Monday 25 March 2024

Israel has little choice but to extract Hamas from Rafah

The appeal to Israel by the Biden administration not to "invade" the town of Rafah in southern Gaza makes no military sense. How can Biden and his security team believe that it would help Israel if they left Rafah alone and thus forget about trying to eliminate the main hierarchy of the organisation that killed 1,200 Israelis on October 7? It would be like Israel appealing to the US not to invade the town of Raqqa in northern Syria when it was the stronghold of the Isis terrorist caliphate. I assume what Biden and Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, mean is that the Israel Defence Forces should not go headlong into Rafah with all guns and tanks blazing and reduce it to rubble. But they can't mean the Israelis should give up on its mission and objective which is to destroy Hamas for good. Rafah is Hamas. As far as is known this is where the October 7 plotters are hiding, so it seems to me to be perfectly understandable, militarily, for the IDF to want to enter the town to seek out the remaining Hamas leaders and combat brigades. But of course for humanitarian reasons, it would be disastrous if the IDF did to Rafah what they did to Gaza City because there are still 1.2 million Palestinian people in or around the town in temporary camps. So, an "invasion" of the town would be calamitous but precise military strikes targeting Hamas with accuracy and with absolute care to avoid civilian deaths, that would surely be approved by Washington? Binyamin Netanyahu has announced he is going ahead with the attack on Rafah whatever Washington says. He just better make sure it's carried out in a way that doesn't kill civilians and destroy relations with the US and bring condemnation from around the world.

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