Consider This from NPR - What Happened the Last Time Israel Invaded Gaza and What to Expect Now

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

Following the surprise attack launched by Hamas militants, hundreds of thousands of Israeli forces are gathering along the border of Gaza.All signs suggest an Israeli ground invasion of the Palestinian territory is imminent. The last time this happened was in 2014.NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with reporter Gregg Carlstrom, who covered that conflict, to hear what we might expect if Israel invades Gaza again in the coming days.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University is committed to moving the world forward, working to tackle some of society's biggest challenges. Nine campuses, one purpose. Creating tomorrow, today. More at iu.edu. On top of everything else, people in Gaza are dealing with an impossible question. What do you say to kids when there are bombs falling all around you? We try to calm the children down by telling them stories and telling them that these bombardments are only fireworks. That's Ghada Al-Haddad, media and communications officer for Oxfam, speaking with NPR Wednesday from Gaza, where she lives. But she can't completely hide the truth from her nieces and nephews.

Children are old, like my family children started to realize that we are lying to them, and these are not sounds of fireworks. The situation in Gaza is dire, six days after the militant group Hamas first launched its attack on Israel over the border. Hamas fighters killed at least 1,300 people, according to Israel. Israel's response has been crushing. As of Thursday, its military said it had dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza. Israel claims it's hitting Hamas targets.

But witnesses in Gaza tell NPR that entire blocks have been reduced to rubble. Al-Haddad says the nights are horrible. I cannot imagine what would happen in the following few hours. Am I going to be dead or alive? I really don't know. And you feel like also helpless. You cannot do anything. You just like wait for the day to come to see what happened in the night. Palestinian health officials say more than 1,300 people have died in Israel's strikes on Gaza. People there have nowhere to go. The border is sealed. And Israel has stopped the flow of food,

fuel, water, and electricity into Gaza. It says the siege will continue until Hamas releases all the hostages it seized during its attack. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have tried to escape the bombing by sheltering at schools run by the United Nations. Not all of these schools are safe, very sadly. At least two of the schools sheltering the displaced have been hit by airstrikes. Fortunately, we did not have any casualties during the time. Juliet Tuma, director of communications for the agency that runs the schools, spoke to NPR from Athens.

People are terrified. I mean, we get all these messages. Luckily, there is a little bit of internet in the Gaza Strip. So one staff member said to me, I think this is going to be the end for me and my family. One staff member said we'll be in touch tomorrow if I'm still alive. And for many, many of them, this is like the seventh time that they go through an escalation in violence and a conflict. But they say to us that this is unprecedented. Unprecedented and likely to get worse. Israel has begun gathering troops near the border to Gaza in preparation for what appears to be a possible ground invasion. Consider this.

It's been nearly a decade since the last major Israeli invasion of Gaza. We'll look at what happened in 2014 and what it can tell us about the days ahead. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Thursday, October 12th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally,

and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University drives discovery, innovation, and creative endeavors to solve some of society's greatest challenges. Groundbreaking investments in neuroscience, climate change, Alzheimer's research, and cybersecurity mean IU sets new standards to move the world forward, unlocking cures and solutions that lead to a better future for all. More at iu.edu slash forward. This message comes from Pushkin. In Revenge of the Tipping Point, bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell returns to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points and the dark side of contagious phenomena.

Available wherever books are sold and wherever you get your audiobooks. It's Consider This from NPR. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is vowing to, quote, crush Hamas. More than 300,000 Israeli reservists have been called up to serve, all of which suggests a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip is imminent. The last time this happened was in 2014, and NPR's Emily Harris was in Gaza City to cover it. People who are in high towers in Gaza City say they can see bright explosions toward the north and eastern borders. And in the east, one man told us the electricity was off in his house, but Israeli flares and attacks were making the sky as bright as day. So how did things play out in 2014? And what

lessons might both Israel and Hamas have taken from it? Reporter Greg Karlstrom also covered the invasion in 2014, and he now covers the Middle East for The Economist. He spoke with my co-host Mary Louise Kelly. Greg, thanks for being here. My pleasure. So you were in Israel in 2014. Describe, how did it feel on the eve of that ground invasion? The ground invasion in 2014 was almost an understated part of the war. It was a war that had sort of been building up all summer, began with Hamas kidnapping and killing three Israeli teenagers in the occupied West Bank. There was then a Palestinian teenager in East Jerusalem who was killed in response. There were mass protests that

followed that. And for the first few weeks, it really was an aerial conflict between the two. That changed about midway through the war, and Israel sent in limited numbers of ground troops. And the objective was to search out and destroy cross-border tunnels that Hamas had dug from Gaza into Israel. But it almost wasn't the main focus of the war. That's interesting. I mean, it does sound similar in some ways to what we appear to be watching unfold today with Hamas airstrikes on Israel, Israeli airstrikes coming into Gaza, clearing and, I guess, eventually prepping the way for infantry. So far, yeah. I think the difference is, in 2014, there were some members of Prime Minister Netanyahu's government, some right-wing politicians, who were pushing for a large-scale

ground invasion of Gaza. Netanyahu ignored those demands, partly because the army told him this would mean weeks of bloody urban combat. And so what happened were these much more limited incursions near the border between Gaza and Israel. I think now what it seems like the army is gearing up for is exactly what the right was pushing for in 2014, which is sending several divisions worth of Israeli troops in with a goal of at least temporarily controlling the whole of Gaza. You mentioned the tunnels. And I gather back in 2014, you had fighting unfolding on three terrains in the air, on the ground, and then underground in all these tunnels where Hamas

fighters could hide. Yes, that's right. And they were a relatively new phenomenon at that point, and they hadn't been used really before, and they were used to rather striking effect. There was one day during that war where a group of Hamas commandos emerged from one of these tunnels and carried out a raid on an Israeli military post, a military post inside of Israel, which was shocking to a lot of people because they didn't expect that Hamas had the capability to infiltrate militants across the

border. That network of tunnels, according to both the Israelis and to Hamas, has expanded significantly since then. Hamas brags that it has dozens of kilometers of tunnels crisscrossing Gaza. These are used to store munitions. These are used now to shelter members of the group's military wing from airstrikes above. So if the Israelis are meaning to go in for a large ground operation, part of that is going to involve going into these tunnels, which are, of course, very difficult environments for any force to fight in. One thing that feels very different this time is the some 150 hostages being held by Hamas. Do we know how that may be factoring into Israeli calculations? We don't. You would think ordinarily in Israel, if there were hostages being held, that there would be great public demand to try and free them, whatever it takes. But I think

the public mood is a little different this time. Some of the rhetoric that we've heard from Israeli politicians in the coalition has been to the effect of, we can't let them dictate our war plan. And effectively, these hostages end up becoming collateral damage. I want to ask about the cost of everything that unfolded in 2014. There's the human toll, of course, I have seen, it was more than 2000 people were killed, mostly Palestinians in Gaza. I've seen estimates of several billion dollars worth of damage of homes and schools and infrastructure, and that the rebuilding hasn't been completed from then. And what, I guess now some of these repaired buildings just get leveled again? They do. It is a very perverse and depressing cycle in Gaza. I remember being there

not long after the war in 2014 and driving through a neighborhood in eastern Gaza that had been heavily, heavily shelled by the Israeli army. And so block after block of homes had been destroyed. And I came across some teenagers who were there gathering up the rubble in carts, and they were taking it off to a factory somewhere else in Gaza that would crush that rubble and then use it as the substrate for a road that they were building in Gaza. And so this is a place that has been under very, very tight Israeli and Egyptian blockade for almost two decades now. So this is how you end up with people using the rubble of a home that's been destroyed in an airstrike to build a road, because there's not enough material,

there's not enough money to do reconstruction after these seemingly endless rounds of war. Greg Karlstrom of The Economist, speaking with my colleague Mary Louise Kelly. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro. This message comes from Wondery. Kill List is a true story of how one journalist ended up in a race against time

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