Israel Ignored American Advice After Oct. 7 and In Rafah, and Proved the Bidenites Wrong

The Bidenites have been free with advice to Israel on what it should or should not do in Gaza. Fortunately, the Israelis have ignored that advice. Even the New York Times now admits that the advice about Gaza given by Washington to Israel was wrong in two previous instances, but it now claims that the Bidenites’ latest advice to Israel — that it should pull out of Gaza and make the ceasefire permanent, because there is “no further military advantage to be gained” — is correct. More on the insistence that this time they have it right, and if Israel rejects such advice to pull out of Gaza it does so at its peril, can be found here: “NYT admits US officials were wrong about the IDF in October, and wrong about Rafah, but thinks they are right now,” Elder of Ziyon, August 15, 2024:

The New York Times headlines, “In Gaza, Israel’s Military Has Reached the End of the Line, U.S. Officials Say.”

Israel has achieved all that it can militarily in Gaza, according to senior American officials, who say continued bombings are only increasing risks to civilians while the possibility of further weakening Hamas has diminished.

In fact, the number of civilian casualties reported each month in Gaza has gone steadily down. The great majority of such casualties were incurred in the first six months of the war. During the last three months of the war, Hamas’ claim of casualties has hovered around 39,000, with only a few hundred added each month — testimony to the effectiveness of Israel’s elaborate system, through leaflet drops, text messaging, and robocalls, of warning civilians away from places about to be targeted.

How do the Americans know that the IDF’s ability to “further weaken Hamas” has diminished? On what basis do they make this claim? The IDF has taken apart most of Hamas’ 24 pre-October 7 battalions, but as we have seen, some Hamas fighters have managed to regroup in Gaza City and Khan Yunis, places where the IDF has had to return, troops to again dismantle these reconstituted Hamas units. Dozens of terror tunnels are still being discovered every month and need to be systematically reduced to rubble or filled with cement. And the IDF keeps discovering large caches of weapons, rocket launchers, and command-and-control centers hidden in such civilian structures as schools, mosques, apartment buildings, and hospitals. The IDF’s need to further degrade Hamas’ power has not, pace the Bidenites in Washington, yet diminished sufficiently for the IDF to pull out of the Strip.

With the Biden administration racing to get cease-fire negotiations back on track, a growing number of national security officials across the government said that the Israeli military had severely set back Hamas but would never be able to completely eliminate the group.

It then admits something else about these same US officials.

In many respects, Israel’s military operation has done far more damage against Hamas than U.S. officials had predicted when the war began in October.

Israeli forces can now move freely throughout Gaza, the officials said, and Hamas is bloodied and damaged. Israel has destroyed or seized crucial supply routes from Egypt into Gaza. About 14,000 combatants in Gaza have been killed or captured, the Israeli military said last month. (The U.S. intelligence agencies use different, more conservative methodologies to estimate Hamas casualties, though the precise number remains classified.)

The figure on Hamas casualties given by the Times is wrong. The IDF now believes it has killed not 14,000, but at least 17,000 Hamas combatants.

The Israeli military also asserted that it had eliminated half the leadership of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, including the top leaders Muhammad Deif and Marwan Issa.

But one of Israel’s biggest remaining goals — the return of the roughly 115 living and dead hostages still held in Gaza after being seized in the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks — cannot be achieved militarily, according to current and former American and Israeli officials.

Some Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, believe that the only way to get all the hostages back is to keep the military pressure on Hamas, striving to kill as many of its estimated 15,000 r combatants who are still believed to be alive, so that the terror group will become desperate for a ceasefire and a swap of hostages for prisoners. Given Hamas’ current refusal even to send a negotiating team to Doha, that time has clearly not come. Should Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7 attack, be killed — a major goal of the IDF since the very beginning of the war — that might make the remaining Hamas leaders in Gaza more amenable to a deal on Israel’s terms.