No hopes of ceasefire in Gaza – official

Israel’s former ambassador to the United Kingdom, Daniel Taub, has poured cold water on hopes of a US brokered ceasefire in Gaza from next Monday.

Speaking to journalists in Johannesburg yesterday, Taub said President Joe Biden was speaking to a different constituency than the Israeli public.

Israelis, he said, needed a reassurance that any pause in fighting would bring about a different outcome after what he termed the greatest Israeli intelligence catastrophe since the Yom Kippur War 50 years before.

“We speak of a ceasefire, but there was a ceasefire in place on 6 October. Now we have found that Hamas constructed an underground city with a sophisticated tunnel structure that at 450km is longer than the entire London Underground,” said Taub.

He said that when Israel had voluntarily pulled out of Gaza 18 years ago, the international community had assured the government that it would have every right to defend itself, but now this had changed.

“We are in an impossibly difficult situation, fighting a war we never sought nor provoked in the first place,” he said.

Hamas, he said, had put Israel in an invidious position. If Israel stopped trying to degrade it, Hamas would do what it had promised and continue to launch attacks like on 7 October until it succeeded. If Israel continued to try to stop Hamas, the country ran the risk of creating civilian casualties and giving Hamas “a sick PR advantage”.

The world had proved it could not help, either, he said.

A multinational peacekeeping force was no answer either, given how Hezbollah had flourished in Lebanon and now numbered 150 000 highly trained and equipped soldiers despite the presence of the Unifil mission.

It was a war Israel had to win, but it was becoming extremely difficult because Hamas, with the backing of Iran, had evolved its campaign of terror on Israelis with a parallel campaign of lawfare, getting first political organisations like the UN General Assembly and then legal bodies to tie Israel’s hands.

“It creates another dilemma, does Israel take part in these court cases and lend legitimacy or not?” Taub said.

Pretoria had been a gift to Hamas, he said, giving the organisation an entree to the International Court of Justice that it would not have had otherwise.

What had galled him, in his visit to South Africa, Taub said, were the deliberate distortions that had been created here about the court ruling, which had not imposed any more measures than Israel was already taking upon itself.