2023-10-22 20:08:20
For most residents of Gaza, the dull rumble of an airstrike is a familiar sound, the current barrage, which began after Hamas, a Palestinian militant group, which killed more than 1,400 Israelis on October 7, is the start of “the 5th war” since the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the region in 2005, notes The Economist.
But nothing could have prepared the people of Gaza for the scale of the destruction this time. The Israeli Air Force claims to have dropped nearly 6,000 bombs on this narrow strip of land in the first week of the war, more than the annual rate of American forces in their operation against the Islamic State in 2014-2017.
Analysis of satellite images suggests that in a short period of time, at least 4.3% of the buildings in the enclaves were destroyed.
To assess the damage caused by the strikes, The Economist analyzed freely available data from +Sentinel-1+, a European satellite. It flies over Gaza at least three times every 12 days and creates an image by bouncing microwaves off the Earth’s surface and measuring the “echo” when they return.
+ 92,000 people will no longer have housing +
By comparing images taken before the start of the war with the last image from October 12, areas with dramatic signal changes, a sign of damage, were identified and the accuracy of the method was verified by applying it to data from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol in spring 2022 and comparing it with human-coded assessments. The method is not perfect. Not all damage can be detected from above. As a result, the numbers might be too low.
The study of the situation in Gaza revealed that significant areas in the north may have been damaged or destroyed. The town of Beit Hanoun appears to be the most affected. Sources on site confirm that the Al-Soussi and Ahmed Yassine mosques, previously reported as damaged, have been razed. Overall, our estimates suggest that 11,000 buildings in Gaza are already damaged or destroyed.
The population of Gaza is particularly vulnerable to airstrikes. Around 2.2 million people live on this 40 km long and 10 km wide strip of land. All border crossings are closed. In some refugee camps, up to 400 people live in each 100 meter square. Hundreds of thousands of people have already been displaced. By merging our damage map with fine-grained demographic data, the analysis suggests that at least 92,000 people will have no place to return to when the fighting stops. That’s about three times the figure for roughly the same time in the 2021 war, says The Economist.
Israel says the strikes killed hundreds of terrorists and destroyed Hamas command centers. The Gaza Health Ministry reports that around 3,500 Palestinians have lost their lives, more than in any other conflagration between Israel and Gaza. As the bombs continue to fall and Israel expects to launch a ground attack, this figure will certainly increase.
+ Israel’s four unpleasant options for the future of Gaza +
The public statements made by Joe Biden, during his lightning visit to Israel on October 18, 2023, did not reveal many apprehensions about the imminent invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israel. But privately, the US president’s advisers hope to pressure Israeli leaders on a pressing question: What should happen after the war?
Israeli officials say they are focused on ousting Hamas from power in retaliation for the massacre it committed in southern Israel on October 7, the same source notes.
“Gaza will no longer pose a threat to Israel,” says Foreign Minister Eli Cohen. “We will not accept that Hamas has any power in Gaza. »
Even after the risks of fighting in such a densely populated place were illustrated by a deadly Oct. 17 explosion at Gaza’s Ahli Arab Hospital, which Israel blamed on an errant Palestinian rocket, Israel’s declared war aims have not changed.
+ Four-way stop +
But Israeli post-war plans remain uncertain. It offers four main options, each one bad than the other.
The first is a prolonged occupation of Gaza, such as the one it undertook from 1967 to 2005. Israeli troops are expected to secure the enclave and, in the absence of a Palestinian government, could also oversee basic services.
This could please part of the Israeli religious right, which still fumes against the 2005 withdrawal of all Israeli soldiers and settlers from Gaza, seen as the abandonment of part of the Jews’ biblical homeland. But no one else wants to see Gaza reoccupied, given the heavy financial burden and the likelihood of endless bad press and a steady stream of casualties. President Biden warned on October 15 that a lasting occupation would be a “grave mistake.” Most Israeli strategists agree.
Another option is to wage a war that decapitates Hamas and then leave the territory. This is arguably the worst path to take. Some Hamas leaders and supporters would likely emerge to reconstitute the group. Even if they didn’t, another unwanted force would take its place. The Middle East has a history of radical groups taking advantage of ungoverned spaces.
The best outcome, from Israel’s perspective, would be the return of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which governs parts of the West Bank in coordination with Israel. But this path is strewn with pitfalls. The first is that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, is reluctant to do so. “I don’t think anyone could be so stupid and think they can return to Gaza in an Israeli tank,” says Ghassan al-Khatib, a former Palestinian minister.
Even if Mr. Abbas were to succeed in taking power this way, he might not want to. Yasser Arafat, the former president of the Palestinian Authority and longtime figurehead of Palestinian nationalism, had a fondness for Gaza; he lived there for a time after being allowed to return to Palestine in 1994. People close to Mr. Abbas say he, by contrast, views Gaza as a hostile place.
Gaza would almost certainly be hostile to Palestinian police sent to secure it. The Palestinian Authority employs around 60,000 people in its security services, which exercise authority over around a third of the West Bank (see map). It cannot even control this limited area: parts of Jenin and Nablus, cities in the northern West Bank, are so restive that Authority forces do not dare patrol there for fear of being attacked. Morale is low. If Palestinian police returned to Gaza, they would become a target for remnants of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other militants. Hamas and the Palestinian Authority fought a bloody civil war in Gaza after Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006. Hamas eventually gained the upper hand and expelled the Palestinian Authority from the Gaza Strip in 2007.
Security isn’t the only option either. After Hamas came to power, Mr. Abbas asked Gaza bureaucrats to stop working. Hamas hired tens of thousands of supporters to fill public office, while the Palestinian Authority continued to pay its employees to stay home. Maintaining this bureaucracy would mean working with around 40,000 people hired for their ideological loyalty to Hamas; To reject it would be to repeat the mistake of the American “de-Baathification” program in Iraq, which threw legions of angry and unemployed men onto the streets.
Ultimately, Israel could concoct a sort of alternative administration, composed of local notables working in close collaboration with Israel and Egypt. Israel relied on this type of arrangement until the 1990s, before the PA began assuming civilian functions in the occupied territories.
There has been talk of trying to enlist Muhammad Dahlan, a former Palestinian Authority security chief who grew up in Gaza, to take the reins of Hamas. But Mr. Dahlan has spent the last decade in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). He fell out with the AP; in 2016, a Palestinian court found him guilty of corruption. There are also tensions between him and Gaza families: he led the fighting against Hamas in 2007. “I think it’s an illusion,” says Michael Milstein, a reserve colonel in the Israeli army and analyst at the Moshe Dayan Center, a think tank in Tel Aviv. “I’m not even sure he would want to come back. He would be afraid that people would want him dead.
Mr. Dahlan’s case highlights a more complex problem. The Palestinians have been divided for nearly two decades. The split is largely their fault: even though the leaders of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority meet every two years to advocate reconciliation, neither side is willing to compromise. But the schism was also exacerbated by the “divide and rule” policy of Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, who saw it as a useful tool to thwart the Palestinian dream of an independent state. “Netanyahu had a flawed strategy of keeping Hamas alive,” says Ehud Barak, former Israeli prime minister.
Hamas and the PA run their small states as one-party authoritarian regimes. In 2021, Nizar Banat, a critic of Mr. Abbas, was beaten to death by Palestinian police at his home in Hebron. Those who oppose Hamas in Gaza face torture and execution. Most Palestinians choose to remain silent, avoid politics and focus on their daily struggles.
The most recent poll from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Polling Research (PCPSR) found that 65 percent of Gazans would vote for Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, in a head-to-head presidential race against Mr. Abbas (who would lose power). Hamas would win 44% of the vote in Gaza in a parliamentary vote, while Fatah, Mr. Abbas’s faction, would get only 28%.
+ Between a rock and a pot +
On the face of it, this would suggest enduring support for Hamas. But these polls only offer a binary choice between activists and incompetents. 80% of Palestinians want Mr. Abbas to resign.
Hours after the hospital explosion, protests took place in West Bank cities, where demonstrators chanted: “The people demand the fall of the president.” He is 87 years old and has no clear successor. None of his future replacements inspire much enthusiasm.
In a hypothetical race between Mr. Haniyeh and Muhammad Shtayyeh, the colorless PA prime minister, the former would win by a margin of 45 points in Gaza and 21 points in the West Bank. Again, this speaks less to Mr. Haniyeh’s popularity than to Mr. Shtayyeh’s lack of popularity: a poll taken in 2019, after his first 100 days in power, found that 53% of Palestinians did not even know that he was Prime Minister.
Open-ended questions yield more revealing results. When the PCPSR asked Palestinians to name their preferred successor to Mr. Abbas, a majority responded that they did not know. The second most popular response, in both the West Bank and Gaza, was from Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah member who is serving multiple life sentences in an Israeli prison for orchestrating terrorist attacks in which Israeli civilians were killed. Several of the other frontrunners, like Mr. Dahlan and Khaled Meshal, a former Hamas leader, do not even live in the Palestinian territories.
Exiles, prisoners – or no one: Palestinian political life is moribund. Palestinians blame Israel for this plight, arguing that the lack of meaningful peace talks has deprived the Palestinian Authority of its raison d’être.
“I think Mr. Abbas will be the last Palestinian president,” says Mr. Khatib. “The whole idea of the Palestinian Authority is that it is a transition to a Palestinian state. If there is no political horizon, then the PA as a whole no longer matters.”
Israelis say the Palestinian Authority has been weakened by widespread corruption. Billions of dollars in foreign aid have been diverted over the past three decades to buy lavish villas in Jordan and to pad bank accounts in Europe. When asked to name the main problems in Palestinian society, more people cite the corruption of their own government (25%) than the continued Israeli occupation (19%).
There is enough blame to share.
The result, however, is that Fatah is probably beyond redemption in the eyes of most Palestinians, a liberation movement that has become fossilized and decadent. In recent years, even some Israelis have begun to wonder whether Hamas could become a interlocutor, following the same path Fatah took decades earlier from violent militants to pliable bureaucrats.
+ Two-state solution +
Not only did Hamas seem focused on improving Gaza’s economy, but some of its leaders also appeared to favor a two-state solution. That would have been a remarkable change for a group whose charter once called for the destruction of Israel. Last year, Bassem Naim, a member of the group’s political leadership in Gaza, told your correspondent that he was ready to accept “a state on the 1967 borders.” Ghazi Hamad, another politician, had said much the same thing a year earlier.
Mr. Milstein was one of the few prominent Israelis who warned, well before the massacre, that Hamas’s apparent pragmatism was a ruse. His point of view, confirmed by terrible events, is now almost universal in Israel. Even if Hamas were willing to participate in peace talks, the angry and grieving Israeli public would not be a willing partner: the vast majority of Israelis want to destroy Hamas, not reward it.
Two other questions will shape Gaza’s future. The first concerns the role that Arab states will play. In private conversations over the past week, several Arab officials floated the idea of a foreign peacekeeping force for the enclave, but quickly added that their countries were not eager to participate. .
Egypt is not popular in Gaza, both because it joined Israel in the blockade of the territory and because of its past as ruler of Gaza from 1948 to 1967. The UAE is said to be reluctant to play an important role. “We are not acting alone,” says an Emirati diplomat. The same is probably true for Saudi Arabia.
Israel would likely veto any role for Qatar, one of the countries with the most influence in Gaza. For years, the emirate has helped stabilize Gaza’s economy with Israel’s blessing, doling out up to $30 million a month in social grants, civil servant salaries and free fuel.
But his support for Hamas – some of whose leaders live there – will now make him suspect. “Israel’s whole strategy over the last decade was to trust Qatar,” Mr. Milstein says. “One of the lessons we should learn from this war is that we should not involve Qatar anymore. »
+ Reconstruction +
Even if Arab states do not wish to secure Gaza, they may be willing to contribute to its reconstruction. After the last major war, in 2014, donors pledged $3.5 billion for reconstruction (although by the end of 2016 they had only disbursed 51% of this sum). The bill will be even heavier this time.
The other question is what happens to the Palestinian Authority. Half of Palestinians believe the project should be disbanded. This would deprive many of them of income (the PA is the largest employer in the West Bank) and likely lead to more violence. But it would also increase the cost of the Israeli occupation and, perhaps, force the return of the long-term future of Palestine to the Israeli political agenda after two decades in which the subject was rarely discussed. “It’s the only card he has left,” explains a former confidant of Mr. Abbas.
There is no lasting solution for Gaza alone. Despite the long schism, Palestinians still see themselves as part of a larger political system. Regardless, the band is too small and lacking in natural resources to thrive on its own. Its economy depends on Israel’s: everything from strawberry plantations to furniture factories relies on exports to its wealthier neighbor. Whoever takes control, Gaza will be neither stable nor prosperous as a small, isolated state.
The only way to achieve lasting calm in Gaza is through a broader settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If the prospect of a negotiated solution completely evaporates, Mr. Khatib warns, “with it, moderate leaders will disappear.” Israel can decapitate Hamas. But it is much less clear that something better can take its place. (The Economist)
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