Ultimate aim remains unclear as government prepares for next move

Chris McGreal in Jerusalem The Guardian, Monday 12 January 2009 Article history

The problem is to define victory. At first, Israel said that the goal of its onslaught against Gaza was to stop the Hamas rockets. But after more than two weeks and nearly 900 Palestinians killed, almost a third of them children and young people, the rockets are still flying into Israel by the dozen each day.

So then Israel said the end game was deterrence - to make Hamas recognise that the price of breaching the next ceasefire was so high it would no longer fire the rockets even if it has them.

But there are many among Israel's political and military elite who doubt that deterrence works with the Islamist group. Every rocket fired into Israel is a victory for Hamas and it is unlikely to stop unless a ceasefire comes with major Israeli concessions, such as lifting the economic blockade of Gaza. And then Hamas would claim its own victory.

So the army has been preparing militarily and politically for phase three - an escalation of the assault that is thought likely to include a major offensive into urban areas such as Gaza City, with all the risks that street fighting brings.

Hamas has said that if Israel attacked the city it would fall into its trap and that the Israeli military would lose so many soldiers battling through the warren of narrow streets, facing roadside bombs and hit-and-run attacks, that the Israeli public would never stand for it.

The army claims Hamas's armed wing has taken a severe beating and that the relatively low number of Israeli casualties so far - with nine soldiers killed, four of them by an Israeli shell - is evidence that resistance is failing.

"The experience so far shows that Gaza is not turning in to a death trap for the Israeli forces," said Shlomo Brom, a former chief of strategic planning in the Israeli military. "I don't think fear of casualties is the concern here. The concern is to decide what this operation is for. The political cost will be dependent on what is in phase three."

The military and the politicians are divided not only over whether to go to phase three, but what it is intended to achieve.

Brom said one goal would be to ensure that Hamas could no longer smuggle weapons into Gaza through tunnels under the border with Egypt.

"If there is breakdown in the next ceasefire the rockets will be launched not only against Be'er Sheva but Tel Aviv," he said. "We want to prevent it, and that was not achieved yet. That is not simple to achieve because we don't expect Hamas to deliver it.

"We expect the Egyptians to deliver it, so one of the purposes of the continuation of the fighting is to put pressure on Egypt or the international community to put pressure on Egypt."

If that is the goal, then the focus of the next phase of the assault will be along the border with Egypt where Israel may reoccupy the frontier and bring the Gazan town of Rafah under its control. Israel has tried occupying Rafah before and been forced out by the high number of Israeli casualties.

However, there are those in the military who see phase three as serving another purpose entirely.

The Israeli press reported yesterday that the officer in command of military operations in Gaza had urged the cabinet to allow the army to make the most of a "once in a generation" opportunity.

"If we don't do that we'll be missing a historic opportunity," Major General Yoav Galant is reported to have said.

Brom said Galant's history opportunity was a desire to topple Gaza's Islamist government.

"I think the main risk in this campaign is that through a series of incremental decisions to go a step further we may find ourselves in a situation in which eventually we change the objective of the war, and instead of the objective being to create this new balance of deterrence, the objective will be to topple Hamas, to destroy Hamas," he said.

Such a move would be fraught with danger, not least the risk of becoming trapped in Gaza in order to maintain control if the Hamas administration is toppled, he continued. "I think we are capable of taking the city of Gaza with a relatively small number of casualties.

"The problem is whether we are not changing our political aims and creating a situation in which we are bogged down in Gaza, in the sense that we reoccupy the Gaza Strip and now we have to decide what we are going to do with this poisonous beast."

Military stages
Phase One On the first day of the week-long air bombardment of Gaza about 250 Gazans were killed, many of them policemen at a graduation ceremony. In the following days, much of the public infrastructure was bombed.

Phase Two During the ground invasion a week later, Israeli tanks and troops seized large parts of northern Gaza, principally areas from where Hamas fired rockets into Israel. They also laid siege to towns and refugee camps.

Phase Three This is the planned ground operation into urban areas such as Gaza City. Hamas has said the city streets will be the soldiers' graveyard. But some in the army believe Hamas has been considerably weakened and such an operation would topple it from power.

Phase Four Plans for the complete reoccupation of Gaza have been drawn up, but the Israeli government says this is not on the cards.