Israel takes out top Hamas commanders
The IDF, in a joint operation with the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), has carried out a wave of targeted killings of senior Hamas operatives, including the righthand man of Mohammed Deif.
The operations, in Gaza City and Khan Yunis, were groundbreaking and complex, targeting operatives close to Deif who himself has survived multiple attempts on his life by Israel, the IDF said.
Among those killed were Rafa’a Salameh, the head of
• the Khan Yunis district, Mohammad Yazouri, the head of Hamas’s military intelligence, Bassam Issa, the head of the Gaza City brigade since 2017, and Jomaa Tahla, the head of the Hamas cybernetwork and missile technology project.
According to the Shin Bet, Tahla was Deif’s right-hand man and the central leader of the group’s intensification project.
“Hitting him is a significant blow to Hamas’s intensification project,” the security agency said of Tahla.
Other targets were Gamal Zabda, the head of the group’s development and projects department, and the chief operative of the Hamas rocket unit. According to the Shin Bet, Zabda held a PhD in mechanical engineering, specialized in aerodynamics, and was a significant source of weapons technology know-how for Hamas.
Khazem Khatib, the head of the Engineering Department in the production division of Hamas, and who served as its deputy chief of staff, was also killed.
Another 13 members of Hamas’s weapons manufacturing staff were also killed. Six were identified as Zaher a-Shahri, the head of Hamas’s R&D and production project, Mahmoud Fares, a mechanic in the group’s R&D and production project, Majad Hadidi, control engineer, Akram Aleta, assistant to Bassam Issa, Hassan Aki and Kamal Krike, who were both active in Hamas special units.
Following the killings a barrage of more than 50 rockets were fired out of Gaza toward Ashkelon and Ashdod.
In an earlier strike, the IDF said, in a combined operation with the Shin Bet, it killed two senior Hamas leaders who were key military intelligence operatives. The two were identified as Hassan Kaugi, the chief of the security department, and his deputy, Wail Issa, the brother of Marwan Issa, who is the deputy commander of the military wing of Hamas.
The two were in a building of more than 10 stories. Hamas had warned that if Israel targeted high-rise buildings, it would fire on Tel Aviv, a threat it carried out. The residents of the building were warned by the Israeli military to evacuate before it was hit, according to Wafa, the Palestinian news agency.
The IDF also destroyed the home of Salah Damhan, a senior official in Hamas, which was being used to store weapons. • for cover, of empty cities, of buses burning, buildings hit, people weeping and body bags. That’s its goal. It burnishes its credentials and demoralizes Israel.
The question is whether we have to play along; whether the media have to act as an accelerator; whether they need to show the images over and over and over again. For what purpose? Show it once, twice – we
get it.
This is an asymmetrical battle, as always. All kinds of footage and images will be coming out of Israel. Hamas, on the other hand, will carefully pick and choose what it wants coming out of Gaza. If, God forbid, an errant IDF shell kills children inside Gaza, that footage will be readily available. But footage of IDF attacks on military targets will not be forthcoming.
There has long been a tension between the military and the Foreign Ministry about what type of footage to release. The military is generally stingy, not wanting to release much visual material, because of a concern that it will somehow compromise tactics or sources, while the Foreign Ministry generally wants to get raw visual material out there because it helps to better explain what Israel is doing, and why.
But there is another reason for the IDF to show more pictures of its operational successes inside Gaza: So that the Israelis see it.
The public needs more than just to hear the prime minister and chief of staff and defense minister say that the IDF is hitting Hamas hard. It needs to see some images showing that – if only to push off the screen the unending image of pain, agony and distress inside Israel.
This type of footage of operational success is important to inculcate inside the public – a public that is suffering – a sense that while it is getting hit, it is not in vain, and that the other side is getting hit equally hard. If you are getting blasted; if alarms of falling rockets are going off every three minutes; if your cities are getting pounded, you want to see – along with the rockets flying over your cities – some kind of visual proof that the IDF is operating and protecting you.
This is by no means a desire for Israeli television networks to show grisly pictures of pain and agony from Gaza. It is a call, however, to reduce the images of pain and agony in Israel.
This is an atmosphere of war, and in a war, you want to build up a nation’s morale, not demoralize it. Nonstop pictures of direct hits on Israeli apartments, of terrified citizens, and fires in the streets do just that. • it’s ready, we’ll announce that. But in the meantime, we have great confidence in our team on the ground in Jerusalem, led by a career diplomat, Jonathan Schreier, who enjoys open and regular access to a range of senior officials.”
Just since this weekend, she said, there were more than 25 high-level calls and meetings by senior US officials with senior officials from Israel, the Palestinian Authority and representatives from Qatar, Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia.
“Just yesterday we had more than 10 phone calls by senior Washington-based officials, including National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s call with his counterpart,” said Psaki.
However, previous rounds of escalation in the region required mediators on the ground, an effect that cannot be achieved in a phone call. On Wednesday, Blinken announced that
US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israel and Palestinian Affairs Hady Amr will fly to Israel to try to de-escalate the situation.
MARK DUBOWITZ, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, told The Jerusalem Post that “President Biden seems content to let his national security advisor and secretary of state do the talking for him, and his Iran envoy do the negotiating for him in Vienna.
“This seems to be a general trend over the last 100 days where the president seems disengaged on foreign policy issues,” Dubowitz said.
“There is no substitute, however, for presidential leadership, and given his connections and decades of experience, he would be expected to be working the phones,” he added. “But perhaps he is content to let the Israelis have a few days of political space to do severe damage to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad before lighting up the switchboards in the region.”
Lucy Kurtzer-Ellenbogen is the director of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict program at the US Institute of Peace.
“Once again this conflict has proven that it will force its way onto a US administration’s agenda,” she told the Post. “There has been valid critique in the past that constant prioritized US engagement on this conflict at the highest levels of the administration is not the proportionate and strategic use of our leverage and resources.
“That said, a pendulum swing in the other direction is equally unhelpful. A de-prioritized and smaller-staffed approach across administrations to proactively address the multiple conflict drivers in this arena does not help head off the type of explosion we are now witnessing.
“With no special envoy appointed, no US ambassador to Israel in place, and no consul-general since the Trump administration took the step of closing the Consulate in Jerusalem, the US administration is left to divert the most senior-level attention when crises such as this emerge,” she said.
“The US relationship and lines of engagement with the Palestinians were still in the process of resetting, following decisions taken over the last few years,” Kurtzer-Ellenbogen continued. “The current moment underscores the urgency of reestablishing effective regular and right-sized channels of engagement, at the same time as it potentially sets back or diverts from progress toward that goal.
“Priority at this immediate point will be for the US to assert its leverage and leadership to push for de-escalation as quickly as possible. This will require working in tandem with its international partners, who have their own sets of leverage to bring to bear on the different actors.”
She went on to say that “when the violence abates – hopefully sooner rather than later – the key will be to maintain such coordinated partnership and focus toward addressing conflict drivers that, if left to fester, will only lead to an all-too familiar sequel to the current moment.”