Reuters World News - The tactics of a Gaza ground assault and the threat of a larger war

Episode Date: October 14, 2023

On Part One of our weekend special, our journalists report on what to expect from a ground invasion in Gaza. We also examine the calculus of regional forces, including Hezbollah, Iran and the Saudis as the threat of a wider Middle East war looms.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paper flyers are raining down over Gaza. The air almost glittering with thousands of leaflets dropped by the Israeli army. The image is striking, but the message is chilling. Evacuate your homes immediately. On this special weekend episode, our Middle East correspondents look at what's ahead as Israeli forces prepare for a ground assault in Gaza. This is going to be a massive urban nightmare for Israeli forces. And we examined the calculus for regional powers as the US urges them to stay out and stop the war from spreading.

The scale of the ground invasion that could be to come is so huge that every world leader that you see come out on television today is just begging for diplomacy to prevail. I'm Kim Vinal in Nicosia. As we were recording this podcast, we learned the sad news about the death of our colleague, Isam Abdallah. Isam was killed and six other journalists injured when missiles fired from the direction of Israel struck them, according to a Reuters videographer at the scene. The group of journalists, including from Al Jazeera and Agenz France Press, were working in an area where the Israeli military and Lebanese militia Hezbollah

have been trading fire in border clashes. While other news outlets, including the Associated Press and Al Jazeera, said the shells were Israeli, Reuters could not establish whether the missiles had actually been fired by Israel. Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Makati, a Hezbollah lawmaker, blamed the incident on Israel. The Israeli defence forces did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Roiters is urgently seeking more information and is working with authorities in the region.

Isam was a wonderful and creative and caring journalist. He'd reported on some of the world's biggest events but never lost sight of what mattered how they affected the people caught up in them. He will be deeply missed. The UN has called for an investigation into his death. Here's correspondent Michelle Nichols asking UN spokesman Stefan Dejarek to comment in a briefing at UN New York headquarters yesterday. A group of journalists were struck in southern Lebanon. The journalists were from Reuters, A.F.P. and Al Jazeera, several have been injured and a Reuters journalist has been killed. What's your reaction to this?

All our deepest condolences to you and all of your colleagues at Reuters and all your family. This is yet another example of the daily dangers. Journalists face in covering conflict throughout the world, and we do hope that there is an investigation as to exactly what happened. Just a quick follow-up, any messages to the parties involved in this conflict with regard to journalists covering it? Without journalists, we can't know what's going on, and journalists need to be protected and allowed to do their work.

Israel's UN envoy, Gilad Erdan, said Israel, Israel would investigate the incident. The Committee to Protect Journalists says that since the start of the Israel-Gaza war, 11 journalists have been killed. Several thousand Gaza residents could be seen fleeing south on Friday. That's after Israel ordered more than a million people to evacuate the northern half of the Gaza Strip. On Friday, Israel said its infantry and tanks had carried out raids inside the Gaza Strip. marking the first shift from an air war to ground operations.

To get a sense of what a ground war will look like, we spoke with James McKenzie, our Bureau Chief for Israel and Palestinian Territories, and to Jonathan Saul, who's been reporting on the Israeli Defence Forces strategy. Jonathan, just start by telling me, where are you? I'm just outside Jerusalem. There was a rocket attack yesterday, loud explosion.

So if you start hearing sirens going off, then I might have to run into a enforced shelter. Of course, absolutely, very much. Please do and be safe. Jonathan, can you just start by telling us about the terrain in Gaza for a ground war, what a ground assault will look like? This is going to be a massive urban nightmare for Israeli forces. Because since the 2021 last campaign, Hamas, has managed to revitalize itself, rebuild and reconstitute a lot of its networks. It's receiving much more funding. Its missile arsenal is back up to a certain level of strength, but also,

more importantly, that it's preparing for a massive assault by Israeli forces. What this will probably mean is that Israel will face multiple, multiple challenges, everything from suicide bombers with explosive belts to booby-trapped locations everywhere, IEDs, and the biggest problem is going to be the underground bunkers fortresses where multiple Hamas, fighters, commanders and possibly also hostages that were taken from Israel are housed. That is going to be a massive, massive undertaking, nothing that conventional warfare will have any answers for. Just logistically, how does Israel's military go in and launch this kind of assault without endangering those hostages? At the moment, what we've seen is massive aerial bombardments by Israeli fighter planes.

The question is, what's happening with the hostages? Nobody's quite sure. But there might be an expectation that it will probably be worth Hamas his best interest to keep them insulated from the bombings, but it's unclear. But the point of the heavy bombardments is to clear the way, literally to flatten the ground, ahead of ground troops entering Gaza. James, what options does Israel have in terms of a ground invasion? Well, they don't have any very good options. It's not quite clear what they was not clear at all, what they're going to do. There's different scenarios. They could mount full scale in

invasion of the whole area, which they would occupy. They could make a more limited incursion where they go into a part of it and stay a more or less lengthy period of time. We don't know. They say they're preparing for it, but a final decision hasn't been made. That's the official position. But what we've seen from the kind of bombardment of Gaza suggests they're kind of trying to separate different parts of the strip from each other. So it's sort of kind of broken up into areas that make it more difficult for Hamas to operate. Part of the problem is going to be the terrain of Gaza. It's a very, very tightly sort of packed area. It's very heavily popular. It's small. It's got a mixture of some sort of semi-rural areas, but pretty semi-rural, and very heavily

densely populated cities and refugee areas. for over a million people to move south, but how realistic is that? This is one of the key questions at the moment. To what extent will the civilians remain in densely populated areas? Hamas has urged civilians and residents to remain in their homes, but Israel has cautioned them by even dropping leaflets to get out of built-up areas. There's very little places that they can actually go, but the idea is to move away from the built-up areas onto the coast. Failing that, it's going to be, I don't know. It's going to be brutal. It's going to be very difficult.

It's one of the great contentious points. The military insists that they try to limit civilian casualties as much as possible. On the Palestinian side, they say, well, an enormous number of civilians are killed, and, you know, they accuse the Israelis of recklessly endangering, even deliberately targeting civilians. It's not a situation where it's really very easy to give a definite answer about any of those things. in one sense. In a lot of ways, it's sort of a bit of a moot question as well, because as experience in many wars have shown, not just here, but everywhere, Afghanistan, Iraq, all over the place. Once you start to drop bombs, there are civilian casualties. What does recent experience on the ground in the West Bank tell us? Well, we've had a bit of a taste of how difficult it is to operate in some of these areas

early this year in the city of Janine and the Northern West Bank, which is one of the great centers of armed Palestinian groups. And they've mounted a couple of major operations in Janine, which showed how difficult it is to operate in these areas. And one occasion they had to send in a helicopter gunship for the first time in many years to rescue a group of soldiers who were trapped after being ambushed and they were pinned down by heavy fire for a long time.

And, you know, it was difficult to get them out. And they had to send in this helicopter gunship. And that's a... Janine is a tiny, tiny fraction of what would await in Gaza. Jonathan, what might Janine tell us about how prepared Israeli soldiers are for this type of tight-knit urban warfare? The security sources that I've spoken with have said that Janine is in some ways a very small precursor, but what they learned was valuable lessons in urban warfare.

But I think also Hamas has changed as well. Hamas is a very formidable, strong military organization. with lots of capabilities and lots of equipment, and they are prepared for a very bloody fight. That at least is what they're saying publicly. Israeli forces are also very motivated. They want to get on with the actual battle and the campaigns ahead. They've never been as motivated as this for many decades

because they know that this is to them an existential fight ahead. The conflict is inflaming tensions across the Middle East. A ground war in Gaza threatens to become a nightmare for Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, and is already a setback for the oil-rich nations of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, with Iran in the wings. Maya Jabali is the bureau chief for Lebanon, Syria and Jordan and has been reporting the tensions.

Just a note that this interview was recorded before Maya had learned about her colleague's death. So Maya, let's start with Hezbollah, we've seen some rockets coming across the border. So we have indeed seen some of the most serious confrontations between Hasbullah and Israel across the Lebanese border since the 2006 conflict in which there was a month of fighting between the two of them. And today we actually had a very illuminating speech by Hasbalah's deputy chief, Naim Klasim,

who was saying that the party would get involved the party would contribute to the confrontations against Israel, but according to its own vision and its own plan. So what we're seeing between the confrontations across the border and the signals that Hezbollah are sending is a very carefully calibrated response, where the party wants to make sure that it's not triggering a wider conflict, but that it's responding within the rules of engagement to Israel. What does the calculus look like for Hezbollah's leaders? It's a good question and it's really hard, obviously, to get into the heads of a lot of these senior Hezbollah leaders who are making these very strategic decisions. But I think the situation in Lebanon really has a big part to play in that. Lebanon has been, it's entering now its fifth year of economic crisis.

We're not seeing any of the reforms that should have been done years ago actually being implemented. were not seeing long-term financial relief coming into Lebanon. And we spoke to families in southern Lebanon whose houses were destroyed in the 2006 conflict across the border. That lasted a month, and it saw some pretty heavy damage, not just in southern Lebanon, but even in the southern suburbs of Beirut, which are a Hezbollah stronghold. And some families were saying that, listen, even if the panes of glass in my house were to get shattered, I don't have the money to be able to replace them. Some families said they didn't have the fuel to fill up their cars, so they would need to escape from the south.

So I think Hasbullah, as are many actors in Lebanon, they're acutely aware of that reality, and they're aware that the cost that civilians would have to bear would just be tremendous and multitudes what they had to pay in 2006. And that actually could be playing a deterrent role. Iran backs both Hamas and Hezbollah. what has it said? So Iran has had a couple of different positions that it's taken. So primarily it denied any kind of involvement in the planning or the green light for this operation

that Hamas waged last week against Israeli towns. The events that unfolds it thereafter have triggered a regional tour by foreign minister, Hussein Amir Abdul-Avdhajan. He traveled to Iraq, to Lebanon, and he's traveling to Syria today as well. and he also spoke to the Saudi foreign minister, which is the first contact that the two of them have had since the resumption of diplomatic ties

between Tehran and Riyadh's back in March. When the foreign minister lands it in Beirut earlier this week, he pledged that the whole access, meaning Iran's network of allies in the region, would be responding to what they said were Israeli crimes against Palestinians. So we're seeing some play. of additional support and we're seeing Iran kind of rally its proxies in a way in the region.

There haven't been direct threats to jump into the conflict. But we're seeing this regional tour by the foreign minister and we're watching it very, very closely. What are the chances this could actually become a wider Middle East war? That's something that has really worried a lot of people in the region, from the leadership down to just regular, regular civilians, because they're looking at what you said, the Iranian network in various countries, and particularly the ones that border Israel, which are Lebanon, Syria, and Palestinian territories as well, and wondering what kind of response

might these different actors be preparing in retaliation, let's say, for Israel's bombardment of Gaza. We're looking into this as well, and we're trying to track whether any of these groups are moving forces around, are moving weapons around in preparation of some kind of an attack. There's nothing that we've noticed that has been conclusive so far, but it's something that I'm sure has a lot of actors very worried. And obviously one of the biggest signs of that concern would be the U.S. moving in some of its warships into the Mediterranean earlier this week as a signal to these actors that should they get involved in a broader confrontation, that there's also some very heavy firepower that would be awaiting them.

So let's come back to Iran. As you mentioned, Iran's leader spoke to Saudi crown prince Muhammad bin Salman, which those two countries hadn't spoken directly for seven years. How big a deal is that? We haven't necessarily seen the results of that conversation, right? Since the Chinese brokered reproschement between Tehran and Riyadh broke out back in March, after years of attempts by other countries, of course, to be able to bring these two regional powers together, we've seen some incremental progress on diplomatic ties resuming between the two countries. But I think this conflict in particular obviously would benefit from every kind of diplomacy, what people are suffering in Gaza right now, the scale of the war, the war, scale of the ground invasion that could be to come is so huge that every world leader that you

see come out on television today is just begging for diplomacy to prevail. And that's another channel that if it works and if it can generate some kind of cool down, I think it would be very welcome by many people in the region and beyond. Saudi Arabia had been working to normalize ties with Israel. Can that happen now? That's a question that many are asking as well. And that's something that has come up so often in the statements by those who have backed Hamas's assault onto Israeli towns and said that this is, in part, it comes after attempts by regional countries to normalize with Israel. And this assault should show that that normalization is rejected by the people of the region. So very much remains to be seen. But I think everyone's focus is right now on humanitarian situation.

Everyone is looking at what can be done for the people of Gaza who are on the ground, who are suffering so much bombardments, some of the heaviest bombardment that they've ever seen, according to the residents who I've spoken to, and who are worried that they're going to be displaced yet again, possibly permanently outside of the Gaza's trip. Can the allies of the Palestinian people come to their aid? Could say the Arab League afforded? We've seen Jordan try to send a military plane full of,

aid over to Egypt and hoping that that aid could then be trucked into Gaza if the necessary permissions are secured. But for now, Israel isn't allowing anything into Gaza. It has tightened its blockade that it had been imposed for years and itself has said that it will not allow food, water, medicine into the Gaza Strip and it has cut off electricity as well. We've seen Turkey tried to send some aid as well that hopes would be delivered, I think, through Egypt. But at this point, efforts to relieve some of that humanitarian suffering have failed. And we've seen representatives of aid organizations and of relief organizations just appalled at the collective punishment that is being meted out against the Palestinian people in Gaza, given the scale of the bombardment.

I think what Egypt is particularly concerned by now is that very heavy bombardment campaign that would lead to displacement of Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt would then be another permanent refugee presence. Thank you to Maya Jabali, James McKenzie, and Jonathan Saul for being so generous with their time in difficult conditions, as well as our reporters in the Middle East covering the conflict. Please be safe. On part two of this special series,

we examine what Hamas sees as the end game. and the internal politics of the Palestinians and Israel. Don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast player or download the Reuters app.