The Israeli army has announced the withdrawal of its ground troops in southern Gaza in the early hours of this Sunday, the same day that marks half a year since the war in the Palestinian enclave, a spokesman for Israeli military intelligence has confirmed to this diary. That source justified this decision with the argument that the army has already achieved its objectives in Khan Younis, the city in the southern region where Israeli troops entered four months ago and where Israel claims to have dismantled the local Hamas structure. The source has alluded to how the ground troops that will remain in the enclave, a division and a brigade, will guarantee what he has defined as “precise operations based on intelligence”, instead of a massive and continuous presence in the territory.
“Today, Sunday, April 7, the 98th commando division of the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] concluded its mission in Khan Younis. The division has left the Gaza Strip to recover and prepare for future operations,” the spokesperson said through a WhatsApp message. He then added that “a significant [ground] force led by the 162nd Division and the Nahal Brigade continue to operate in the Gaza Strip, and will preserve the IDF's freedom of action and its ability to carry out precise operations based on intelligence.” ”.
The spokesperson has declined to answer El País's question about whether this decision is due to pressure from the United States. Other military sources cited by the
Haaretz
newspaper have denied this Sunday
That this withdrawal is in response to a demand from Washington to the Government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The denial of the source cited by the Israeli media alludes, without citing it, to the telephone conversation held last Thursday between the President of the United States, Joe Biden, and Netanyahu, four days after an Israeli attack against a convoy of the American NGO World Central Kitchen (WCK) killed seven aid workers, six of whom were Westerners, including an American.
Washington's irritation and its subsequent pressure on Netanyahu for this attack has forced the Netanyahu Government to make the first concessions in this war, minimal, but which until now Israel had refused. More than 33,000 Palestinians have perished in this half-year of war, according to data from the Ministry of Health of the enclave governed by Hamas. At least 13,000 embodied the essence of a civilian: they were children, Unicef, the UN children's agency, has warned.
The decision to withdraw the 98th Division of the Israeli army from southern Gaza also comes when, for two months, Israel has been threatening to unleash a ground military offensive in Rafah, the city on the border with Egypt where more than 1.4 million people are crowded. of displaced people, out of a total population of 2.2 million Gazans. The Biden Administration has not explicitly opposed this attack, but it has made it subject to the protection of the civilians who take refuge there, a condition that is impossible for the UN to meet.
The Israeli army now justifies its withdrawal from southern Gaza with the argument that it has achieved the objectives it sought and also alluding to this supposed change in strategy. “All intelligence and combat operations in the region” have been achieved, said the sources cited by
Haaretz,
who emphasize that the 98th Division has “dismantled the Hamas brigades in Juan Yunis, killed thousands of their members and destroyed 30 kilometers of tunnels.” The source stressed that, in that Palestinian town, the ground troops "have done everything they could do."
If the departure of these troops is confirmed, the only permanent land military presence in Gaza would be that of the Nahal brigade, made up of around 2,000 soldiers, integrated into four battalions, one of them reconnaissance. In addition to those troops, who now guard what Israel has dubbed the Netzarim Corridor, a road that divides Gaza into two halves and reaches from the border with Israel to the coast, Israel plans to permanently station many more troops in the future. the edge of the enclave, to quickly enter it whenever you want.
The soldier cited by Haaretz alluded to this possibility by pointing out that there is “no need to remain in the sector [southern Gaza] without an [operational] need,” given that the Israeli army can re-enter it at any time.
The source then alluded to how these troops can re-enter Gaza at any time since there is no . According to the Israeli newspaper, the army plans to permanently station three divisions on the border with Gaza in the future, from where they could penetrate the territory whenever they consider it necessary. The sources added that the departure of troops from Khan Younis will allow displaced Palestinians to return to their homes after taking refuge in Rafah.
The other reasons, this supposed change in strategy, refer to the evolution of “the perception of the fighting in the south of the Strip” after the new Israeli assault on the Al Shifa hospital, in the north of Gaza, which, according to this Saturday the World Health Organization (WHO) has left the enclave's once main hospital complex reduced to an “empty shell” of charred buildings and corpses lying between twisted iron.
Another Israeli newspaper,
The Times of Israel,
cites Israeli military intelligence sources this Sunday, who assure that this operation has convinced the Israeli army that what it defines as “focused incursions” similar to the one that took place in the Al Shifa hospital are more useful when fighting Hamas.
Faced with this decision that has caused surprise, the Israeli military has tried to highlight those objectives that they claim to have achieved in Khan Yunis. Not only of having killed a large number of alleged Hamas members, but of having located a 900-meter-long tunnel in the Al Amal neighborhood in that town, where they maintain they also found a warehouse with weapons and explosives.
In these six months of war, the Israeli Army claims to have killed more than 13,000 members of Hamas in Gaza, in addition to about a thousand militants of that fundamentalist group and others, such as the Islamic Jihad, authors of the attack in Israel on October 7. , in which 1,200 people died and another 240 were kidnapped. Of them, about half remain in Gaza and a third are believed to have died.
However, Israel continues to miss the image of total victory over Hamas that would justify the war. The Israeli government has not been able to prove that it has killed any prominent leaders of the organization. Above all, its main leader, Yahia Sinwar, who is believed to be still alive somewhere in Gaza. Meanwhile, Netanyahu faces growing unpopularity, not so much because of the 33,000 Gazans killed in the war, but because of the fate of the hostages and his inability to recover that idea of security that the Israelis had before October 7 and that was shattered by the Hamas attack. 88% of Israeli Jews support the military offensive and more than half oppose the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza while there are hostages. They even advocate for the military to use even more force.
This Saturday, more than 100,000 Israelis gathered in Tel Aviv in a demonstration to demand from Benjamin Netanyahu's government an agreement for the release of all the hostages, and early elections in which the prime minister would clearly lose his parliamentary majority, according to polls. . The massive show of rejection of the prime minister occurred shortly after it became known that the Israeli army had recovered the body of one of those hostages, Elad Katzir, in Gaza.
Those who participated in the protest, the largest since the start of the war, demanded that Netanyahu reach an agreement with Hamas to release the kidnapped people, which Israel has been negotiating for weeks in Cairo in vain. On Saturday, the fundamentalist group that rules Gaza confirmed that it will send a delegation to the Egyptian capital for a new round of talks to achieve an end to the fire, under the mediation of Egypt, Qatar and the United States.
Meanwhile, the criticism, always nuanced and still without serious consequences, for Israel among its Western allies does not cease. The country also faces the threat of Iranian retaliation for the Israeli attack against the consulate and residence of that country's ambassador in Damascus, the capital of Syria, last Monday, in which ten people died, three of them senior officials of the Revolutionary Guard. Islamic. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant noted this Sunday that Israel “has completed preparations to respond to any scenario that may develop against Iran.” An advisor to Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has stated, for his part, that Israel's embassies “are no longer secure,” suggesting a possible attack on Israeli diplomatic headquarters.
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