Mahmoud Abbas’s Efforts to Exacerbate the Conflict in Gaza

When reports of a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas emerged last week, officials from Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party immediately denounced it as a “betrayal of the Palestinian people” by Hamas. Bassam Tawil explains that not only is Abbas undisposed to the resumption of peace on the Israel-Gaza border but he bears some responsibility for the latest outbreak of fighting. In fact, the “march of return” in Gaza, which quickly evolved into escalating violence, followed on the heels of failed reconciliation negotiations between the two groups:

In March 2018, Abbas and his government decided to impose a series of punitive measures against his own people: the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The measures include, among other things, halting payments to thousands of civil servants and forcing thousands of others into early retirement. He also decided to stop paying Israel for the electricity it supplies to the Gaza Strip and limited the amount of medicine shipments to the coastal enclave.

Abbas has defended his sanctions against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by arguing that Hamas was refusing to hand control over the coastal Gaza enclave to his government in accordance with previous “reconciliation” agreements signed between his ruling Fatah faction and Hamas.

The violence of the past few months along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel could have been avoided had Abbas agreed to lift the sanctions he himself imposed on the two-million residents of the Gaza Strip. He chose, however, to continue these measures so that the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip would continue to direct their anger toward Israel. Abbas has no headquarters or offices in the Gaza Strip where the Palestinians there can protest against him. So he had nothing to worry about when he decided to punish his own people. He also had nothing to worry about regarding the international community because he knows that, as usual, it will blame only Israel for the crisis in the Gaza Strip. . . .

Equally disingenuous is that Abbas, who is responsible for the current wave of violence along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel, is now demanding that the international community, specifically the UN, provide “international protection” for the Palestinians against Israeli measures, . . . while he is doing everything he can to wreak havoc on his people in the Gaza Strip. He does not want a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel, he does not want to lift the sanctions he imposed on the Gaza Strip, and he does not want the international community directly to fund economic and humanitarian projects that would improve the living conditions of his people. So what exactly does Abbas want? He wants the people of the Gaza Strip to continue protesting so that he will be able to continue to demonize Israel.

Read more at Gatestone

More about: Fatah, Gaza Strip, Hamas, Israel & Zionism, Mahmoud Abbas

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF