GAZA — As Israel withdrew its forces from the northern Gaza Strip on Monday after a two-day assault on Hamas militants, and as Palestinians emerged from their houses to inspect the damage, Hamas leaders seemed to be following the playbook of their Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, in its 2006 war with Israel.
Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for Hamas in Gaza, said that like Hezbollah, Hamas had “gone from the stone to the rocket.”
“What we learned from Hezbollah,” he said, “is that resistance is a choice that can work.”
The clearest example of echoing Hezbollah came Monday when thousands attended a so-called victory rally, and Mahmoud Zahar, an influential Hamas leader, briefly came out of hiding to tell the rallygoers that his organization would rebuild any house that had been damaged by the Israeli strikes.
Holding up his group as the source of reconstruction as well as resistance is precisely the message that brought local and regional acclaim to Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, when his organization faced down Israeli attacks in the summer of 2006 through rocket barrages on Israel.
The latest surge in hostilities between Israel and militants in the Gaza Strip left 116 Palestinians dead, according to Dr. Moawiya Hassanain of the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, making it the deadliest fighting in Gaza in a year. Two Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting in northern Gaza on Saturday, and one Israeli civilian was killed last Wednesday by rocket fire in the border town of Sderot.
But more than 200 rockets have been fired at Israel since Wednesday, according to Israeli military officials, including at least 21 longer-range Katyusha-style rockets, which are manufactured outside Gaza and brought into the strip. Palestinians and Israelis see the use of those rockets as another illustration of the growing similarity between Hezbollah and Hamas, the militant Islamic organization that controls Gaza.
“We are very concerned that the role model for Hamas in Gaza is the Lebanese Hezbollah,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, when asked about parallels between this conflict and the one with Hezbollah.
“I have no doubt that the people who built Hezbollah’s military machine are now building the military machine of Hamas,” Mr. Regev added. He cited Iran, where Israeli security officials say the longer-range rockets used by both Hezbollah and Hamas were made.
Israeli officials say Hezbollah also provides Hamas with training and logistical support. They add that Hamas has also adopted other Hezbollah tactics, operating in civilian areas and in some cases storing weapons in homes, creating similar quandaries for the army that it faced in its war in Lebanon in 2006.
Soon after the forces left northern Gaza on Monday, two more of the imported rockets struck Ashkelon, an Israeli coastal city of 120,000 people about 10 miles north of the strip. One rocket hit an apartment block, causing damage but no serious injuries.
Hamas has claimed responsibility for most of the rocket fire. Hamas took over Gaza last June after routing forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah.
Mr. Abbas, who is based in the West Bank, suspended peace talks with Israel as the death toll rose in Gaza, and on Monday he called on all sides to agree to a cease-fire and to allow him to act as a mediator, a day before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was expected to arrive in the region for talks.
There was a second day of unrest in the West Bank on Monday, with Palestinians protesting the Israeli actions in Gaza and throwing stones at soldiers and Israeli cars in various locations. An Israeli settler shot and killed a 17-year-old Palestinian on a road west of Ramallah. According to Israel Radio, the settler said he had gone out for a walk and was confronted by a group of Palestinians, some masked, who threw stones.
In what was apparently a bid to remain relevant in Gaza, and in an echo of the actions of the Lebanese government in southern Beirut after the war in 2006, Mr. Abbas also instructed his government to allocate $5 million to compensate Gaza residents whose properties were damaged in the Israeli campaign.
Israel says its ground and air forces have been aiming only at rocket squads and weapons storage and production facilities in Gaza. Israel’s army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, and its chief of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, described 90 percent of those killed in Gaza in the last few days as terrorists.
But that figure is challenged by medical officials in Gaza, who say about half of those killed were civilians, including several young children. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem also issued a statement on Monday saying that by its count, at least 54 of the dead had not taken part in the hostilities.
Mr. Olmert was quoted as telling Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of Parliament that the recent military campaign, which started with concerted airstrikes on Wednesday and continued with the ground incursion early Saturday, was “not a one-time event.”
“We are in the midst of a combat action,” he said, adding that “the objective is reducing the rocket fire and weakening Hamas.”
On Monday evening, the Israeli Air Force struck another rocket-launching squad and the wagon in which they were transporting rockets in northern Gaza, an army spokeswoman said. Palestinian officials said one militant was killed.
Israel is mulling a much broader and longer ground operation in Gaza, the defense minister, Ehud Barak, has said in recent days. But Israeli government and military officials say they are wary of such a campaign because of the inevitably high cost in lives on the two sides and uncertainty about what might be achieved.
In terms of strength, Hamas is still far from Hezbollah. But if Israel does not act, said Mr. Regev, the spokesman for Mr. Olmert, it will wake up one day to a much more dangerous situation in the south with a large part of the Israeli population within range of Hamas rocket fire.
In the Gaza town of Jabaliya, the focus of the Israeli ground operation, residents emerged from their houses to inspect the destruction left by the Israeli tanks and to bury more of the dead.
Ahmad Darabeh, 37, a teacher and father of six, described how soldiers blew open the door of his house without warning before dawn on Saturday and took up sniper positions inside. The family was confined to one room, allowed out only to the bathroom once every 10 hours, Mr. Darabeh said.
He said one of his female relatives, Nihad Daher, 22, who lived nearby, was killed Saturday by shrapnel when an Israeli Apache helicopter fired a missile at an armed group outside the house.
Mr. Darabeh said he was impressed by the organization of the members of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. “It was striking to see their performance this time,” he said, adding that if the Israeli ground forces had not been backed up from the air, “Hamas could have beaten them.”
The Qassam Brigades say that 37 of its members have been killed since Wednesday, and other militant groups say they lost 15.
Many Palestinians in Gaza also expressed reservations about the Hamas celebrations, given the number of people who had died.
Sitting outside her partly destroyed house in Jabaliya, Aisha Abd Rabbo, 85, said she did not care about the offer of compensation from Mr. Zahar, the Hamas leader who addressed the rally on Monday.
“All I want is the return of those who were killed,” she said.
An interesting article that addresses some of the issues of a project I just started working on--how insurgent groups "learn" from one another's strategies of violence against a state. Hamas, it appears, has just taken a page from the Hezbollah's play book. Arguably, Hamas saw that the Israeli incursions into Lebanon benefited Hezbollah, so Hamas has been using the same tactics in the hope of producing similar results. The Israeli incursion into Lebanon was claimed as a win by Hezbollah, who claim they repelled the Israeli invasion. While that is not really true in any case, the world's reaction to the Israeli war discredited the Olmert government and in many ways strengthened Hezbollah.
1 comment:
An interesting topic.
And I'm sure that the "information age" plays an enormous role in that. 20 years ago, to spread that knowledge, I'm sure key talent and tactics would have been imported, bringing veterans from other conflicts into the organization as "advisors" to educate key personnel, who would in turn teach their own. A process that I'm sure could take days, weeks, even months.
Now, however, where everyone and their brother can have access to cell phones, GPS devices, and internet forums, successful tactics and political strategies can proliferate in the time it takes to read an article or watch a video.
And as violent groups become increasingly tech savvy, a guy with a laptop, a digital video camera, and some $50 software can produce a training/instructional video on par with a commercial tutorial in quality.
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