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Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari
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- Author, Ahmed Al-Khatib
- Role, BBC Arabic
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2 hours ago
Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari announced the beginning of a new phase in the Gaza war, “with less intensity in terms of ground operations.”
In an interview with the New York Times, Hagari mentioned the reduction in the numbers of ground forces as well as the Israeli air strikes on the Strip, saying, “The war has moved to a different phase, but this transition will not be accompanied by ceremonies.”
Hagari’s statements came the day after similar statements made by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to the Wall Street Journal, in which he said that his country’s army “is in the process of transitioning from intensive military maneuvers to other modes of special operations.”
Although Hagari gave daily briefings to the Israeli media, this time his statements came abroad, ahead of a visit by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to Israel, the fifth since the outbreak of the war on the seventh of last October.
Saeed Okasha, an expert on Israeli affairs at the Al-Ahram Center for Studies, said that these statements – which were not issued in an official statement by the Israeli Ministry of Defense – were intended to calm the United States, which is pressing hard to move to a stage in which the Israeli military operation is limited to special operations inside the Gaza Strip. .
In an interview with the BBC, Okasha described these Israeli statements as “not serious and evasive.” Because it is not being implemented on the ground, it is unlikely that it will serve its intended purpose.
Observers believed that Gallant and Hagari’s statements amounted to an announcement of the start of the third phase of the war after the phases of intense bombing and ground invasion.
“Everyone knows”
Jack Nerea, an advisor to the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, said, “The Israelis are fully aware that the third phase has already begun and they have witnessed the withdrawal of forces from Gaza and the return of many reserve forces to their homes. Everyone knows that we are in the third phase.”
Nerea added to the Israeli channel i24: “According to army officials, all of 2024 will be a year of war.”
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Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant
With the reduction in the number of Israeli forces inside Gaza, observers are likely to extend the new phase to several months, which Gallant indicated in his interview with the Wall Street Journal that military tactics “take some time.”
The New York Times quoted American officials as believing that the number of Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip has declined to about half of what it was last month at the height of the war (50,000 soldiers).
Speaking to the BBC, Sayed Ghoneim, a visiting professor at the Royal Military Academy in Brussels, said that Israel aims in the third phase to “establish a new security system in the Gaza Strip and create a new security reality for the citizens and state of Israel and for the residents of the settlements in the area surrounding Gaza, and then end Israel’s responsibility for daily life.” In the sector.”
Ghoneim believes that the path Israel will take to achieve this goal is to “gradually withdraw Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip, while creating a buffer zone or zones in the Gaza Strip.”
The most important features of the third stage
The third phase is expected to witness a significant reduction in military operations inside the Gaza Strip, according to Israeli officials.
Hagari told the New York Times that Israel will focus at this stage on “Hamas strongholds in the south and central Gaza Strip, especially around Khan Yunis and Deir al-Balah.”
American officials expect that the third phase will depend more on “local missions carried out by small groups of elite Israeli forces, which will move inside and outside residential communities in the Gaza Strip in search of Hamas leaders to snipe them and kidnapped hostages to rescue, in addition to destroying tunnels,” according to the New York Times.
In an interview with the BBC, Major General of Staff Muhammad al-Shahawi, a member of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs, believes that this stage will witness the targeting of Palestinian faction leaders abroad, as well as the targeting of specific areas, instead of adopting a scorched earth policy as was the case in the previous two stages.
Saeed Okasha told the BBC: “This stage will witness all forms of fighting. There are areas that may be Israeli-secured to a certain extent, so the enclaves therein will be liquidated through intelligence operations. There are other areas where raids will continue, and whenever large numbers of Israeli soldiers fall in the Gaza Strip, “Israel was more willing to return to violent bombing, even of civilian areas.”
Jack Neria spoke about carrying out operations in Gaza, albeit on a large scale and in different ways, saying: “The army will withdraw at times and redeploy at other times… and it will carry out very precise targeting operations, using intelligence.”
As for the Americans, they see this third stage as an opportunity for the return of those displaced by the war from their homes.
According to the Palestine Chronicle website, it was the Americans who insisted on using the phrase “positional operations” before the Israelis subsequently adopted it when talking about the third phase of this war.
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Why did Israel resort to announcing the third phase?
In addition, the third phase comes in response to international pressure in light of the high number of civilian deaths in Gaza and the deteriorating humanitarian conditions in the Strip. However, during the second phase of the war (the ground invasion phase), the Israeli army confirmed that it needed many continuous months to destroy the network of tunnels that It is used by Hamas fighters (and its length extends hundreds of kilometers below the Strip), according to the British magazine The Economist.
Major General Al-Shahawi said that during the previous two phases, Israel suffered heavy losses, forcing it to withdraw five brigades, in addition to a mechanized brigade that suffered heavy losses, from the northern Gaza Strip.
In this regard, The Economist noted that this war has already inflicted heavy economic losses on Israel. Since its outbreak, Israel has called up about 360,000 reserve forces, along with the main Israeli army – which means recruiting more than half a million out of an Israeli population of less than ten million people.
An Israeli official told Reuters news agency that reducing the number of forces will allow a portion of reserve soldiers to return to civilian life, in an attempt to support the Israeli economy damaged by the war.
But Saeed Okasha believes that although the economy is important, the decisive element in this regard is security calculations, especially with the desire of the majority of Israeli society to continue the war until Hamas is eliminated.
“The cruelest day”
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Al-Quds Brigades
Talk of moving to a third phase implicitly refers to the success of the previous two phases of the war, which is what Israel insists on – whether in whole or in part – while the facts on the ground say something different, according to the Palestine Chronicle website.
Israel’s goals in these two phases were: dismantling the armed Palestinian factions in northern Gaza, and destroying the capabilities of those factions in the center and south of the Strip.
On the ground, on the same day that Hagari announced the start of the third phase, the Al-Qassam Brigades and the Al-Quds Brigades bombed Tel Aviv from southern Gaza – in what Israeli Channel 12 described as “the cruelest day” for the Israeli army since the beginning of the war in Gaza.
In this regard, the War Watch website published, via the
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End of war
The Palestine Chronicle website sees Israel’s announcement of the third phase of the war as an attempt to end that war slowly without officially announcing this end.
But Jacques Neria confirms the start of the third phase, but he also confirms that this does not mean that the war is over.
“There is no talk of an end to the war,” Nerea says. “This is not on the table at the moment.”
Saeed Okasha believes that Israeli public opinion now does not imagine that the war will end or that its end will be officially announced before it achieves its goals.
Okasha refers to a recent opinion poll conducted by the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies, which showed that more than 90 percent of Israelis want the war to continue until Hamas is completely eliminated, which is a difficult goal to achieve, according to Okasha.
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2024-01-09 20:23:46
