Israel’s Gaza invasion could test its occupation of the West Bank

A Palestinian argues with Israeli settlers as a remote-controlled gun is seen on an Israeli army checkpoint in Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank—File photo by Mussa Qawasma/Reuters on September 26, 2022

* Israel will struggle to man its ever-increasing checkpoints in the West Bank and flood the Gaza Strip with soldiers

* Military authorities do not reveal the number of checkpoints or their locations, and new, ad hoc posts often pop up overnight with no advance notice

Analysis by Zoran Kusovac, Al Jazeera

Israel maintains a hefty security presence in the occupied West Bank with a network of permanent and temporary checkpoints set up by the army and paramilitary border police.

Military authorities do not reveal the number of checkpoints or their locations, and new, ad hoc posts often pop up overnight with no advance notice.

Those checkpoints and the personnel needed to man them are reminders of how Israel’s military is spread out to maintain its occupation. There are also warning signs of the challenge Israel might face in supporting a likely increase in demand for these barriers from Israeli settlers while also needing its troops for an expected invasion of the Gaza Strip.

International agencies try to keep track of the checkpoints, which are a major obstacle to normal and dignified life in the Palestinian territory.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) counted 645 obstacles before the latest violence. Human Rights Watch counted 1,500 temporary checkpoints that came and went in 2019 and 2020.

The human rights group also warned that, even in a period of relative calm: “Israeli forces routinely turn away or delay and humiliate Palestinians at checkpoints without explanation, while permitting largely unfettered movement to Israeli settlers.”

Most of the checkpoints are along the separation barrier – a wall that in places rises three storeys high, topped with razor wire and dotted with observation towers and all sorts of surveillance and security equipment.

It snakes through Palestinian lands for more than 700km (435 miles), preventing access to Israel from the occupied West Bank.

Any additional barriers will make daily life and movement more difficult, complicated and miserable for most of the three million inhabitants of the West Bank.

Hit and burn

Many observers believe the Hamas attacks on southern Israel last Saturday were triggered by unchecked violence instigated perpetrated by Israel settlers in the occupied West Bank.

There have been numerous cases of hit and burn attacks against Palestinians and their properties near new illegal settlements without any attempt by the Israeli army to prevent the settler rampages.

It is unclear whether the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has turned a blind eye to the rise of settler aggression or tacitly encouraged it.

Most Palestinian residents report two faces of violence: institutionalised but contained harassment by the military and unconcealed hatred and belligerence by settlers who, unlike other citizens of Israel, can legally and openly carry automatic weapons.

Israeli authorities know that potential Palestinian attacks in the occupied territory could target settlers in isolated settlements. In quiet times, many settlements do not have army units but rely on minor garrisons that are responsible for an area with several settlements.

Protecting settlers

Bloody scenes of Israeli villages being overrun by Hamas gunmen and people mowed down by machine guns in their homes or captured have created a new reality on the ground. Settlers now insist on direct and close protection, and the authorities cannot deny it.

Control posts are manpower-intensive. From my own experience during the second Intifada from 2000 to 2005, the Israeli army puts a squad of at least 10 to 20 soldiers on even the smallest “flying checkpoint”.

In addition to troopers checking passengers and vehicles, a flying checkpoint needs more soldiers to observe incoming and outgoing traffic and provide wider reconnaissance of the surroundings.

For an armed response, at least two teams manning vehicle-based weapons for perimeter security and a quick reaction infantry team are needed.

Two shifts can man such a checkpoint around the clock when needed, but after a week or two of long hours, fatigue sets in, causing complacency and loss of vigilance. Every sensible commander will demand a third shift as soon as enough reserves are available.

Thus, to maintain the simplest checkpoint, Israel needs at least 50 men and women. Bigger ones, like crossings in the separation wall, need hundreds.

It can be assumed that during this conflict, the Israeli army will eventually deploy up to 50,000 soldiers, a third of its peacetime strength, just to man roadblocks and control stations, some of which will be erected inside Israel too.

Security and political aspects of the settlements also cause a major drain on human resources. The occupied West Bank has about 150 illegal settlement and about 100 outposts not recognised by the Israeli government.

It is hard to imagine that, facing the fury of settlers, the government would settle for anything short of putting at least a platoon of 20 to 40 soldiers in the small settlements and at least a company of 200 soldiers for the bigger or more difficult to defend settlements.

Adding up settlement by settlement, the manpower estimate gets to 30,000 to 50,000 just for that.

Assuming that the Israeli land attack on Gaza is most likely to be launched at the beginning of a weekend, for reasons that are political rather than purely military, the big question is: Can Israel finalise the deployment of all its forces, a prerequisite for action, by the end of Friday?

Risking my reputation, I guess probably not.

How did Israeli intelligence fail to stop major attack from Gaza?

“We have no idea how this could have happened” — that is the reaction Israeli officials gave when Frank Gardner, BBC’s security correspondent asked how, with all its vast resources, Israeli intelligence did not see this attack coming from Hamas.

Dozens of armed Hamas gunmen were able to cross the heavily fortified border between Israel and the Gaza Strip, while thousands of rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel.

With the combined efforts of Shin Bet, Israeli domestic intelligence, Mossad, its external spy agency and all the assets of the Israel Defense Forces, it is frankly astounding that nobody saw this coming — or if they did, they failed to act on it.

Israel has arguably the most extensive and well-funded intelligence services in the Middle East. It has informants and agents inside Palestinian militant groups, as well as in Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere.

It has, in the past, carried out precisely timed assassinations of militant leaders, knowing all their movements intimately.

Sometimes these have been done with drone strikes, after agents have placed a GPS tracker on an individual’s car; sometimes in the past it has even used exploding mobile phones.

On the ground, along the tense border fence between Gaza and Israel there are cameras, ground-motion sensors and regular army patrols. The barbed-wire topped fence is supposed to have been a “smart barrier” to prevent exactly the sort of infiltration that has taken place in this attack.

Yet the militants of Hamas simply bulldozed their way through it, cut holes in the wire or entered Israel from the sea and by paraglider.

To prepare for and carry out such a coordinated, complex attack involving the stockpiling and firing of thousands of rockets, right under the noses of the Israelis, must have taken extraordinary levels of operational security by Hamas.

Not surprisingly, the Israeli media has been asking urgent questions of their country’s military and political leaders as to how all this could have occurred, on the 50th anniversary of another surprise attack by Israel’s enemies at the time: the Yom Kippur war of October 1973.

Israeli officials told Frank Gardner that a major investigation has begun and questions, they say, “will go on for years”. But right now Israel has more pressing priorities.

It needs to contain and suppress the infiltration of its southern borders, removing those Hamas militants who have taken control of several communities on the Israeli side of the border fence.

It will need to address the issue of its own citizens who have been taken captive, either through an armed rescue mission or by negotiation. It will try to eliminate the launch sites for all those rockets being fired into Israel, an almost impossible task of whack-a-mole as they can be launched from almost anywhere with little notice.

And perhaps the biggest worry for Israel is this: how does it stop others responding to Hamas’ call to arms and avoid this conflagration spreading into the West Bank and possibly even draw in the heavily-armed fighters of Hezbollah across its northern border with Lebanon?