VERY WORRIED ABOUT MISCALCULATION
Israelis Don’t Want Gaza to Be Their Next Lebanon
By STEVEN ERLANGER
JERUSALEM — For the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, badly battered by last summer’s inconclusive war against the rockets of Hezbollah, launched from Lebanon, the rocket fire from the Gaza Strip seems a similarly intractable problem with no easy, popular response.
While the Hamas militants in Gaza seem to have taken a lesson from that war — how to use rockets against Israeli civilians to eat away at Israeli self-confidence and frustrate the Israeli military — Israel’s own lesson is less clear, because its ground assault on southern Lebanon did not end in a clear victory, let alone destroy its adversary.
The Israeli government is feeling constrained by its own weakness and damaged credibility. If it goes into Gaza too hard, it will be criticized for trying to overcompensate for its failures last summer against Hezbollah. If it acts with too much restraint and caution, it will be criticized for being intimidated by its failures last summer against Hezbollah.
“We don’t want to invade Gaza in a big way,” a senior official said. “But stalemate is impossible. We hope that a political process will prevail because we don’t want to be dragged into what Hamas wants us to be dragged into. But events will dictate. If a Qassam rocket lands on an Israeli kindergarten, all bets are off.”
Israeli helicopters and fighter planes, using their most precise weapons, are hitting Hamas camps, buildings, fighters and teams of militants charged with firing rockets toward Israel. On Tuesday, the Israeli Air Force struck a compound of the Hamas police militia known as the Executive Force in Jabaliya, in northern Gaza. No casualties were reported in the strike, the third against targets in Gaza since a rocket attack on Monday that killed eight.
Israeli politicians are talking of harsher measures, including the assassination of senior Hamas military leaders who order the attacks, and warning that senior Hamas political leaders may also be at risk.
But trying to calibrate the amount of military pressure that might persuade Hamas and the Palestinians to stop the rocket fire and recreate a working cease-fire over Gaza is not an easy calculation.
And there are significant voices inside the Israeli security establishment who warn that, rockets aside, Hamas is organizing a buildup of weapons, reinforced tunnels and explosive matériel in Gaza that resembles Hezbollah’s efforts in southern Lebanon in recent years.
Sooner or later, those voices argue, Israel will have to confront Hamas in a serious way inside Gaza, especially since Fatah is failing to do so.
But with the Palestinian unity government of Hamas and Fatah in tatters after fierce factional infighting, there is no obvious Palestinian address for Israel to apply pressure. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, to whom the Israelis and Americans speak, appears weaker after the infighting.
Even Prime Minister Ismail Haniya of Hamas, a popular political figure, is being overshadowed and undermined by the actions and oratory of Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades.
In general, Gaza’s gunmen — who come in many different stripes, with affiliations that cut across factional, institutional and family loyalties — appear to be listening less now than before to political leaders.
Hamas in particular appears riven politically, senior Israeli government and security officials say, with important figures like Mahmoud Zahar, the former foreign minister, and Said Siam, the former interior minister, opposed to the group’s participation in the unity government.
The Qassam Brigades have made it clear that they took the lead in the latest round of fighting, attacking the Presidential Guard of Mr. Abbas and the Fatah-dominated Preventive Security Force. They continued those attacks even when Mr. Haniya came out in favor of a truce.
Burned, Mr. Haniya took a harder line on Monday in his sermon at the funeral of the family of a Hamas legislator, Khalil al-Hayya, praising the fighters and saying, “We will keep to the same path until we win one of two goals: victory or martyrdom.”
Mr. Olmert is being careful, aides say, to keep on Washington’s good side. The Bush administration has openly supported Israel’s right to defend itself against rockets fired by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other groups, and has praised what it calls Israel’s restraint. But Mr. Olmert is also conscious that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is committed to pushing Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts forward in her time left in the job, as is President Bush.
A major incursion deep into Gaza would take at least a month, a senior Israeli officer said, and would inevitably cause significant civilian casualties. There would be nothing like a major Israeli ground offensive to unite all Palestinian fighters, and it would do further damage to the more moderate Mr. Abbas and the chances for peace. More than 30 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli raids in the past week.
Even the leader of the rightist Likud Party, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is riding high in opinion polls, is speaking carefully about the options and suggesting graduated responses.
Last week he proposed “a wide range of actions that we can do to apply pressure.”
“And the actions begin with a general closure of Gaza,” he said, “through a controlled stoppage of services such as electricity and water, up to targeted killings and actions from the area on infrastructure targets, or limited ground incursion to the radius of the Qassam range or a larger ground incursion.”
Asked if he favored a large-scale infantry incursion, Mr. Netanyahu said: “I think the problem here is to return to the balance of deterrence that was so very eroded in the last year. As a result of the last war, Gaza has turned into Lebanon Two with bunkers.”
For now, the Israelis are barely using tank fire in Gaza and are not firing artillery, which is less accurate and has hit Palestinian houses and families in the past. Instead, they are relying on the most precise airborne weaponry they have, trying to send a message to militant leaders, especially of Hamas, that every rocket will entail a painful price.
Those around Mr. Olmert say that they, too, are concerned about how Israel and its will to defend its people are perceived — not just by the militants of Gaza, but by the Syria of President Bashar al-Assad.
The Syrians are training defensively, “but it’s easy to move from defense to offense,” a senior Israeli official said. “We’ve made it clear to him through credible channels that Israel has no offensive intentions. But we’re very worried about miscalculation.”
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