Israel has served notice that it will seek to kill Hamas operatives not only in the Gaza Strip but also beyond the borders of Israel and the West Bank, the latest threat of a coming wider regional conflict. The official comment specified Qatar and Turkey as countries that host Hamas officials.
The warning, delivered by an Israeli military spokesman, suggests that should Israel achieve its goal of wiping out Hamas rule and military resources from Gaza it will also pursue its enemies abroad.
“The directive is definitely to kill or capture all the leaders of Hamas. Those who planned, facilitated and executed the murderous October 7 massacre in Israel,” said Jonathan Conricus, spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces. “All of them are dead men walking. It’s only a matter of time inside Gaza and outside of Gaza until these Hamas leaders will either be captured or killed by Israel.”
“All of them will pay a price,” he said, suggesting Israel may mount a kind of global manhunt of Hamas officials even after the military operation in the Gaza Strip is finished.
Such a search-and-kill operation was mounted for almost two decades after the 1972 Munich Olympics, during which the Black September Palestinian terror group abducted and killed 11 Israeli athletes. Outrage and fear among Israelis accompanied the shock of the Munich massacre.
Israeli intelligence agents spent several years hunting down and killing Black September operatives abroad. The October 7, 2023, killings of some 1,300 Israeli civilians by Hamas militants have stirred calls inside Israel for similar retribution.
The IDF pronouncement followed last weekend’s string of diplomatic failures by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who spent five days barnstorming the region.
The top US diplomat tried to persuade Israel to alter its hardline war tactics and to persuade friendly Arab governments as well as NATO ally Turkey to support American military backing of Israel and accept that the US also wants to protect Palestinian civilians.
Blinken’s entreaties apparently failed to win support. It was an unusual – and likely for Washington – an unsettlingly open display of reduced US influence in the region. The crisis has mired President Joe Biden’s foreign policy in a place he didn’t expect it to be—the chronically unstable Middle East.
Just eight days before the Hamas raid, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, publicly declared, “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades now.”
On his visit to Tel Aviv, Blinken proposed Israel schedule regular “humanitarian pause” periods to let food, water and medicine pass in safely from Egypt into the Gaza Strip. Biden had already urged Israel not to give in to “rage,” but rather adhere to international rules for safeguarding civilians during war.
Blinken also repeated Biden’s call for a revival of the 25-year-old “two-state solution” proposal to create a sovereign Palestine abutting Israel to resolve its long conflict with the Palestinians.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Biden’s tactical advice and peace proposal. He dismissed calls for a cease-fire, except one to permit the repatriation of 240 hostages held captive by Hamas.
“I made it clear that we are going with full steam ahead, and that Israel refuses any temporary cease-fire that does not involve the release of the kidnapped Israelis,” Netanyahu said on November 6.
Netanyahu added that it is Hamas that puts Palestinian civilians in danger by placing them as “human shields” in front of Israeli military targets. He offered no steady opening of supply routes, free from bombing, into Gaza from Egypt, except occasional paths for “an hour here, an hour there.”
Roads that occasionally have been announced as open are sometimes treacherous: A coastal road designated for safe Palestinian travel from north to south has come under fire from Israeli military snipers.
The Israeli leader predicted that armed conflict inside the Gaza Strip could become a regular occurrence even after the current war ends. “I think Israel, for an indefinite period, will have the overall security responsibility because we’ve seen what happens when we don’t have it,” Netanyahu told the American ABC News network.
Netanyahu never mentions the two-state solution, a formula he has opposed throughout his political career. Apparently to avoid any unseemly display of discord, he elected to stay away from Blinken’s farewell press conference on November 5. It was the first time anyone could remember that an Israeli prime minister had so snubbed a visiting US secretary of state.
Arab countries—Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and the Palestinian Authority that governs parts of the West Bank—met with Blinken in Amman, Jordan, and openly voiced disagreement with Biden administration policy on the Gaza war.
They rejected the vague “pause” euphemisms and said flatly that a cease-fire was needed to end the killing and serve as a prelude to lasting peace.
Summing up the Arab leaders’ feelings after meeting with Blinken, Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said, “All want a ceasefire and negotiations over the two-state solution. We should stop this madness and start talking.”
Several regional governments friendly to the United States have faced pro-Palestinian protests. Outrage has been ignited by the Gaza death toll, which medical authorities put at more than 10,000. Gaza authorities do not break out military casualties from civilian deaths in their estimates.
Turkey, another stop on Blinken’s tour, added insult to disagreement. Blinken met with Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan skipped the meeting. As in the case of Israeli prime ministers, it had long been the practice of Turkish leaders to meet with a visiting US secretary of state.
At his trip’s end, Blinken offered himself a consolation prize: at least everybody seemed eager to talk.
“One of the common denominators that I’ve heard throughout this trip is the imperative of American engagement, American leadership. Every country I talk to is looking for us to play a leading role with our diplomacy to try to make progress on all of these different aspects of the crisis,” he said upon leaving the region on November 6. “All of this is a work in progress,” he added.
Diplomatic reinforcement was dispatched from Washington even before Blinken returned to Washington: US Central Intelligence Agency chief William Burns traveled to the region on November 5. Burns has played the role of diplomatic fireman for Biden, going on missions perhaps too fraught with controversy to suit Blinken’s low-key diplomatic style.
This year, Biden dispatched Burns to Libya to scold the Libyans about the presence of Russian private militias in the country and later to Saudi Arabia to express displeasure for engaging China to mediate talks over the renewal of Saudi relations with Iran without informing Washington.
On his first stop in Israel on November 5, Burns brought a plan for how to set up a “tactical pause” in the Gaza Strip. He then went on to Egypt and asked President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi to supply security forces to help stabilize Gaza after Israel leaves, an offer the embattled Sisi refused.
In Gaza, the Israeli ground and air offensive continued unabated. Israeli soldiers had entered Gaza City, the largest town in the Palestinian enclave, to clear it of hidden Hamas leaders and units. Israeli officials said that about 100 Hamas officers have died in the Israeli drive into Gaza as the conflict entered its second month.
Skeptics think that Biden will slow-walk diplomacy to give Israel the time to rout Hamas. Sultan Barakat, a professor of crisis studies at Qatar’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University, surmised that Biden will eventually demand Israel end its invasion, as US presidents have done for lesser incursions in the past, though not right away.
“The American clock is ticking, but it may be slower than usual,” he suggested.