Region | Palestinian Territories
Ground invasion has both parties weighing the risks
Israeli leaders run the risk of repeating their disastrous experience in the 2006 Lebanon war, when they suffered high casualties in ground combat with Hezbollah, and they may face political fallout in elections less than two months away.
- By Sudarsan Raghavan and Griff Witte, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
- Published: 23:35 January 4, 2009
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Occupied Jerusalem: In the first eight days of Israel's battle against Hamas, the conflict was fought from the air, with Israeli fighter jets striking from the skies on targets in Gaza, and with Hamas firing unguided rockets with the hope they would land on Israelis living in cities as far as 25 miles away.
On Saturday, Israel altered that strategy, bringing the war to Hamas's doorstep with a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. In so doing, Israeli leaders run the risk of repeating their disastrous experience in the 2006 Lebanon war, when they suffered high casualties in ground combat with Hezbollah, and they may face political fallout in elections less than two months away.
Heavy toll
For Hamas, the Israeli attacks have taken a heavy toll in death and destruction, wiping out not only security and police buildings but also homes, mosques and a university that are all part of its network in the strip. The Hamas goal, analysts say, is not so much to win militarily but rather to exact a psychological victory, in the same way Hezbollah bolstered its legitimacy both inside Lebanon and in the Arab world after its war.
Many believe that the ground invasion could give Hamas, with superior knowledge of Gaza's terrain, an advantage over Israel's troops. "If you enter Gaza by land, a dark fate will await you," top Hamas political leader Khalid Mesha'al warned Israel in a televised interview on Friday from exile in Damascus.
Over the past four years, Israel has sought to block the Palestinians from using some of their most devastating, close-range tactics: suicide bombings and small arms in guerrilla-style strikes. Those kinds of attacks were favoured by Palestinians during the second intifada, or uprising, earlier this decade, but they are much more difficult to pull off today.
In 2002, at the height of the second intifada, more than 1,000 Palestinians were killed, compared with about 400 Israelis. In the past eight days of war, more than 460 Palestinians were killed, and four Israelis died by rocket fire. There were no Israeli military casualties in the air campaign.
For Yoav Amit, a school administrative manager in Beersheba, such statistics provided little comfort. On Thursday, he inspected a huge hole in a ninth-grade classroom, where a rocket had torn into the ceiling. "We can't depend only on airstrikes," he said. "We have no choice but to send ground troops into Gaza."
Still, he said, he worried about Israel's soldiers. "It didn't succeed in Lebanon," said Amit, who served in the Israeli air force during the 1973 Mideast war. "The same thing might happen in Gaza."
Persisting dilemmas
"The dilemmas are the same as Lebanon, except much worse with Gaza," said Gershom Gorenberg, an Israeli author who has written extensively about Israeli-Palestinian issues. "You're dealing with a nonstate actor who's radical. Nobody wants to repeat an occupation [in Gaza]. What makes things worse in Gaza is that no international force is going to want to come in and control the situation."
"The goal of the operation is to restore deterrence to our southern border. And deterrence is a matter of perception," said Isaac Ben-Israel, a member of the Israeli parliament from the ruling Kadima party and a retired major general. "If we hit them hard enough, they might come to the conclusion that they shouldn't fire any more rockets. But that won't be achieved without a ground campaign."
Ben-Israel acknowledged that a ground campaign carries risks. Flying high over Gaza with sophisticated missile-evasion technology at their fingertips, Israeli airmen are largely out of range of Hamas attacks; not so for the soldiers, who could find themselves fighting Hamas block to block through Gaza's densely packed cities.
Others were more blunt. "What's wrong with the air war? Do you prefer ground forces moving into the Gaza Strip and finding themselves encircled by one and half million Palestinians?" said Shlomo Gazit, a retired major general who was in charge of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip from 1967 to 1974. "It's a guaranteed catastrophe for the people in Gaza and for us."
But Hamas' capacities are still limited. "Hamas has no real tools to fight the Israelis. They're not Hezbollah," said Nabil Kukali, director of the Bethlehem-based Palestinian Centre for Public Opinion.
Still, there is a political benefit for Hamas in continuing to fire, even if the rocket attacks are no match for Israel's vastly superior military technology.
"In 2006, Israel was helpless in the face of rocket fire from Hezbollah. And Hamas has learned from Hezbollah's experience," said Ziad Abu Zayyad, a former Palestinian negotiator who publishes a journal on the conflict.
"Israel may know how to enter Gaza," Abu Zayyad said. "But I'm not sure they know how to get out."
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