Report: Israel bungled Gaza war
The gruelling seven-week Gaza War of 2014 was mismanaged by a bumbling security establishment in Israel, the country’s State Comptroller concluded on Tuesday.
The gruelling seven-week Gaza War of 2014 was mismanaged by a bumbling security establishment in Israel, the country’s State Comptroller concluded on Tuesday.
In a long-awaited pair of reports, Joseph Shapira, the top watchdog of state affairs, suggested that the conflict might have been avoided but said that diplomatic and humanitarian solutions to keep a lid on tensions between Hamas and Israel weren’t explored.
Shapira presented government ministers as hapless, suggesting that they had no comprehensive strategy regarding Gaza. One of his most stinging criticisms, which is shaking Israeli politics, is that the threat of Hamas terror tunnels was ignored for years, and was only made a priority just before the war broke out.
When tunnels were put on the agenda, according to the report, it was too little too late. The intelligence was inadequate, the solders weren’t trained for combat in tunnels and were ill equipped, and in-fighting between different branches of Israel’s security establishment harmed intelligence gathering.
At the end of the conflict, Shapira claimed, around half of the tunnels remained, which is more than the government had indicated – and some of the air strikes on tunnels had done more harm than good, failing to destroy tunnels and making it harder to target them in future. Technology to detect tunnels was slow in development before the war, and still lacks speed today, according to the report.
Opposition Leader Isaac Herzog of Zionist Union said that the report points to “years of failure” in the government’s management of security, and Yair Lapid of the opposition Yesh Atid party called it “extremely concerning”.
But Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman insisted that the report was “nothing to do with learning lessons but rather to do with settling scores”.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denied that he had been badly prepared for the war and said that the results of the war “speak for themselves”, with a quiet border with Gaza, flourishing border communities, and Hamas dealt a “devastating blow”. He also claimed that the tunnel threat wasn’t ignored but rather was raised from 2013.
Shapira said that these 2013 discussions were not serious enough; and Netanyahu’s argument did not satisfy the likes of Lapid, who served in the security cabinet during the war, and claimed on Tuesday that the report confirmed what he knew for years – namely that Netanyahu pulled the wool over his eyes, and the eyes of others in the security cabinet, when it came to the tunnel threat. The report “proves beyond any doubt that the Prime Minister knew about the strategic threat of the tunnels, didn’t order the IDF to prepare an operational plan, didn’t inform the security cabinet and didn’t tell the public the truth”, said Lapid. “The State Comptroller criticises him for that because as a result the IDF was not properly prepared for the tunnel threat during Operation Protective Edge.”
Zehava Gal-On, leader of the left-wing Meretz party, hit out at those who authorised a military operation “without political or strategic objectives and without intelligence”, and claimed that after 74 deaths on the Israeli side and more than 2000 on the Palestinian side they are “engaged in gambling on ‘Who Profits from the auditor’s report.’ It’s like a game.”
In the areas worst hit by Hamas fire in the run-up to the conflict and during, reactions were mixed, with some residents saying it proved their gut instinct that their leaders hadn’t properly explored all the options for dealing with Gaza’s rulers, while others said they appreciated Netanyahu’s intervention and credited him with the current quiet. Local leaders, regardless of their political affiliation, mostly said that the report should be taken with a grain of salt.
Alon Schuster, head of the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council and a representative of the Labour Party, told The AJN that he thinks it’s a “lie” that tunnel threats were being ignored, and said: “From our point of view, as citizens around Gaza, the State of Israel gave us a sense of security. No citizen has been hurt by a terrorist who infiltrated through terror tunnels and our sense of security is now much higher.”
NATHAN JEFFAY
comments