Operation Iron Swords has already begun with numerous bombing raids by Israeli aircraft on the Palestinian enclave in response to Saturday’s large-scale attack by Hamas militias. A surprise action with thousands of rockets launched against Israeli territory that has already claimed at least 600 dead and more than 1,800 injured, according to Israeli health sources.
Added to this is the entry into southern Israel of armed militiamen who have taken an unknown number of civilian hostages and military prisoners, in addition to several enclaves in at least eight Jewish towns.
“What is surprising is not the number of missiles launched by Hamas, but the incursion into Israeli territory and the taking of towns. That had never been seen and was not expected,” says Enrique Ayala, analyst at the Alternatives Foundation and retired brigadier general. of the Spanish Army.
Hundreds of armed militiamen have crossed the borders by land, through inflatable boats and even on motorized paragliders, says Ayala, who points out a certain “vulnerability of the Israeli defense”, in the middle of Shabbat and at the close of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has declared a state of war in a televised message, the mobilization of troops in the reserve has been ordered, tens of thousands, according to the Army, and he has assured that the response will be unprecedented.
In Gaza they have no doubt that the ongoing operation will be lethal and forceful. There are already 313 Palestinians dead, including 20 minors, and nearly 1,800 injured in the various air strikes launched by Israel on Saturday, according to the latest balance from the Palestinian Ministry of Health. “It is a very high number and the worst is yet to come, since the biggest bombings usually occur at night,” warns Martí.
“Leave Gaza”
At around 11:00 p.m., Netayahu confirmed his intentions. In another televised message, the prime minister assured that Israel will use “all its power” to destroy Hamas, and urged Palestinians to leave the Gaza Strip. “I say to the residents of Gaza: leave now because we will act strongly”
“The Israel Defense Forces are about to use all their power to destroy Hamas’ capabilities,” he said. “We will turn into rubble all the places where Hamas hides and operates from,” he warned. He has recommended civilians flee Gaza, although the movement of Palestinians from the strip out of the territory is impossible because of Israel’s blockades.
Gaza, an open-air prison
Everyone is aware that the worst part of the conflict will fall on the civilian population of Gaza, “the largest open-air prison in the world,” summarizes Martí. “A kind of large-scale concentration camp totally controlled and fenced by Israel,” Ayala illustrates.
There, more than two million Palestinians, half of them boys and girls, are crowded into a strip of 365 square kilometers in which Israel does not allow the entry of basic supplies or the exit or entry of people. A cruel blockade that has been in place since 2007, when Hamas won the elections and took control of the strip. “90% of the population depends on humanitarian aid to survive, there is a brutal economic collapse and there is a lack of medicines and health infrastructure,” summarizes the director of UNRWA Spain.
“Gaza is an absolutely tortured and subjected region. From time to time it reacts with outbreaks of violence that are repressed with great harshness by Israel, whose bombings do not usually discriminate between military and civilian targets,” Ayala maintains.
hell with no way out
“In Gaza there is no escape, no one can leave there and there are no air raid shelters for the civilian population. They cannot be built because Israel does not allow the entry of material,” adds Martí. He emphasizes that Israel has completely cut off the already precarious electricity supply in the strip and the Palestinian authorities have announced power outages due to lack of fuel. “It is terrifying to wait for a military operation in the middle of the night and in total darkness,” he notes.
As of 6:00 p.m. on Saturday, at least 20,363 internally displaced people were taking refuge in 44 UNRWA schools from Israeli bombing. Three schools were affected by collateral damage caused by the Israeli Armed Forces airstrikes.
For its part, Doctors Without Borders has reported that Israeli forces have attacked the hospital complex and an ambulance in front of the Nasser hospital, in southern Gaza. “The attacks have killed a nurse and an ambulance driver, injured several, and damaged an oxygen station,” the NGO reports. Bombings against civilian facilities are constant during Israeli operations, as humanitarian organizations have been denouncing for years. The effects of this new offensive are expected to be large-scale.
The deadliest military operation in the strip, called Cast Lead, was in 2008, when bombings killed about 2,400 Palestinians. “When Israel bombs, something common in recent decades, the population is left absolutely helpless and the physical and psychological consequences are enormous,” adds Martí.
There are fears of a possible prolonged operation, like the one in 2014 between Hamas and Israel, when the Islamist movement kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers. That led to a seven-week war. There were more than 2,100 Palestinians killed in Gaza and 73 Israelis, including 67 soldiers.
Possible military incursion into Gaza
Experts do not rule out that Israeli troops will enter Gaza in the coming hours, especially to try to free hostages and prisoners of Hamas militias.
The spokesman for the Islamic Jihad group in Gaza, Daoud Hishab, assured that “all captives in the hands of the resistance groups will be held until the release” of the Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons. At the same time, according to what he said, there are also women and minors among the hostages. Something that several videos circulating on social networks would prove.
Deadly crackdown in West Bank
The climate of violence is also worsening in the occupied West Bank. Five Palestinians, including a minor, died on Saturday during clashes with Israeli troops in different areas, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
Riots, protests and clashes have occurred in various parts of the West Bank, such as Jericho, Ramallah, Hebron and Qalqiliya. The last three deaths are a 13-year-old boy shot by Israeli forces in the Qalqiliya area, another 24-year-old boy who succumbed to his wounds after being shot by the Israeli Army in the town of Al Laban al Garbi and a 19-year-old boy. years who died in similar circumstances in Hebron.
Netanyahu wins props
Domestically, the Hamas offensive appears to have politically benefited Netanyahu, whose government – which includes far-right and Jewish ultra-nationalist parties – was more weakened than ever. His judicial reform has raised massive and constant social protests and the total rejection of the political opposition, who consider the legislative package an authoritarian turn that limits the separation of powers, weakens the rule of law and the country’s democratic regime.
Among the most worrying movements is that of numerous military reservists, who announced that they would not attend the call-up in case of emergency if the judicial reform went ahead. The televised announcement of the state of total war, Ayala believes, “also sounds like a warning from Netanyahu to the opposition military reservists,” who for the moment seem to be retracting their positions in the face of the terror caused by Hamas attacks.
“In a context of war, the political and social opposition is usually lowered for the sake of defending the national territory,” considers Ayala. And the statements of the Israeli opposition parties seem to follow that line. The opposition leader, Yair Lapid, has offered Netanyahu the formation of an “emergency” unity government to “oversee the difficult, complex and prolonged campaign that lies ahead,” he noted, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The large number of civilian victims in Israel has fostered unity in the face of the external enemy and has also generated the support of the great Western powers, Spain included, for the Israeli Government. “An absolute double standard when compared to the support for Ukraine in the face of the Russian invasion,” says Ayala.
From the European Commission to the US, the “terrorist” acts of Hamas have been strongly condemned, and their messages have once again ignored the six decades of illegal occupation of Palestine and the context of continued violence that the Jewish State applies against the Palestinians. .
30 Israeli raids on Gaza
Martí insists on the importance of context to understand the situation beyond this latest Hamas operation. “So far this year we have carried out thirty Israeli military incursions. In May there was another escalation of violence against Gaza with more than 100 Palestinians killed, while groups of Israeli settlers continue to take positions in occupied territories and expel Palestinians from their homes. “, Explain.
On Saturday, Israeli settlers launched an attack on the northern West Bank village of Yasuf, wounding two Palestinians with live ammunition and setting fire to two houses, according to the official Palestinian Wafa agency. According to EFE, the occupied West Bank and Israel are experiencing their greatest spiral of violence since the Second Intifada (2000-05) and in 2023, 209 Palestinians have already died in the framework of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, most of them militiamen in armed confrontations with Israeli troops and attackers, but also civilians, including 37 minors.
On Friday, a Palestinian was shot dead by Israeli settlers in clashes with settlers and Israeli soldiers in the town of Huwara in the northern occupied West Bank. The victim’s funeral led to new clashes between Palestinians and Israeli troops.
Inside Israel, Hebrew soldiers have managed to regain control in at least 29 strategic areas, as reported by the Government, which on Sunday morning ordered the evacuation of areas near Gaza.
Distant ceasefire
For the moment, the Israeli armed forces continue fighting in the south of the country to try to recover positions taken by Hamas and eliminate all the militants still in the territory.
In Ayala’s opinion, Hamas’s military action “is also political”, at a time of incipient diplomatic rapprochement not only with Saudi Arabia, but with other Muslim countries such as Morocco. The Saudi kingdom and also Qatar, Gaza’s main logistical support, have asked both parties for restraint, but blame the escalation on Israel’s continued violations of rights.
The expert considers that the Israeli operation will last “a few days”, as has happened on previous occasions, and a hypothetical ceasefire will surely come with the mediation of Egypt, which is already trying to contact the parties, as it did in the last Israeli operation, in May 2021. There were 11 days of clashes after weeks of tension during Ramadan that left at least 260 dead in Gaza and 13 in Israel.
However, according to Palestinian sources in Gaza cited by EFE, the Gazan authority rejected offers to negotiate a ceasefire with Israel that came from Egypt, Qatar, the Arab League and Jordan, while showing a position of strength and speaking of “success of your operation.”
