HOW THE WEST BANK FITS INTO THE EQUATION
Violence by Israeli settlers is complicating Israel’s war in Gaza
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Thousands of Hamas fighters are now facing a deadly shootout with the Israeli army as the disastrous war their leaders triggered is in its tenth week. Now out of their tunnels, those men are trying to cope with the increasing winter chill and heavy rains. There is little shelter for them, or for the bedraggled surviving citizens of Gaza, from the elements and from Israeli bullets and bombs.
War is hell, too, for Israeli troops, who are on the hunt, now engaged in house-to-house and rubble-to-rubble searches for Hamas fighters, who will be far more willing to engage in one-on-one shootouts in the south of Gaza than in the earlier days of mass bombing in Gaza City. Future historians will make their judgment on the stunning ratio of dead Palestinians in Gaza to the Israeli combat dead. Israel’s military leaders now assess that the majority of Hamas fighters will be dead, will be captured, or will have deserted by the end of January. But then what? If the religious zealots who now dominate the government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have a day-after plan, it is not known. What does the end of fighting mean for the surviving citizens of Gaza?
The only sure thing is that the astonishing number of innocent civilians of Gaza killed or maimed by Israeli bombs has left a stain on Israel’s international reputation that cannot be ignored. The disparity, as a former Israeli military officer told me this week, “is something that Israelis will have to think about. I support the war,” the official added, “but the balance is not right.”
In a series of interviews this week, I have learned more about the current scenario. The biggest surprise has been the number of Hamas fighters in the south who have chosen to surrender to Israeli troops. An American official with access to sensitive information said as many as seven hundred Hamas soldiers, all thought to be motivated by religious fanaticism as well as anti-colonial resistance, chose to surrender, in lieu of being shot, in the past week or so. “This was not expected,” the official said. “Israel expected Hamas to fight to the end, just as America thought the Japanese would do in World War II.”
That total included a senior aide to Yahya Sinjar, known to be one of the masterminds of Hamas’s October 7 cross-border raid into Israel that led to the death of 1200 Israeli citizens and soldiers, as well as the capture of 240 hostages, many of them on active duty in the Israeli Defense Force. Sinjar’s aide, whose name I could not learn, was said to be in charge of communications for Hamas.
Sinjar, who spent more than two decades in an Israeli prison, is believed to be hiding somewhere in the south of Gaza and is among several high-value Israeli targets there. The official told me that there is sensitive intelligence indicating that officials in Iran and Hezbollah, the militia group in Lebanon, have accused Sinjar of “going too far” in the October 7 attack. Rather than grabbing a few Israeli soldiers to be used as bargaining chips in future prisoner releases, the official said, “Sinjar ordered an all-out attack” that was far more successful, both in its violence and the number of hostages captured, than anticipated. Neither Iran nor Hezbollah has made any overt moves to directly support Hamas since the war began.
Another surprise in the past week was renewed contact between Israel and the Hamas political leadership in exile about a possible exchange of Israeli hostages in return for the release of Palestinians now held in Israeli jails in the West Bank. At this point, I was told, there are 137 Israelis in Hamas custody and still thought to be alive. All were taken hostage on October 7, and as many as thirty-six of them are believed to be active IDF members, men and women between the ages of eighteen to thirty-one. Eight civilian women and two children are still believed to be in custody.
The official said that Hamas has expressed interest in “the exchange of ten hostages in return for the release of as many as forty prisoners now in Israeli custody and a 48-hour ceasefire in the war. Those to be released could include captured men” from the age of 22 and up. I had previously been told that in the earlier hostage release talks Hamas insisted that the captured Israeli males between the ages of eighteen and fifty were either in the IDF or in the active reserves and would not be released.
The Israeli intelligence community, the official said, “knows much more about the hostages than it lets the public know. A few elderly men and women who were grabbed and taken to Gaza without their medications died in captivity because of lack of medical treatment. An elderly woman who spent forty four days in captivity without her heart medication is now dying in an Israeli hospital because her condition became terminal while being held, untreated by Hamas.”
There will be payback, the official said: “The minute the last hostage is on Israeli soil, the entire [Hamas] leadership—political, religious, and military—will be killed in the countries where they live. Mossad is already tracking them, but killing them before the hostages are out is risky.”
He said that “the big problem” today between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government is not the war against Hamas, but Netanyahu’s clash with the Palestinian Authority, the much weakened agency still nominally in charge of the West Bank. Steadily increasing violence committed there against the Palestinian population by Israeli settlers, who are openly supported by the IDF and the extremists that now dominate Israeli politics, has triggered alarms in Washington. The official told me that “Bibi’s continuing campaign” in the West Bank “is complicating Israel’s efforts to create favorable arrangements in Gaza after the war ends,” and the violence has become a “huge obstacle” for the Biden administration.
The most direct sign of Washington’s alarm came Tuesday during Biden’s remarks to a routine campaign reception for Jewish contributors. The president defended Netanyahu’s decision to go to war with Hamas. “There’s no question about that,” Biden said. “None. Zero. They have every right.” But he went on to attack the hardliners that now dominate the Israeli government, specifically citing Itamar Ben Gvir, the Israeli minister of national security, who has been given expanded authority by Netanyahu over Israeli police and the security forces in the West Bank. Ben Gvir’s support in the Israeli Knesset helped Netanyahu win a fifth term as prime minister, at a time when he was facing serious corruption charges—charges that are still pending.
Ben Gvir is a fanatic who has been arrested dozens of times and convicted at least eight times on charges of incitement to racism against Arabs and supporting a terrorist organization. Earlier this year, when asked about increased violence committed by settlers in the West Bank, he told a Washington Post reporter that American reporters needed “to stop getting things in the wrong order. There are individual cases of violence from Jewish residents against Arabs and I am aware of them, but there are thousands of cases of Arabs engaging in violence against Jews.”
Biden was uncharacteristically caustic about Gvir. “This is a different group,” he told his Jewish supporters. “They don’t want anything remotely approaching a two-state solution. . . . They don’t want . . . anything having to do with the Palestinians. . . . We have to make sure that Bibi understands that he’s got to make some moves to strengthen the PA. . . . You cannot say there’s no Palestinian state at all in the future.”
The president pointedly added that he and Netanyahu “talk a lot. I’ve known him for fifty years. . . . He’s a good friend but he has to change. . . . This government in Israel is making it very difficult for him to move.”
The American official told me that the Israelis running the government today “are pissed at Biden and think he should have said that we’re with you all the way. ‘You got to do [in the West Bank] what you got to do.’”
The crucial question now facing the American intelligence analysts, he said, “is whether there is going to be a regional war” in the Middle East if the Netanyahu government continues to ignore the growing crisis in the West Bank. That question, given the prime minister’s ongoing legal predicament and the support he needs from Ben Gvir and his clique, “is up in the air.”
“There is a lot of behind-the-scenes back-and-forth,” he added, on the future of the two-state solution in the Middle East.