Israel prepares to attack Rafah

Tel-Aviv

The Israeli army is ready to take action in Rafah. This is the message sent Thursday by the general staff to the War Cabinet chaired by Benjamin Netanyahu, who must decide whether or not he gives the green light to an invasion of this locality located on the border with Egypt. The only certainty: the Prime Minister has repeatedly affirmed that the objective of a “total victory” over Hamas that he holds out to the Israelis can only be achieved after having eradicated Hamas in Rafah. To prove that he is ready to act, the head of government recently affirmed that a date had already been set for such an operation without giving any further details.

On the ground, preparations are going well. Two reservist units were recalled to serve in the Gaza Strip, as the army tended to reduce its numbers in recent weeks. The IDF has also ordered some 40,000 tents to accommodate some of the approximately 1.5 million Palestinians fleeing the fighting and taking refuge in Rafah. Some 150,000 of them have already left this city to settle in Khan Younes in particular, according to Israeli estimates. Satellite photos made it possible to identify a large open area in this area which should be used to set up a large canvas camp.

To try to calm the Egyptians, who fear that in the event of an Israeli attack in Rafah, crowds of Palestinians would try to force the border to flee to the Sinai Peninsula, the chief of staff, General Herzi Halevi, and Director of Shin Beth, the internal security service, Ronen Bar, held talks Wednesday in Cairo with their Egyptian counterparts.

For the Israeli military and Benjamin Netanyahu, but also for Hamas, Rafah has symbolic value. Israel estimates that 4 of the 6 "brigades" of the Hamas military apparatus still intact are in this town where Yahya Sinwar, the Islamist leader and mastermind of the incursion of Hamas commandos who carried out the massacre on October 7, is also hiding. in southern Israel.

The Israeli army claims to have already completely disabled 18 other brigades of the Islamic movement. She also believes that only very hard blows dealt to Hamas could make it possible to be in a position of strength to obtain the release of the 133 hostages held by the Islamists. For the moment, negotiations on this hypersensitive issue are at a standstill.

Strange coincidence of the calendar: it was at the moment when Israel seemed about to attack that Hamas engaged in a new episode of psychological warfare by making public on social networks a video of one of the hostages, Hersh Goldberg -Polin, kidnapped at a rave party on October 7th. The testimony of the 23-year-old Israeli-American, whose arm was amputated during his kidnapping, even staged and partly censored by the local media, deeply moved Israelis.

He spoke of the “nightmare” he has been experiencing for more than 200 days while denouncing Benjamin Netanyahu and the government “who should be ashamed of having abandoned us.” This video spontaneously pushed hundreds of Israelis to demonstrate their anger in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv against the prime minister, accused of not doing everything to obtain the release of the hostages, while the police intervened unceremoniously against the protesters.

But in Rafah, Benjamin Netanyahu is forced to take into account the international impact that thousands of Palestinian civilian victims could have if the Israeli army invaded this city. Joe Biden, the American president, has continued to proclaim his opposition to such an operation while the United States has just released a huge additional $26 billion in aid to Israel while continuing to provide unrestricted weapons and ammunition to the IDF.

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Another potential reason for conflict has emerged with the United States. The US State Department and the UN have called for an investigation into accusations by Hamas that mass graves were discovered near the Nasser hospitals in Khan Younes and al-Shifa in Gaza City.

A total of more than 600 corpses were found, some of which had their hands and feet tied, which would tend to prove that they were shot during operations carried out by the Israeli army against these two establishments. The army spokesperson denied these accusations and said that tests had been carried out in these cemeteries to determine whether some of the dead were not hostages. He also released a video showing Palestinians digging a mass grave in these cemeteries several weeks ago to bury the dead.