Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Israeli report cites failures in 2014 Gaza war
Scathing analysis cites shortfalls on planning, decisions
Inquiry concludes that the military wasn’t prepared to counter and destroy Palestinian tunnel networks.
JERUSALEM — Israel’s intelligence was severely lacking and its military not adequately prepared to swiftly destroy the network of offensive tunnels used by the Palestinian militant group Hamas during the 2014 war in the Gaza Strip, according to a scathing official report released Tuesday.
Critics seized on the report by Israel’s state comptroller to argue that the failures prolonged the war, which lasted 50 days, and led to greater losses on both sides.
The report highlights systemic shortfalls in the planning, preparations and real-time decisions of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then-Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, the army’s chief of staff at the time and others in the security cabinet.
If Israel’s objective in the war was to find and destroy dozens of attack tunnels dug by Gaza’s militant Islamist organizations to infiltrate into Israel, its mission failed, the report states.
The investigators estimated that only half of the tunnels were neutralized by the war’s end in August 2014 — despite claims by Israel’s military that it had eliminated the threat.
“Even though the threat of the tunnels was severe and was known to the army’s southern command since 2008, the military’s southern command had no strategic operational plan to deal with the threat,” the investigators said.
The report was written by an Israeli general and released by the comptroller, Yosef Shapira, after an audit from September 2014 to August 2016.
In Israeli eyes, the report is far more important than those previously released by human rights groups and the United Nations.
The comptroller’s report does not address exactly how many of the tunnels are still operational.
Israeli forces continue to report that Hamas is digging new tunnels and expanding older ones.
Since the war’s end, the Gaza front has been relatively quiet, though Salafist groups in the coastal enclave occasionally fire rockets into Israeli territory.
The report highlights that in the months between the creation of Netanyahu’s previous administration, in March 2013, and the start of hostilities with Hamas in July 2014, his security cabinet did not discuss how conditions in the Gaza Strip — soaring unemployment, lack of water and electricity blackouts — could pressure Hamas to go to war.
Seventy-four Israelis, including 68 soldiers, and more than 2,100 Palestinians were killed in the fighting.
The United Nations and human rights groups say that 7 in 10 Palestinians killed were civilians, including 500 minors.
Israel says that about half the Palestinian dead were combatants and accuses Hamas of employing “human shields” — leading to the large numbers of civilian fatalities.
Israeli airstrikes and ground troops also caused extensive damage to the strip’s infrastructure, much of which has not yet been rebuilt.
The comptroller’s investigators concluded that Netanyahu and his government did not actively seek diplomatic alternatives to a war.
At the war’s start, the most pressing challenge was stopping the constant barrage of Hamas rockets and mortar shells.
While the report is the most in-depth investigation to date into events that led to the war and Israel’s actions during it, the comptroller notes that the inquiry does not assess the validity of Israel’s decisions or the overall results of the war.
Embargoed copies of the report were distributed to politicians and journalists days earlier, leading to lengthy analyses by Israeli commentators and fingerpointing by leaders involved in shaping the outcome of the war.