Analysis | Surprised by Its Achievements, Israel Rushed to End Gaza Campaign

International mediation efforts aimed at achieving a swift cease-fire between Israel and Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip came to fruition on Sunday.

The initial and most pressing need for a cease-fire was humanitarian. Gaza’s power plant is out of fuel, and fuel enters the Strip from Israel. Without more fuel, Gaza’s power supply will be disrupted and hospitals’ ability to function could be severely impaired. This would negatively affect the treatment of hundreds of people wounded in Israeli air strikes.

But the parties quickly moved on from discussing a lull in the fighting for bringing in fuel to talking about an immediate cease-fire. As Egyptian sources said, it came into effect Sunday night. Israeli political and security sources also sounded relatively optimistic. This could work, they said.

But at 8 P.M., as Palestinian groups often do under such circumstances, Islamic Jihad launched a comparatively massive barrage at southern Israel and the greater Tel Aviv region, with the goal of creating some kind of narrative of victory for the resistance.

And as usual, last-minute problems cropped up. Islamic Jihad demanded guarantees for the wellbeing of two of its members jailed in Israel. The Egyptians promised that everything would be fine as long as the organization committed to quiet.

Although a cease-fire was very much on the table, both sides knew it could take some time. The blows Islamic Jihad has been dealt – two of its senior commanders in Gaza were killed – actually complicated the talks a bit; it was hard for Islamic Jihad to end the fighting without any military achievements against Israel. The decision-making process was also complicated by the fact that some of its political leaders are abroad (usually in Syria, currently in Iran), while others are in Gaza.

Keeping Hamas on the sidelines

Throughout the three days of fighting, Hamas sat on the sidelines. Just like during Operation Black Belt in November 2019, Israel focused its fire on Islamic Jihad and Hamas did not get involved in the fighting. Israel’s concern was that, if the fighting dragged on and Palestinian civilian casualties mounted, it would become harder for Hamas to continue its restraint.

We got an example of this Saturday night, after four Palestinian children and one young man were killed in the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza. This briefly inflamed Gazans’ tempers, but fortunately for Israel, it could prove, on the basis of photographs, that the explosion was caused not by an Israeli air strike but by a misfired Palestinian rocket that accidently hit a home in the camp.

The Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit, in an unusual move, is steadily disseminating videos that show air force decisions not to strike homes in Gaza because civilians were spotted nearby. The message is clear: This time, Israel is making special efforts to avoid harming uninvolved civilians.

Over the weekend, a consensus developed among both government officials and defense professionals that it would be better to end the fighting as soon as possible. Israel was somewhat surprised on the upside by its own operational achievement in managing to assassinate two of the leaders of Islamic Jihad’s military wing in Gaza – the commanders of its northern and southern sectors. Another senior official, the commander of the organization’s antitank unit, was also killed.

Israel’s ability to determine where senior Islamic Jihad officials are even when they’re on the run – and one was killed a day after the fighting began – shows a high level of coordination between the Shin Bet security service, Military Intelligence, the air force and the IDF’s Southern Command. On the defense side, too, Iron Dome batteries have so far provided impressive protection against the more than 1,000 missiles launched from Gaza.

All of these, of course, are tactical successes, not a strategic victory. And this string of successes could end in a moment, whether because of a successful Palestinian strike on the home front, an attack near the Gaza border or an Israeli mistake that resulted in the deaths of innocents and would tip the international community against Israel. So far, the international media has focused mainly on events in Ukraine and Taiwan and has been almost indifferent to the periodic outbreak of fighting in Gaza.

In the background, despite remaining relatively quiet for now, are other areas prone to eruptions – Jerusalem, the West Bank and mixed Jewish-Arab cities inside Israel. So far, the attempted provocations on the Temple Mount by MK Itamar Ben-Gvir and his ilk have failed. Thanks to a heavy police guard, relative quiet was maintained on the Temple Mount even when some 2,000 Jews visited it on Sunday.

Israel didn’t expect Islamic Jihad’s fierce response to last week’s arrest of its top official in Jenin, Sheikh Bassam al-Saadi. The thinking apparently was that since he had already been arrested at least six times in the past, the seventh wouldn’t provoke a major storm. That forecast proved wrong, as we all know.

Moreover, prior coordination between Central Command, which carried out the arrest, and Southern Command, which bore the consequences, was evidently flawed. After the arrest, Islamic Jihad threatened a retaliatory attack from Gaza, thereby accelerating the escalation there.

But since then, Israel has demonstrated an operational focus that has produced several achievements. Nevertheless, the government and the heads of the security services would be wise to avoid being intoxicated with their achievements.

The bottom line is that Jerusalem mainly seeks to pressure Hamas to do more to restrain Islamic Jihad’s military activity against Israel in the future. That seems like an achievable goal, unlike the nonsense about defeating Hamas once and for all.

Prime Minister Yair Lapid openly told the leaders of southern communities, with whom he met Sunday afternoon, that the operation has exhausted itself. We’re seeking to end it, he said.

Hamas’ double game

One thing we’ve heard almost none of this time is the demand traditionally raised during military operations – to send in the ground forces to conquer Gaza. There’s apparently a practical reason for this: Islamic Jihad is a smaller organization than Hamas, so dealing it a significant blow doesn’t require such a step. But this also stems from Israelis’ declining willingness to accept military casualties.

Nevertheless, the possibility of an Israeli preemptive strike against Hamas in Gaza has come up at least twice in the last year and a quarter. Last year, after May’s mini-war with Hamas, there were defense officials (including the Shin Bet’s director at the time, Nadav Argaman) who thought it would be better to attack Hamas to keep it from rebuilding its military power in Gaza.

The second time was following an upswing in terrorism from the West Bank this spring that included lethal attacks inside Israel. That prompted then-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to consider launching an operation in Gaza, but the idea met with significant resistance from the IDF brass.

The different decision made this time stemmed from the different circumstances. Israel had been challenged by Islamic Jihad, whose threats of vengeance led to a lockdown on communities near Gaza. To escape this trap, it launched a kind of preemptive strike – a series of attacks on senior Islamic Jihad officials and operational cells, on the assumption that these wouldn’t escalate into a broader conflict.

Another question that will surely have to be addressed after the operation ends relates to Israel’s general policy toward Gaza. The Bennett-Lapid government adopted a different approach toward Gaza from its first months in office.

It removed some of the restrictions on bringing goods into Gaza, thereby making it easier to carry out major projects to rehabilitate the territory’s civilian infrastructure. It also allowed 14,000 Gazans to work in Israel, while promising to increase that number to at least 20,000 if quiet were maintained. These steps were based on the assumption that improving Gaza’s economic situation would convince Hamas to exercise security restraint over the long term and also prevent attacks by other organizations.

This assumption largely proved false last week. Islamic Jihad was preparing for an attack, and Hamas, despite pleas from Israel via Egyptian intelligence, announced that it had no ability to stop it.

This chain of events raises the question of how well-founded Israeli intelligence’s predictions were and whether Hamas, once again, wasn’t playing a double game by winking at Islamic Jihad and occasionally letting it take action. That enabled the organization to avoid completely abandoning the spirit of violent resistance against Israel and ensured that it wouldn’t be seen as an Israeli collaborator.