aircraft smashed into the home of a Hamas lawmaker on Sunday night. Khalil al-Haya was not at home at the time of the blast, but seven of his family members, including his 60-year-old father, were killed in the strike.

Hamas officials said that two of the dead were militants and the rest civilians, but Israeli officials insisted that five of the dead were members of the armed wing of the Islamic group and that three were civilians.

The strike immediately raised questions as to whether Israel was also renewing attacks on the political leaders of Hamas, as it did several years ago when it assassinated the group’s most senior leaders. That assessment was strengthened by threats issued the next day by two senior cabinet ministers.

Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter warned that the Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal might be targeted. Dichter, a former head of the Shin Bet internal security service, said that Mashaal, whom Israel tried to assassinate in Jordan in 1997, was “not immune, not in Damascus and not anywhere else. I’m convinced,” he said in an interview on Army Radio, “that at the first opportunity, he will be bade farewell.”

Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer followed that up with a more sweeping threat. There was no distinction, he said, “between those who carry out the (rocket) attacks (into Israel) and those who give the orders. I say we have to put them all in the crosshairs.”

Military officials, however, insisted that al-Haya was not the target of Sunday night’s strike, but rather a group of Hamas militants gathered near his home. And despite the threats to renew attacks on Hamas political leaders, government officials let it be known that the renewal of aerial strikes was aimed at the Islamic movement’s military wing and not its political leaders.

For now, Israel appears intent on keeping up the pressure on Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants via ongoing aerial strikes, in the hope this will persuade them to cease firing rockets into Israel. Senior ministers have ruled out calls by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the hawkish opposition Likud party, to target Palestinian infrastructure in Gaza, like the electricity supply, if the rocket fire continues.

With the trauma of the war in Lebanon last summer still fresh, ministers don’t believe there is broad public support for a major ground push into Gaza.

In response to an attack on a border patrol, in which three soldiers were killed and two were captured by Hezbollah guerrillas, Israel launched a major military assault in Lebanon in July last year, but despite its superior fire power it was unable to halt the daily firing of dozens of rockets into the northern part of the country.

After failing to subdue Hezbollah from the air, a hesitant Olmert launched a limited ground offensive that also failed to stem the rocket attacks and which many Israelis believe was poorly managed.

Government ministers and military officials also counsel against a ground operation for fear the army would get entangled again in the densely populated Gaza Strip. Deputy defence minister Ephraim Sneh has warned against re-entering Gaza – Israel pulled out of the coastal strip in August 2005 – saying the situation was complicated and that there was no “magical solution” to the rocket fire.

Army chief Gabi Ashkenazi is known to be against a major ground incursion. The military says that Hamas has built an elaborate maze of underground tunnels in anticipation of an Israeli ground push, and is reticent to get sucked into house-to-house combat in the narrow alleyways of Gaza.

But the death Monday in Sderot and the mounting political pressure on Olmert to take even harsher measures in Gaza as a result of the ongoing rocket attacks could force the Prime Minister’s hand. The pictures of hundreds of women and children fleeing the rocket-hit town of Sderot have already forced the government to renew aerial strikes in Gaza.

And Olmert could also find his already shaky ruling coalition further jolted if his more hardline partners demand a harsher response. Avigdor Lieberman, head of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) party, has intimated that he would quit the government if the military was not ordered to take more severe measures in Gaza.

“The current coalition has reached the moment of truth,” he said. “They must either dismantle Hamas or dismantle the government.”

Some hardline lawmakers want the government to order a major ground operation in Gaza, similar to the one Israel launched in April 2002 when it re- invaded the West Bank following a spate of suicide bombings in its cities.

For now, Olmert will clearly be hoping that the aerial assault on militants in Gaza and the threats to target Hamas political leaders will persuade the group to agree to another time-out in the war of attrition between the two sides.

But Olmert – maybe chastened by his Lebanon experience, when he made bold, unfulfilled pledges about crushing Hezbollah – has been careful not to offer any instant solutions. “I don’t have simple answers,” he told angry residents in Sderot during a visit to the shell-shocked town on Monday. “Even when we were in Gaza they continued to shoot at us.”