IMAD MUGHNIYYAH IN GAZA

Utterly rough draft. First and only.

INTRODUCTION AND CAVEAT

Ibrahim al-Amin writes for the Lebanese daily, al-Akhbar. I believe he used to write for as-Safir. He’s always been close to Hezbollah. In today’s al-Akhbar he has a front-page article titled, “Imad Mughniyyyah in Gaza: a Communications Network, Tunnels, an [organizational] Hierarchy, and [stored] Supplies to Last for Months.”

First a caveat: Although I have tons of respect for Mr. Ibrahim and his terrifically informative reporting, his article likely reflects in part an Iranian/Hezbollah policy to explain to the Arab public that neither Iran nor Hezbollah had quit on them. Hezbollah cannot at this time activate the Lebanon front, in good part because Lebanese parliamentary elections are coming up and the party doesn’t want to weaken its allies at the polls. If war is to happen, let Israel start it. Only then would the Lebanese public accept Hezbollah’s deterrence and retaliation. What resistance the Arab public is witnessing in Gaza and success (see below) should be credited to Imad Mughniyyah and Hezbollah, says not-so-implicitly Mr. Al-Amin.

ROUGH TRANSLATION

1. Al-Amin says that prior to the assault on Gaza, the Israeli Foreign Minister had assured Mubarak that Israel’s mission would be swift retribution and should result in finishing Hamas politically. That, the Israeli Foreign Minister had said, would pave the way for Mahmoud Abbas to re-enter Gaza with his men. The Foreign Minister told Mubarak that the air attack in-and-by-itself would destroy Hamas’ infrastructure and should break the leadership hierarchy of that political party and kill its fighters in a wholesale fashion. In three days at the most, al-Amin reports about the Israeli Foreign Minister, Israeli land troops would advance into Gaza and would eliminate what pockets of resistance were left. Israel then should return home with convoys of prisoners, while thousands of Abbas men would reenter the Strip.

2. Mubarak believed the Israeli Foreign Minister and began to plan for the next phase in Gaza. But the days passed and Israel’s assault seemed to take longer and longer.

3. A few days before Israel’s attack , Hamas’ leaders, both military and political, with the commanders of allied groups, had evacuated any and all known places, where they would historically be found. The first 150 or so infrastructure sites which the Israeli force bombed had been emptied out. Mostly civilians dies who were close by. The only “success” for the Israeli air force was the massacre of the policemen.

4. This strategy, al-Amin says, was the brainchild of the late Imad Mughniyyah. No sooner had Hezbollah defeated Israel in the summer of 2006 than Mughniyyah had begun “toli ve the obsession of [attending] to Gaza.” Mughniyyah began a series of meetings with his Palestinian friends in which he lectured them about the importance of the communication network – that this network was “a strategic weapon,” together with “the weapon of the private [hiding] places. With this, tens of Palestinian resistance fighters traveled to Syria, Lebanon, and Iran where they were given many details and benefitted from much expertise. In less than one year, Gaza had changed in terms of its strategic preparedness for Israel’s war.

5. The Palestinian resistance movement in Gaza, al-Amin admits, had been shocked early on by the insanity of Israel’s air assault. But in two days, he said, that movement regained its composure and returned to its planned strategy.

6. The Israelis had meant their media campaign of showing off their soldiers getting ready to enter Gaza as part-and-parcel of a strategy to terrorize Gazans and the Palestinian resistance there. But the resistance kept on dispatching its rockets as a means of showing off that the intelligence the Israelis had gathered had been faulty.

7. When the Israelis came into Gaza, the Palestinian resistance fighters withdrew. Only to return and belie Israeli calculations that its strategy of cutting off Gaza in parts and isolating these would bear fruit.

8. The idea, reports al-Amin, was to have stored enough supplies to be able to wage a war of attrition against the Israeli troops should these decide to remain in Gaza for the long term.

9. The swiftness promised by Israel’s Foreign Minister to Mubarak prior to the attack didn’t happen. That rattled Mubarak and his men. These arranged for an emergency meeting with the Israelis in Taba, at which meeting the Israelis admitted that things didn’t happen according to plans. Al-Amin intimates that the Israelis had relied on intelligence reports from officers of the Palestinian Authority (Abbas’) but that these reports about amounts of supplies of rockets proved faulty. Other intelligence reports on which the Israelis had relied had come from the United States. These reports had been given to the harmful idiots (oops!) by Arab intelligence services. At the Taba meeting the Israelis blamed the Egyptians for not controlling their border with Gaza, and the Egyptian officers retorted that they had destroyed hundreds of tunnels and claimed that much of the smuggling of weapons had come by sea. (At which point the Israelis and the Egyptians had a fist fight. I’m KIDDING! See www.HarryWessel.com to know where I’m coming from.)


10. At this point, Israel is stuck. It doesn’t want to cut short its operation because it wants to assure that Hamas will not be able to shine as Hezbollah and dominate Gaza.

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(Editor's note: there's more in the article. I've picked what I judged to be most telling. Note, too, that the article that followed - very short -- revealed that the Saudis had met yesterday with Hamas leaders. Nothing was said about what had transpired at the meeting. But do refer to prior posts about the apparent rift among the Saudi ruling elite on the Gaza matter. )