Israel Seen As Gaining the Upper Hand in Battle With Hamas Over Gaza

Jodi Rudoren,New York Times

August 22, 2014

Israel Kills 3 Top Hamas Leaders as Latest Fighting Turns Its Way

JERUSALEM — Hamas is the party that keeps extending this summer’s bloody battle in the Gaza Strip, repeatedly breaking temporary truces and vowing to endlessly fire rockets into Israel until its demands are met. But the latest round of fighting appears to have given Israel the upper hand in a conflict that has already outlasted all expectations and is increasingly becoming a war of attrition.

Barrages of rockets from Gaza sailed into Israel nearly nonstop on Thursday, but they did little damage, and a Hamas threat against Ben-Gurion International Airport failed to materialize. Israel, meanwhile, killed three top commanders of Hamas’s armed wing in predawn airstrikes, and by afternoon had called up 10,000 reservists, perhaps in preparation for a further escalation but in any case a show of strength.

Israel’s advantage has never looked more lopsided. In contrast to the earlier phase of the war, Israel this week deployed its extensive intelligence capabilities and overwhelming firepower in targeted bombings with limited civilian casualties less likely to raise the world’s ire.

People looked at rubble of a house in Rafah that witnesses said was destroyed on Thursday in an Israeli airstrike that killed three senior Hamas military commanders. Credit Wissam Nassar for The New York Times

Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian faction that dominates Gaza, buried some of its most beloved and effective leaders while launching largely futile homemade rockets from its depleted stock.

“There’s a longstanding conventional wisdom that Israel doesn’t do well in wars of attrition,” said Michael B. Oren, an Israeli historian and a former ambassador to the United States. “That overlooks a broader historical view that Israel’s entire existence has been a war of attrition, and we’ve won that war.”

The long-term impact of the strikes against the Hamas commanders, which followed an attempted assassination of the head of the armed wing on Tuesday night, may be limited. Hamas waged its fiercest fight ever this summer despite Israel’s 2012 hit on the director of day-to-day military operations.

But in killing Hamas militant leaders responsible for years of headline-grabbing attacks, including the 2006 abduction of Sgt. Gilad Shalit, Israel dealt a profound psychological blow to the enemy while giving the home front something clear to celebrate.

“These are senior people,” said Michael Herzog, a retired Israeli brigadier general and fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “People in Gaza know exactly who they are, people in Israel know exactly who they are. In our bilateral context, it resonates strongly.”

Even more significant would be the death of Mohammed Deif, the shadowy figure who has survived several previous Israeli assassination attempts with severe injuries and was the target of Tuesday night’s attack. Mr. Deif’s fate remained unknown Thursday, though the body of his 3-year-old daughter, Sara, was recovered from the rubble of the Gaza City home where five one-ton bombs also killed Mr. Deif’s wife, baby son and at least three others.

Amos Yadlin, a former Israeli chief of military intelligence, called the killing of Mr. Deif’s three deputies “a very important operational achievement” and said that if Mr. Deif also turns up dead, “this will badly hurt Hamas’s military wing.”

“This is a complex campaign and there is no such thing as a knockout, or a silver bullet that will put Hamas out of commission,” cautioned Mr. Yadlin, director of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. “We’re now going to a war of attrition that was a threat of Hamas. Israel basically turned it upside down and said, ‘You want attrition? You are welcome. You lost your strategic military tools against Israel. Our firepower and our intelligence and our capability to sustain more days is much bigger than yours.’ This is the strategy.”

The Gaza Health Ministry said Israeli airstrikes had killed at least 60 people since the collapse on Tuesday of cease-fire negotiations in Cairo and the resumption of violence after nearly nine days of quiet, bringing the Palestinian death toll in the operation that began July 8 close to 2,100.

Several of Thursday’s attacks targeted men on motorcycles or in cars who Israel said were militants, though Palestinian witnesses also reported that five people, three of them children, were killed while watering a Gaza City garden, and five others while digging a grave in the Sheikh Radwan cemetery.

Returning to a limited air campaign after weeks of a ground assault in which 64 of its soldiers were killed in surprisingly strong challenges by Hamas fighters, Israel was able to avoid the large-scale collateral damage that has provoked international outrage.

The Israeli military said that more than 300 rockets were fired from Gaza over 48 hours, one of the most intense barrages of the battle so far, sending rattled residents of southern cities once again scrambling for shelter. Though Israel’s education minister announced that school would start as scheduled Sept. 1, the mayor of Ashkelon, less than 10 miles from Gaza, said he would not allow schools in his city to open under fire.

With Israel and the Palestinians apparently still far apart on terms for a durable truce, analysts suggested settling in for days or even weeks more of cross-border air exchanges, after what is already the longest Israeli military operation in decades. Diplomatic pressure appeared to be easing, if only because the world’s attention seems focused on other crises including the rise of Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria, the Ebola outbreak in Africa and civil unrest in Ferguson, Mo.

As the conflict grinds on, Israelis see time as on their side. Experts estimate that Hamas began the summer with a stockpile of about 10,000 rockets. It has fired nearly 4,000, according to the Israeli military, which says it has taken out at least 3,000 more. So it cannot keep launching at this pace for long.

Israel has much vaster resources, though its politicians and people are increasingly fractured over the prosecution of the campaign. There are growing calls for a more aggressive ground invasion, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has resisted, and intense opposition to the idea of making concessions in a cease-fire agreement that might seem to reward Hamas.

“His hope is that he can avoid those two things by essentially continuing an air campaign while Hamas fires rockets,” said Nathan Thrall, co-author of a recent International Crisis Group report on Gaza. “Israel can play that game for a long time, certainly longer than Hamas can. That’s true on a purely military level, but the fact is, as the war drags on, it’s going to be harder and harder for Netanyahu not to do one of those two things.”

In Gaza, time is a liability. The number of displaced residents seeking shelter in United Nations schools swelled to nearly 300,000 as the violence resumed; officials have already given up any hope of classes starting Sunday as planned.

Analysts said the recent halt in hostilities had made the leaders of Hamas’s Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades vulnerable, as they left the safety of underground bunkers.

In a statement, Hamas said that the three commanders were part of Qassam’s “founding generation” and had “fed pain to the enemy for more than 20 years.” Killed were Mohammed Abu Shamalah, who was the head of Qassam’s southern division and known as “the Fox”; Raed Attar, nicknamed “the Blonde” and in charge of the Rafah brigade; and Mohammed Barhoum — “the White-Haired,” or “the Old” — who had been on Israel’s most-wanted list for two decades.

When Sergeant Shalit was exchanged for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in October 2011 after Hamas held him in captivity for five years, it was Mr. Attar seen in a video ushering him from a pickup truck. Mr. Abu Shamalah, the Israeli military said, was also involved in a 2004 tunnel attack that killed six soldiers, and the 1994 murder of an Israeli officer in Rafah.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, called the killing of the Qassam commanders “a big Israeli crime that will not succeed in breaking our people’s will,” and promised, “Israel will pay the price.”

But a 39-year-old mourner who would identify himself only as Abu Nuqira acknowledged, “This is a painful loss — they are the symbols of resistance.”

In the Rafah refugee camp, a friend of Mr. Abu Shamalah’s said he had last seen him at the onset of the war, with Mr. Attar, and that he had said then he hoped to be a martyr.

“I told them, how do you stay together under these circumstances?” recalled the friend, who gave his name as Abu Mohammed and said he was 55. “He said that we lived together and we will die together.”