The Decibel - Understanding Israel’s push into Rafah during ceasefire talks

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

Tension is ratcheting up in the Gaza Strip as the Israeli military descends on the southern city of Rafah. This move has forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians sheltering there to flee yet again. All of this has been happening this week against the backdrop of ceasefire negotiations between Hamas and the Israeli government and souring relations between Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Joe Biden.The Globe’s Senior International Correspondent Mark MacKinnon brings us up to speed on the many developments, breaks down what happened in the ceasefire talks this week, and what this means for the people in Gaza and the remaining Israeli hostages.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

Earlier this week, the Israeli military launched its invasion of Rafah. Rafah has become home to more than a million Palestinians, including hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people. Now, they're on the move again. Israel says it needs to enter Rafah because it believes the city is the last Hamas stronghold. While the Israeli military headed to Rafah, ceasefire negotiations were also happening. There was a report that seemed like progress had been made, but now it appears the talks have ended for the time being. Since the start of the war seven months ago, almost 35,000 people have been killed in Gaza,

according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Nearly 1,500 Israelis have also been killed, the vast majority on October 7th. And now, there are fears the death toll could climb if there's a full attack of Rafah. A lot has happened in the last week. Tensions are high, and there has been lots of confusion. So today, we're speaking with The Globe's Senior International Correspondent, Mark McKinnon. He'll help us understand what we know about the Rafah invasion, its connection to the ceasefire negotiations, and where things might go from here.

I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Mark, great to see you. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Manika. So we're talking on Thursday morning here in Toronto, Thursday evening where you are in Jerusalem. And I wanted to start off with the Israeli military offensive in Rafah. We've been hearing a lot about that this week. What exactly has happened? Well, it's been a whirlwind week. It started on the weekend. I think there was a lot of optimism here and around the region that some kind of ceasefire agreement was nearby that would see Hamas release at least some of the hostages that it's been holding since last October in exchange for a period of a ceasefire

and that this would be a multiple-stage ceasefire that would move us towards perhaps the end of this conflict. Those talks appear to have broken down. On Monday, we had this whirlwind of activity where first the Israelis began dropping leaflets and sending text messages to people living in the eastern edge of Rafah, this city in the south of the Gaza Strip that's really the last area the Israeli military has not yet gone into. And that seemed to prompt a sudden sort of awakening from Hamas. They suddenly accepted the terms of a ceasefire. We didn't know what those terms were. Since then, we've seen Israel proceed with what looks a lot like a military incursion into Rafah, where more than a million people have been gathered near the border between Gaza and Egypt

because it's the last place to get aid, the last chance to get out of the Gaza Strip. Yeah, we've been talking for months now about people kind of moving south in Gaza towards Rafah and into Rafah. You called it a military incursion, Mark. What is that exactly? Is that a full scale invasion or is this something else? Well, right now, the concern with the United States in particular has been trying to avoid is a full on assault on this city of Rafah, which before the war was about 200,000 people. I've been there. It's a very crowded place with just 200,000 people in it. And now we've got perhaps a million others who had come down here. The United States is putting a lot of pressure on Israel to get them not to launch a full-on attack on the city of Rafah, where I believe the last four, really, Hamas battalions are ensconced. And so far we've seen Israel go into the eastern edges of Rafah after dropping these leaflets that I mentioned

and take over the Philadelphia corridor, which is the border area between Rafah and the Egyptian border. You know, a full-on assault appears imminent. It hasn't necessarily begun. It's hard for us to say exactly because there's not a lot of independent reporting happening in the Gaza Strip right now, but all indications are that this is gathering steam. And when you say it appears imminent, I guess, what is that based on? What are we seeing? Well, there's certainly a lot of Air Force activity that you can hear. We've definitely seen Israeli tanks reaching the Rafak crossing, which was the border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, which has been really the most important conduit for humanitarian aid getting into Gaza.

We see videos of Israeli tanks massing just on the eastern edge of the Gaza Strip. And the Israeli defense minister today is saying no outside pressure, even from our best of friends, is going to deter us from finishing this operation. So all signs point to the Battle of Rafah, which will be an extremely difficult one for those people living there being right ahead of us. You just mentioned humanitarian aid, and we know that the Rafah Crossing was one of the main arteries for aid into Gaza, right? So now that it's closed, how is aid getting in? It's not very much getting in at all is the simple answer. It has been the most important corridor for aid by a long shot. And a lot of the aid that has been waiting to get into the Gaza Strip, waiting for Israeli approval to be allowed into the Gaza Strip, is piled up in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.

That aid, for now, doesn't seem like it's getting in anytime soon. There are two other crossings into the Gaza Strip. One is the Karim Shalom crossing in southern Israel. That crossing has been closed since Sunday or Monday when Hamas launched rockets in that direction. They appear to have been targeting this massing of Israeli troops on the edge of the Gaza Strip, which is right around the Karim Shalom crossing. And then there's a third entry point, which is on the very north of the Strip, called the Erez crossing, which is where journalists like me and humanitarian workers used to cross. It was more the pedestrian crossing, for want of a better term, to the Strip previously.

You could walk through this sort of maze of tunnels and cages to get into Gaza. And that crossing, the passenger terminal, which Hamas badly damaged on the October 7th attacks, is not functioning yet, but the Israelis have opened up sort of a gap in the wall to allow for some humanitarian aid from the north to come in. And the north is where the World Food Program has been warning about an imminent famine or a famine they say has begun. But most of the aid, as I said, is now south of Rafah piled up in Egypt. And you can't bring that suddenly around to the north. And Israel, the Israeli government has challenged the use of the term famine there, we should just say they don't agree that the blame for the slow pace of aid delivery should fall on them. Let me ask you about people in Rafah, though, Mark.

I mean, for months now, people in Gaza have been told to go south towards Rafah, right, as the Israeli military moved through the territory. So where are the people who are in Rafah supposed to go now that the military has actually moved in there? Well, the maps that they were dropping in these leaflets that I referred to earlier gave sort of two exit routes. One was to sort of go west towards an expanded humanitarian zone along the coast. The other one was to go back towards Khan Yudas, which is just north of Rafah.

It's largely been reduced to rubble by a battle there previously. So people are leaving, those that can. You've seen these videos of just thousands of Palestinians walking, piling into cars, getting on donkey carts, heading just away. You know, we have a journalist in the Gaza Strip who's been working for us for a long time, and he left Rafah actually a while ago because he just said living in a tent in those conditions was just so miserable because, as I said previously, you had an extra million people basically arriving on this already very crowded place. You had to live in tents. You had to sort of live on humanitarian aid handouts. He's gone back to his home in the center of the Gaza Strip

some time ago. And I think a lot of people are doing that. And these homes are destroyed. But that's what people are returning to is sort of buildings that have been damaged by other battles because it's at least you're in your home and away from the act of fighting, which now feels better than being in a tent with a battle ahead. I guess I'm wondering what it's like for people on the ground there, right? Especially when we're talking about access to things like healthcare, which is so important. And over the last seven months, we've heard a lot about how few hospitals are actually operating in Gaza right now. What is available to the people in Rafah and I guess those who are leaving that area as well? I had it laid out for me last week that there were five remaining hospitals in the Gaza Strip, three of which were in Rafah.

One of those appears to have closed down in the last few days because the Israelis ordered the staff and patients to evacuate it. So you're down really to absolutely minimal services for this group of people where malnutrition is rising, all sorts of sicknesses and illnesses are spreading because of the lack of sanitation. In addition to people who have just been injured by the war, I spoke this week to a midwife in the Gaza Strip who was telling me how she's delivering 15 babies a day and she has to send mothers and babies home hours after they've given birth, after these babies are born, because the hospital can't keep them there. And she said she was sending babies home that had diarrhea, that had fever from mothers who were suffering from malnutrition because the pace of injured and seriously wounded people coming to these hospitals was such that you couldn't let a woman and a baby stay in a bed for a day. After I wrote that article,

another doctor wrote to me and said, actually, your article understated what was happening. We often have two women delivering in the same bed. I think that is the scale of what's going on here. And I was speaking to UNRWA, the United Nations agency that sort of is the main aid implementer in the gas strip. And they said earlier last week that there was 800 people for every toilet in the gas strip. And then a week later, they wrote to me and said, actually, please update that. There's 880 people now per toilet. So if you can imagine just the sanitation, how long you'd have to wait.

And so you're hearing all sorts of tales of just, you know, how illness is spreading as a result of this, on top of all the other more obvious sort of impacts of the war. Yeah, I mean, that sounds like a really an impossible situation there. I would imagine for women and girls who are already more vulnerable in these kinds of situations, this is even more acute. So when you speak to people who are doctors who work on the ground in the Gaza Strip, they say the first thing that women and girls ask for after a ceasefire, of course, is dignity. And they say there just simply is no dignity in the Gaza Strip right now. And you hear these hard to fathom stories, including I was told that women in the camps, because there's a shortage of things like for menstrual products, they're making pads out of canvas tents. And there's a spike in the number of urinary tract infections, UTIs, because women are avoiding eating and drinking because they don't want to go line up at these unsafe and unsanitary toilets that are all that remain in the camps around Rafah. Mark, what has Israel said about why it decided to send tanks into Rafah this week?

So the Israeli rationale is that if a ceasefire happened right now, Hamas would still be intact as a political and military force in the Gaza Strip. And the bottom line for Israel is that there will not be a return to the status quo before October the 7th. Israel is no longer willing to tolerate an armed movement capable of lobbing rockets at a city, capable of attacking its kibbutzis and towns just across the border. And they say if you had a deal right now, if you just ended the fighting under the ceasefire terms that Hamas

says it's accepted, you would leave intact these four Hamas battalions, you would leave intact Hamas political leadership who by and large have not been found, or if they've been killed, we don't know about it yet. And therefore, this whole situation could repeat itself. So I think despite all the outside pressure, the signals we're all getting, and I, you know, talked to Israeli government spokespeople this week, is that they feel they cannot stop right now, and they need to go into Rafah. And when it comes to this decision, who is actually making this call? Decisions of this magnitude are made by a three-person work cabinet. It's chaired by Mr. Netanyahu, the prime minister, of course, but with two other people that are sort of in the room. Mr. Netanyahu,

Yoav Galant, who is the Defense Minister, and Betty Gantz, who is a former Army Chief of Staff, former Defense Minister, and a political rival of Mr. Netanyahu's who's joined this war cabinet. And both Mr. Gantz and Mr. Galant are former generals, people with a lot of military experience, which is something that Mr. Netanyahu has been a political leader for a long time, but he's never commanded an army. I think it would be fair to say that none of these three men would be considered doves. And we see that in the decisions they're making right now, that they are emphasizing the security needs, as they perceive them, of Israel, the need to finish this operation, destroy the remaining Hamas fighters over, you know, the people in the streets who are saying, please take a ceasefire. We'll be back after this message. Mark, let's talk more about these the ceasefire talks that are happening here, because there's the biggest development was the statement from Hamas announcing that it had accepted a deal on Monday.

What did they actually agree to? Do we know? Hamas said that it agreed to sort of a multi stage, a three stage ceasefire, which would have seen them release a certain number of the hostages it's holding. The number that I've read is 33 in the first sort of phase of the ceasefire in exchange for an end to the hostilities. And there'd be a second phase where they'd release more hostages and the Israelis would start to pull back. And then the third stage of the ceasefire would see all the hostages released, a certain number of hostages released from Israeli prison. And Hamas hoped this would be the end of the war. And I think that's where the real break is between what Hamas wants and what Israel

wants. Israel is willing to stop shooting and to allow for the release of hostages, of course. What it is not willing to do is say, okay, then that's the end of the war and allow Hamas afterwards to come back to power. What Israel is saying is, you know, we can have a pause, but it's not the end. Israel didn't accept that deal, right? So this is some of the sticking points then, I guess, in the negotiations. Yeah. So the deal that Hamas, you know, sent out and said, this is what we've agreed to and what briefly caused some excitement on, particularly inside Gaza and among the hostage families.

The understanding that we've had from foreign diplomats is that it's not that different from the one that the United States and Qatar and Egypt are trying to nudge the two sides to. The real sticking point is how long this deal would be and what it means. Is it just a pause or is it the end? Let me ask you about the hostages as well, right? Because we know Israel and Israelis really want to get the hostages home. It's been more than seven months now.

Do we know what state the hostages are in or even, I guess, how many are still alive? We know that there are 132 Israelis that are counted as hostages, and a rolling count by the Haaretz newspaper suggests that 37 of those are believed to be dead. Now, we've seen a few videos which have been very impactful, Israeli hostages sort of pleading to their families, their government, to reach a ceasefire. Obviously, those would be recorded under duress. You know, the families of the hostages and some of the ex-hostages who were released in a November ceasefire have become, together, a very potent political force here,

pushing for the government of Prime Minister Netanyahu to prioritize getting the hostages out alive over all other political considerations. That said, despite even that, the political and military leadership of Israel has this other aim as well, which is destroying Hamas completely. And, you know, when the negotiations are happening with hostages, it's usually, Hamas is demanding the release of Palestinian prisoners as well who are in Israeli jails. What do we know about that? We know that past hostage releases by

Hamas have been part of that exchange has released a ratio of Palestinians who are in Israeli jails from as low as last time, I think it was just several Palestinian prisoners per Israeli hostage release to back to the most famous case was Gilad Shlid, an Israeli prisoner who was a longtime hostage of Hamas. And he was released in exchange for more than a thousand Palestinians being released from prison. What's most interesting, I think, here is that Hamas has made it very public that they have called for the release of Marwan Barghouti, who is the most famous Palestinian prisoner in Israeli prisons and a figure that many Palestinians think would be a natural leader for them should he be released. And someone who has support among both

Hamas and Fatah, the party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whether or not he gets released will be a really interesting question. Obviously, the Israeli government doesn't want to release someone who they have jailed for his involvement in multiple murders. And I don't think Mr. Abbas even is that interested in releasing someone who's far, far more popular than he is. Mark, if we take a step back here, I guess, look at these two elements of the war that we've been talking about, right? The military offensive in Rafah and the ongoing ceasefire talks, the negotiations. What should we make of the timing here? Like the fact that these are happening at the same time? Definitely there's a connection there.

I mean, we had this ceasefire talks and they seem just to go on and on and on. And then when Israel started dropping those leaflets on eastern Rafah earlier this week, it really did seem like, OK, that's a move to say to Hamas, we've got to make a deal now. And then Hamas responded very quickly by saying, we've agreed to a ceasefire, as we've learned, not the one that Israel is interested in. So definitely, this is a pressure tactic. The Israelis, I think, were telling the Americans, certainly at the start of this, that they were going into Rafah with the intention of putting more pressure on Hamas. Obviously, at some point, if a full-on offensive on Rafah begins, it'll be very difficult to stop that, and ceasefire negotiations will be over until the operation is. In our last few minutes here, Mark, I guess we should look at kind of the bigger picture here and some of the other players, in particular the U.S., because they have a big part in what's

going on here. How has the U.S. reacted to everything that's happened in the last week? Well, there's a very important development just in the last 24 hours, or at least it's only been confirmed in the last 24 hours, that the United States, President Biden has held up the delivery of thousands of bombs that were to be delivered to the Israeli military because he didn't want to see them used in a full-scale operation in Rafah. And for the United States, for any U.S. president to use that kind of leverage on Israel is a sign of the level of frustration the U.S. has with the Israeli government right now. The sense that we're giving you all of this aid and supporting you're not listening to us. There's also this outside pressure from the International Criminal Court, and we don't actually know what's going on there. But Prime Minister Netanyahu has put out a couple of tweets about how the ICC has no

jurisdiction to charge senior Israeli officials and nothing the ICC does will affect what Israel decides to do to defend itself. The reporting local media here is that they genuinely fear the ICC will press charges at some point in the future against Mr. Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders, which would be another sign of just the international community, which was once very supportive of Israel at the start of this war, having become concerned with its conduct. And then, of course, there's the internal politics here in Israel, where Mr. Netanyahu is the head of a coalition that relies on the support of far-right parties. It's clear that Mr. Netanyahu at least has to worry that he would lose his government if he backed down now and

agreed to a ceasefire. Yeah, the internal politics are really something that are quite important to talk about, too. Can I ask you a little bit more about that, Mark? How else is this playing out in terms of the pressures that Netanyahu is facing? You see these protests on one side almost every night, both outside his residence here in Jerusalem, outside the defense ministry headquarters where his work habit meets regularly, led again by the hostages, the families of the hostages, the released hostages, calling for him to sort of prioritize bringing these people home. And that obviously has a lot of impact here. And on the other side, he's got his coalition members who are saying, you know,

let's not just go into Rafah, they're saying we should plan to reoccupy the Gaza Strip, which Israel pulled its soldiers and settlers out of in 2005, though it maintained control of the airspace and the water. And we should be building settlements in the Gaza Strip again. Let's talk that the same should happen in the north, that Israel should push Hezbollah back from the northern border with Israel and go into southern Lebanon. And it's not just sort of these extremist right-wing parties that are saying that.

I spent part of a day this week with Israeli families who have been living for seven months in internal exile, really, in hotel rooms, because they were told to evacuate the northern border zone because of the concern that the war in Gaza, the second front, could be opened with Hezbollah in the north. And, you know, seven months later, there's still these hotel rooms. And you ask them, you know, do you want to go home? They said, no, not until we fix that situation, not until we feel safe in our homes. We feel like that October 7th can't happen in the north of Israel. So even all the focus right now is on Gaza, on resolving that situation, coming to some kind of

end to that war with Hamas. There may yet be another conflict ahead in the north with Hezbollah. Just very lastly here, Mark, where do things go from here? What are you watching in terms of the ceasefire and what happens in Rafah in the coming days? Well, I've been trying to talk to people both on the Israeli political scene and in the Palestinian Authority about the day after. So Mr. Biden has made it clear that his support for Israel includes

he'd like to see them after the end of the war in Gaza be included in sort of a regional security agreement that would include Saudi Arabia, which has never recognized Israel. And Saudi Arabia would recognize Israel as a state and part of this process would involve the creation of a Palestinian state at some point along the line. And there's a sense on both sides that this is the moment to try and change the status quo, not right now when this war is happening, but afterwards, everybody recognizes that the status quo is dangerous.

There's also a real disillusionment with the current leaders, with Mr. Netanyahu, who is personally ideologically against a Palestinian state. But even if he could be swayed as beholden to this far-right government. And on the Palestinian side, how many times have we even heard about Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority over the last seven months? They've been sidelined. He's been quiet. He's seen by his own people of being complacent. So there's just a desperate need for new leaders on both sides if Mr. Biden's idea is going to be driven to somewhere good. Mark, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. Thank you.

That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Our intern is Aja Sauter. Zura Jabril joins us as a fellow of Carleton University's Brooke Forbes Award. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.