Opinion | How Israel Attacked Gaza and Radicalized Yet More Palestinians

There is something catastrophically reckless, if not malevolent, about the timing and nature of Israel’s unprovoked attacks on Gaza, which began last Friday and ended with a ceasefire Sunday. The impact on internal Palestinian power dynamics will be long lasting – and it will cast a long shadow over the calm Israel purports to pursue in the south of the country.

Israel knows full well that several Palestinian Islamic Jihad leaders are discontented with its trade-off with Gaza’s rulers, according to which Hamas keeps the peace in exchange for tentative, unsustainable measures easing the blockade on the Strip.

“When we stop resisting, and are satisfied with a few [of those] measures, who will demand our rights?” asked PIJ secretary general, Ziyad al-Nakhalah, two weeks ago. “We should intensify our resistance and impose new facts on the ground. Only then can we achieve the minimum of what we aspire to.”

The PIJ, however, knows that Gaza’s beleaguered public vehemently opposes another round of ruinous and devastating conflict. Hamas has been working around the clock to keep the PIJ in line to uphold the ceasefire, which until last week had held since May 2021, framing the containment as unifying decisions of war and peace by maintaining a “joint factional operations room.”

PIJ hardliners needed a powerful trigger to defy Hamas and take action on their own. And Israel’s government gifted them not one trigger, but two.

First, the detaining of PIJ leader Bassem Saadi, 62, in Jenin last week, where he and his family were beaten to a pulp until his wife was taken to the emergency room at the Ibn Sina Hospital. There was no significant security value in humiliating Saadi, a political rather than a militant figure, who has no operational role. Israel was displeased by his calls for a unified intifada and already arrested him a year ago. He was warned not to engage in any further political or social activities.

The pictures of Saadi’s bruised face and his blood covering the floor worked like magic to mainstream his preaching and rhetoric and enrage the PIJ’s base and leadership alike. It created a strong pretext to shake up a status quo in which Israel seem to believe it had impunity because it saw Palestinians as defenseless and forgotten.

When the PIJ demanded Saadi’s release, or else, Israel’s Prime Minister, Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz were wary of accusations of weakness had they acted rationally and defused the simmering crisis. Instead, they established a lockdown in Israel’s south for four days, sealing Gaza hermetically, cutting off workers from their jobs and patients from urgent care.

Unlike Hamas, the PIJ is not in charge of Gaza, so it had little to lose from this stand-off, but it was still relatively constrained by Hamas. That is when Israel gave the Iran-backed militants their second, decisive gift.

When voices from the Israeli right began to call Lapid’s lockdown “a security disaster,” the caretaker premier, facing fateful November elections, decided he needed to showcase strength, no matter the human cost. The Israeli government decided to go for a limited escalation with the PIJ alone, without engaging Hamas. This started with the assassination of Tayseer Al-Jabari, commander of the PIJ’s Northern Gaza Brigade.

Lapid rushed to boast that Jabari was “one of the two most senior commanders in Islamic Jihad.” He was a militant so senior, so infamous and so dangerous that Israel’s military spokesperson, Ran Kochav, comically struggled to even remember his name on national TV.

Israel’s targeted killings in Gaza always lead to the same results: a more radical and more popular PIJ with a base more unified around revenge and retaliation; a compelling pretext for an escalation that unleashes the pent-up fury of Gaza’s siege and status quo; and greater legitimacy for armed groups and armed resistance in general.

Jabari was more moderate and less connected to militants in the field than his predecessor, Baha Abu Al-Atta, whom Israel assassinated in 2019. Before taking command of the PIJ’s Northern Gaza brigade, that brigade was known, under Abu Al-Atta, for being insubordinate, defying Hamas and the status quo. Now, amidst intense confrontations, hardliners have a higher chance of filling his post.

From the moment of Jabari’s death, Hamas lost its ability to contain the PIJ, but its leaders exerted tremendous pressure to prevent the PIJ’s response from leading to an all-out war. The joint factional operations room marked redlines that should not and were not crossed.

The PIJ’s retaliation has been unremarkable compared to the magnitude and severity of Israel’s airstrikes. Between 35 (Israeli estimates) and 44 (Palestinian estimates) Gazans were killed during the hostilities, including 15 children: Israel claims that at least eight fatalities were caused by errant PIJ rockets.

In the three days of the escalation, the PIJ and other armed groups in Gaza together launched a total of about 580 primitive short and medium range projectiles and mortars on Israel that led to no fatalities. This number is notably low compared to the rate from last year’s round of hostilities, when more than 4360 rockets were fired, reaching Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem, and it falls far short of the retaliation threats made last year. Last April, Hamas leader Yahia Sinwar vowed a first salvo of 1,111 rockets into Israel if called to defend Jerusalem in the future.

As Hamas exercised maximum restraint and worked tirelessly to keep the PIJ’s actions within its redlines, the PIJ didn’t even use a single one of its homemade, medium-range “Buraq-120” projectiles, which carries a warhead with 300 kilograms of TNT, or its “Improved Qassam” projectile with a 400-kilogram TNT warhead, and it didn’t deploy any of its improvised drones or its Cornet anti-tank missiles.

The escalation could have actually ended in its first hours, had Israel offered a reasonable compromise to restore calm that the PIJ would have had no choice but to accept. This could have included releasing Bassam Saadi and ending raids and clashes in Jenin, or releasing the two PIJ hunger-strikers Khalil Awawda and Raed Rayan who are on the verge of death,.

Instead, on Saturday night, Israel assassinated the PIJ’s Southern Brigade commander, Khaled Mansour, in a series of airstrikes on a densely populated refugee camp in Rafah, which left eight people dead and more than 40 wounded. That marked an irrevocable turning point in the PIJ’s internal power struggles.

Mansour was a calculating, measured and deeply influential figure with a formidable popular base in the PIJ. He played a central role in developing the its militant wing, connected to its foot soldiers, and was very well connected with all the militant groups in Gaza. He and Akram Ajouri (who was unsuccessfully nominated to be the movement’s Secretary-General when then-head Ramadan Shalah was incapacitated) were the counterweight to Ziyad al-Nakhalah and Abu Al-Atta’s group in the PIJ.

While Gantz and Lapid might find electoral value in adding Mansour’s assassination to their resumes, the impact of his death in in the long-term will be to empower Nakhalah, famed for his inflammatory rhetoric and who is currently visiting his patrons in Tehran: to make the PIJ more impulsive, militant-minded and adamant to avenge its revered leader; and to weaken Hamas’ ability to contain them.

Once the dust settles from this round, Israel’s political establishment is more likely than not to unlearn everything this escalation made clear. The Israeli government will continue Gaza’s 15-year-long draconian besiegement, immiseration and slow suffocation, and pretend there is nothing abnormal in keeping 2 million people under a permanent state of non-life.

To avoid being called “weak on terror,” Israel will refrain from building a permanent ceasefire arrangement with Hamas that allows economic and sustainable development in Gaza, no matter how far Hamas has gone to exercise restraint and act responsibly.

Gantz and Lapid will suffice with the usual ceasefire understandings; giving meager bandages, painkillers and occasional crumbs of mercy to Gaza (a few worker permits, expanding the fishing zone) and expecting only silence and gratitude in return.

But if electoral expediency and competitive rhetorical prowess are put to rest for a moment, the only way Israel can guarantee sustainable calm is if it finally works towards a long overdue breakthrough in the Gaza file and let its people be.

Israel will only know peace once it ceases its own military’s provocations, abuses and violence in the West Bank and treats Palestinians as individuals and a collective with rights, rather than as atomized, dehumanized subjects. Only then will Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s platform of militant resistance become redundant, and its leaders reluctant to threaten such major breakthroughs with violence.

Muhammad Shehada is a writer and civil society activist from Gaza and a student of Development Studies at Lund University, Sweden. Twitter: @muhammadshehad2