Cost of botched Gaza spy mission? Israel’s back at brink of war

On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assured Israelis weary of conflict with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip that he was “doing everything I can in order to avoid an unnecessary war.”

Twenty-four hours later, Israel appeared to be on the brink of just that.

After a botched intelligence mission by undercover commandos left seven Palestinian fighters dead, the militant group Hamas and other armed factions mounted an intense and escalating rocket and mortar barrage across much of southern Israel.

With air-raid sirens wailing from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, and after a Palestinian anti-tank missile blew up an Israeli bus, seriously wounding a 19-year-old soldier, Israel retaliated with airstrikes and tank fire that grew steadily more destructive as the night wore on.

Israel hit scores of military posts and weapons caches across Gaza, but also levelled a Hamas television station, radio station and office building, and the group’s military intelligence headquarters. It was the heaviest fighting between Israel and Gaza since their war in 2014.

The fighting threatened to scuttle months of multilateral talks aimed at calming the Israel-Gaza border, where protests since March have been met with a lethal Israeli response. Some 170 Palestinians have been killed and thousands more wounded.

So why, some Israelis were asking Monday, with the government under pressure to ease tensions in Gaza and the talks showing progress, would it risk it all for what officials described as a fairly routine mission?

The answer, analysts said, may be that it was so routine. No one expected the commando squad to be exposed.

“The real assumption is that the operation will not be revealed,” said Giora Eiland, a retired major general and former national security adviser. “It’s not 100 percent, but it can be estimated that 99 percent of these operations are not revealed, and 99 percent is good enough to make a decision assuming that the force will enter, execute and go out without being detected.”

The cost of that tiny risk became evident Monday. More than 400 rockets and mortar shells were fired into Israel, and the Israeli military said it had struck more than 70 military targets in Gaza.

© 2018 New York Times News Service