::: spoiler HAMAS' ALAMO, PT. 2

The Biden administration had done its usual waffling. Its initial support for the Israeli response—“We’ve got your back,” President Biden famously said early in the crisis—has been tempered as protests against the Israeli bombing grew. Biden made two quick trips to Israel and Secretary of State Tony Blinken has been on the road and in what has seemed a constant state of bewilderment as Netanyahu continues to do as he wishes in Gaza. CIA Director Bill Burns showed up in the Middle East for a few days, allegedly to work on the release of hostages, and Biden a few days ago dispatched Brett McGurk, the National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, to the region to discuss the same matter.

When asked of the impact of those visits, the informed official, who has worked on Middle Eastern issues for decades, responded cryptically: “Bibi to those three blind mice: ‘Shaddup already.’” The official explained: “There is a power vacuum in Washington. No one is running the show” while America is continuing to ship as many as one thousand bombs daily to Israel. “It’s chaos in the White House. They are saying the same things over and over. They are doing what they think will get the president re-elected. He is a George the Third. It’s scary, and it is disgraceful.”

Netanyahu, fearing a guilty verdict in a now delayed criminal trial, clearly is determined, along with the generals in charge of the war in Gaza City, to rid Israel of Hamas and ride the war to another term as prime minister while never spending a day in jail.

The IDF, a well-equipped and well-trained military, now more than 520,000 strong, including 360,000 recently activated reservists, is constantly tightening the noose. Hamas fighters living underground are facing increasing danger in what is left of Gaza City. “Contrary to all the worries,” the informed official told me, “on the ground it’s turning out to be a piece of cake.” The IDF, he said, “is operating under very highly controlled fire discipline. They are destroying structures that previously were bombed” to ensure the tunnels below were no longer usable and thus “cutting off access to the sea and to the north and south” for the many thousands of Hamas fighters sealed below. Israel intelligence learned from its interrogation of the approximately two hundred Hamas fighters who were seized during the October 7 attack that their estimates of Hamas’s strength—twenty thousand or so—may have been off by as much as ten thousand fighters. And now, he added, “Gaza City now has the look of Hamburg in 1943.”

Once the fighters were isolated, I was told, the initial Israeli plan was to flood the tunnels with CS tear gas and explosives. CS is an enhanced form of tear gas that is widely used as a riot control agent. It could also save the lives of Israeli soldiers if and when they storm the tunnel systems. “Just wait for the reaction world wide if they gas Hamas in the tunnels in this last act,” the official said. “The mystery for me is why people don’t understand that this is for keeps, whatever it costs the Israelis in casualties or criticism from those who dismiss the horror of October 7.”

At this point, any journalist would immediately turn to Hamas for its view, but I have been unable to find a way to obtain comment. Hamas has told former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, then in Cairo, as he wrote in a recent Substack column, that its military win had destroyed more than 160 Israeli vehicle targets in Gaza in recent days, including twenty-seven tanks. Hamas officials also told Hedges that they had ambushed Israeli ground troops near the Al-Shifa Hospital. I was unable to confirm either of those statements.

The Israeli insider, who is a combat veteran, scoffed at the reports, telling me that only forty-one Israeli soldiers had been killed since the offensive began. He acknowledged that one Israeli tank had been put out of action by a Hamas fighter but noted there had been a lack of hand-to-hand combat. “Israel has been surprised at how little fighting the Hamas soldiers put up,” he said.

The media-savvy IDF have been providing a constant stream of briefings and reports to television and print journalists from around the world who flew to Israel to witness what most expected to be the last hurrah of Hamas, the Islamic resistance group whose following grew as the forward-looking Oslo Accords, promulgated in 1993, were steadily undermined by Israeli governments.

Hamas stunned Israel on October 7 by breaking through the walls and fences separating Gaza City from dozens of kibbutzim and small farming villages in the south of Israel. The early morning raids came, with no response from the IDF for as long as eight hours, as an all-night rave, attended by many hundreds of young Israeli men and women, was ending. The Hamas atrocities, including rape and murder, began there and went on for hours throughout the villages and kibbutzim nearby. Hundreds of IDF soldiers were killed in their quarters and others were taken prisoner. Netanyahu has promised an inquiry but the focus from his Tel Aviv headquarters has been not on an inquiry to find out what went wrong, but on payback in Gaza.

Netanyahu is planning, at the war’s end, with the destruction of Hamas, on remaking of the governing structure in Gaza and the West Bank, which has been the site of steadily increasing settler violence triggered by the October 7 Hamas attack. A newly rebuilt Gaza City, sans tunnels, will be secured by Israeli police or military force, with a revitalized Palestinian Authority, under new leadership approved by Israel, in charge of governance in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The tightened control would be essential for future Israeli expansion of settlement activities there. I was told one name in the mix to run the new Israeli-dominated Palestinian Authority offices is Mohammed Dahlan, a former leader of the Fatah youth movement in Gaza City. He was known for his support of the Oslo Accords and for his closeness to the American intelligence community after he was put in charge of the security forces in Gaza. His hatred of the more radical Hamas led to allegations of torture of Hamas suspects during his years in office, which ended when he was found to have embezzled untold millions of dollars in border-crossing fees. He is now living, as a multimillionaire, in the United Arab Emirates.

The Israeli insider, who has current information about Netanyahu’s postwar planning, confirmed to me that Netanyahu has ambitions beyond maintaining military and police control of the Gaza Strip rebuilt without Hamas. “The plan of Israel,” he told me, after the current war in the Gaza Strip is over and Hamas is no more, “is to turn all of Gaza” into one of the areas in the West Bank that, under the Oslo Accords, is now under Israeli security control. “It will be our people,” the Israeli told me, “who will maintain security in Gaza, and our people can go in and out. The borders with Egypt will be maintained by Israel, and not by Egypt as in the past. The goal being to control smuggling into Gaza, but it will not be Gazans doing it.”

The key remaining issue in Tel Aviv, he said, is “who will be in charge of the civilian control in the rebuilt Gaza?” And who will replace the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas, who is now eighty-eight years old, as the face of the Palestinian Authority. The PA nominally is charged with administering security, among other issues, in the West Bank, but it has failed to provide security to the Palestinian population there as Israeli settlers have expanded their settlements and seized Arab-owned land in doing so. The Israeli also floated the name of Mohammed Dahlan as the potential future leader of the PA in both territories.

With Hamas gone, anything will be possible for Israel and its prime minister in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.