Episode Notes:

Over the weekend, Hamas militants broke through the border wall surrounding the Gaza Strip and rampaged through Israeli streets, killing more than 700. To discuss the attack, the intelligence failures that led to it, and the broader implications for the region, Michael Koplow, the chief policy officer of Israel Policy Forum, joined the WarCast. This episode was recorded on Monday, Oct. 9, 2023

[:28] The Hamas attack in Israel

[2:16] The political response

[4:35] How did this happen?

[8:40] An Iranian role?

[10:48] Military operation

Episode Transcript

Aaron Stein: My name is Aaron Stein and I am the Chief Content Officer at War on the Rocks. You are listening to The WarCast, the members-only podcast for what you need to know now. Hello and welcome to The WarCast where today I'm talking to Michael Koplow who is the Chief Policy Officer at the Israel Policy Forum in Washington DC. Mike, it's good to have you on the show.

Michael Koplow: Thanks for having me.

Aaron Stein: I think listeners can gather what we're going to be talking about, which is the... I mean, I don't really know what to call it. The tragic events that took place over the weekend in Israel where militants from Gaza as part of the Hamas group were able to infiltrate large parts of Israeli territory, killing I think the latest death toll when we're recording this is 700, 1000s injured on top of it. What happened for those who are trying to catch up on the news?

Michael Koplow: For those who are trying to catch up, on Saturday morning, Hamas fighters broke through the border fence around Gaza. Some reports say that they broke through in 29 different places. I've seen reports that they broke through in 70 different places, but they broke through, concurrent with rockets being fired out of Gaza and they basically rampaged around Israeli communities that sit inside of Israel, outside of Gaza, in the Gaza envelope. The current fatalities that have been confirmed are in the 700s, but I suspect that that number is going to go up to over 1000. Perhaps more worrisome, there are somewhere between 125 and 200 Israeli hostages that were taken by these fighters back into Gaza.

Israel is facing a situation that it really has never faced before. The death toll on Saturday is the largest number of Israelis killed in any single day since the founding of the state. This, of course, is all taking place amidst an ongoing crisis with the Israeli government that had not really showed any signs of ending anytime soon. In many ways, it's the darkest day in Israel's history and comes in what was already one of the darkest periods in Israel's history.

Aaron Stein: Let's talk about the political response. We'll come to the military response later. How has the Bibi Netanyahu government been responding to this? Is there unity as they try and respond?

Michael Koplow: The initial response has been seen as a failure on all levels, political and military and intelligence. I assume we will and we should get to the military and intelligence part of it in a little bit. On the political level, the Israeli government was effectively absent. It was hours before Prime Minister Netanyahu or any Israeli cabinet minister appeared, said anything, issued a statement, was seen in public. Even now, and we're two days beyond it, many Israeli ministers have effectively been AWOL, not seen from or heard from. The families of the missing Israelis who were taken back into Gaza have still, as of this morning, not heard directly anything from the government. They're left to glean information from social media posts and from rumors. The political response so far has been pretty awful. In terms of unity, Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz, who are the leaders of the two largest opposition parties, have publicly offered to join the government.

Yair Lapid came out first and offered to join the government so long as Netanyahu was willing to get rid of the two far-right parties that sit in his government. Those two parties, Otzma Yehudit and [inaudible 00:03:50], are led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, names that should be familiar to people by this point. Benny Gantz has also offered to join a unity government. He has not put any public conditions on it. And reports this morning were that representatives for Netanyahu and for Gantz were negotiating about bringing Gantz into the government, but so far nothing has been sealed or concluded. I will be surprised if at some point there is not a broader unity government, but given the bad blood between the two sides of the Israeli political spectrum, given the distrust of Netanyahu and given Netanyahu's unwillingness so far to jettison his very extreme partners, it doesn't seem like it's going to happen immediately.

Aaron Stein: So how does this happen? People think of Israel as this high-tech state. There were all these sensors along the border. There was an actual wall. How does this happen? Where do the failures stem from?

Michael Koplow: There are a number of failures. So let's start with the intel failure part of this. There are two possibilities, and I'm not sure that they're mutually exclusive. Possibility number one is that Israeli intelligence simply missed what was taking place. The reports are that this is an operation that has been in the planning stages for a year. It involved 100s, if not over a 1000 Hamas fighters on Saturday. The number of people that had to have been ready into this ahead of time would have been very large. Given Israel's intelligence assets and its legendary reputation for being able to penetrate the West Bank, Gaza, and Palestinian society relatively thoroughly, if they didn't have any wind at all that this was coming, it's of course a shocking miss.

Possibility number two is that similar to 9/11, the details were in front of them, but they didn't understand what they were seeing. There is some credence to that given that for the previous two weeks, there had been riots along the Gaza border. The consensus of Israeli intelligence and most analysts, and I'll say that before Saturday, I agreed with this assessment, was that because Israel had closed the two crossings into Gaza, the Erez crossing, which is for people, and the Kerem Shalom crossing, which is for goods, that Hamas was orchestrating riots along the border in order to pressure Israel into reopening those crossings, and in addition, pressuring the Qataris to re-up the amount of aid that they sent into Gaza, which they had recently downgraded the amount. It turns out in hindsight that those riots on the border were probably test runs for what happened on Saturday. So it's possible that Israel saw this and just misread what it was, and it's also possible that both of these things happened, that it misread it, but that it also didn't catch the much larger operation. That's on the intel side.

You mentioned high-tech, and I think that one of the big failures here is actually the Israeli reliance on high-tech. I spent a lot of time down on that border. I think I've been to the Gaza border three times already in 2023, and I've sat in the operations' room in the Erez crossing and watched all the cameras and the sensors and all of the surveillance that they have to keep an eye on the border. That reliance on technology only works if you assume that when you see that the fence is breached, you have a response. It seems that the reliance was simply on the high-tech sensors, and no real thought was put into, well, what happens if people breach the fence and those sensors are activated? That leads to the last and I think biggest failure here which is that Hamas fighters rampaged around southern Israel, murdering people in the streets and taking people back into Gaza, and it was hours before there was any real coordinated official response.

Part of that certainly has to do with IDF preparedness. There are all sorts of reports now about reservists who are being called up and have no equipment because the supply warehouses are empty. There are GoFundMe's going around for reservists to buy them helmets and bulletproof vests. We're talking about basic equipment, and it also has to be mentioned that 70% of active duty IDF soldiers before Saturday were stationed in the West Bank, including soldiers from the Gaza division, including soldiers from the base in the Gaza envelope that was overrun by Hamas fighters. All sorts of issues around preparedness and policy decisions about where you are stationed in the IDF, and if you have 70% of the IDF in the West Bank, then obviously you are leaving both the border with Gaza and the border with Lebanon and Syria, which may be the next front, woefully unprotected.

Aaron Stein: There's been a lot of speculation about the role of Iran. I know you follow the Israeli debates very closely. What are they saying about it? Is the possibility that this war could spill outside of the borders of Israel and go all the way into Iran itself?

Michael Koplow: There's a report in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that Iran was deeply involved in the planning of this operation and gave the official go-ahead a couple of weeks ago. Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah leaders have been publicly meeting with Iranian officials for months. It seems pretty clear that there was some Iranian role. Iran is well known to supply weapons and technology and assistance and cash to Hamas. Certainly, there's an Iranian role in this. Whether Iran was intimately involved in the planning and directing the operation, frankly, I have no way of knowing. You have the Wall Street Journal report. There are other Israeli reports that seem to indicate that perhaps Iran was not as intimately involved in the details as the Wall Street Journal report suggests. But of course, Iran has a role in this. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, not to the same extent, but they are both Iranian proxies, as is Hezbollah, which may be the next front that's activated.

And what we've seen so far are not only Israeli warnings to Iran about not opening up another front and not getting involved. We have seen the United States send a carrier strike group to the Eastern Mediterranean in a very clear signal to Iran not to try and escalate things further. Whatever Iran's role has been in this, I think that there will be an Israeli response. I will be surprised, absent Hezbollah opening up another front if that response is a direct overt Israeli strike on Iran. But I think that Iranian security officials tend to have short lifespans. I think that the Israelis are almost certainly going to be looking into that in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

Aaron Stein: Let's turn to the military operation here. There's been airstrikes. I think the head of the IDF or the defense minister has already said that Gaza is under siege. No food, no people going back and forth, no supplies. There's large-scale reports and pictures of tanks being moved south in expectation of a ground offensive. And the declared operation is, I think, to eliminate all of the Hamas leadership. Where is this going? Because Israel does not want to or at least had not wanted to occupy Gaza. Are we headed back to an occupation? What's the end game here? What's the medium gain here? And where is it all going?

Michael Koplow: I think a ground operation in Gaza is inevitable. This is something that Israeli prime ministers, defense ministers, chiefs of staff, heads of southern command have all desperately wanted to avoid since Hamas took over in 2007. But at this point, the politics of the issue are such that with 100s of dead Israelis lying in the streets and 100s of Israelis captive in Gaza, the Israeli political and security establishments have any choice. In a lot of ways, this is reminiscent of the U.S post 9/11 when you only had one member of Congress vote against the authorization for use of military force. And in Israel, there is wall-to-wall sentiment that the equation in Gaza needs to change. And if Israel is indeed determined to remove Hamas' leadership and remove Hamas from control of the day-to-day in Gaza, that cannot be done with airstrikes. That is going to involve an enormous ground operation with tanks and infantry going with massive air support.

I think that's almost certainly going to happen. Whether that solves the fundamental problem, I think, is an open question. It will certainly do lots of damage to Hamas. It will result in many Israeli military casualties and many Palestinian casualties, including innocent civilian ones. But I think it's coming no matter what. The real question that people should be asking starting now is when this indeed happens, what the end game is? You talked about short-term and medium-term goals. And Israel does not want to own Gaza. It does not want to reoccupy Gaza. It does not want to be running the day-to-day in Gaza. There's a reason that Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005. That was disengagement, by the way, from Gaza that was under Palestinian authority rule, not under direct Israeli day-to-day rule. So I would hope that the Israeli government is thinking about what those options are going to be once it removes Hamas from power.

The only real option that exists at the moment, assuming that Israel does not want to run the place, is the Palestinian authority, which is an extremely problematic, imperfect option. I think there are also questions about whether the Palestinian authority, which has wanted to return to Gaza, is willing or even able to do it literally on the backs of Israeli tanks and troops. But the Israelis need to be thinking about the day after because we know here as Americans over the last 20 years that we've seen the gap between military success in places like Afghanistan and Iraq versus political success and diplomatic success and what happens after the military operation. In this case, I would say it's even more important for the Israelis given that Gaza is not 8,000 miles away from where they are, but literally right in their backyard.

Aaron Stein: Well Mike, I could ask millions more questions here, but we're coming to the end of the WarCast time. Thanks for taking the time out of your day to do this.

Michael Koplow: Yeah, my pleasure, Aaron.