Understanding Hamas with Jonathan Schanzer

Welcome to Shield of the Republic. A podcast sponsored by the Bulwark and the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, and dedicated to the proposition articulated by Walter Lipman during World War two. That a strong and balanced foreign policy is the shield of our Democratic Republic. I’m Eric Edelman counselor at the center for strategic and budgetary assessments, a Bulwark contributor and a non resident fellow at the Miller Center. I’m normally joined by my partner in crime, Elliot Cohen, the Robert Euzgood professor of strategy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, but Elliot is traveling, this week.

But I’m very glad to have as our very special guest on shield of the Republic Jonathan Last Chanser, the senior vice president for research at the foundation for defensive democracies. Jonathan has an enormous background, in, Middle East and, terrorism issues. He has a BA from Emery University. He got a MA at Hebrew University. His doctorate from King’s College in London and also studied Arabic at American University in Cairo.

He’s been a terrorism finance analyst at the treasury department, and the author is is the author of three books very relevant to the topic, today of the war in Gaza. He has written state of failure. Yes, sir Arifat, Mamudibas, and the unraveling of the Palestinian state is written Hamas versus Fata, struggle for Palestine and most recently Gaza conflict twenty twenty one, which I highly commend, to readers. You can find all of them available at Amazon. Jonathan welcome to shield of the Republic.

Thanks, Eric. Great to be with you.

So, one of the things that you do in your book on on the conflict, two years ago in twenty twenty one, and I guess it’s worth recalling for our listeners that, we’ve had several rounds of fighting between Israel and Hamas as you document in the book, one round in two thousand eight, two thousand nine. Operation cast led, and then successor rounds in, twenty twelve, twenty fourteen. And then, of course, in twenty twenty one. One of the things you talk about in the book, is that you cannot look at this fight between Israel and Hamas between the, Israeli defense forces, the IDF, who are now operating not just in the north of Gaza, but as of today in the south as well, purely in the context of Gaza, but you have to see it in a broader sort of regional context. Talk a little bit about that and and explain what you mean by the larger context.

Sure. Well, I think I I would probably look at it through two important lenses at least to start with. The first and most important is through the lens of Iran. The Islamic Republic of Iran has been a sponsor. They are the purveyor of weapons.

They are the ones provide the training, and they provide a lot of the guidance that Hamas has received over the years. A lot of that bad advice that has left Gaza in rubble time and again has actually been the result of Iran urging and goading the, Hamas terrorist organization to engage in war with the Israelis. This is part of, what has been widely described as the ring fire strategy that, Iran has devised in the region. The goal is to surround Israel with various proxies that can fire thousands of rockets into Israel. So we see the capabilities of Hamas and Gaza or what were their capabilities.

We see, Hezbollah, which has roughly ten times the number of rockets as well as a lot more sophisticated ordinance. That it can fire at Israel. We see Shiite militias that are operating in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen course, have been firing rockets at Israel from longer distances. All of these groups are aligned funded, trained, armed by Iran. And the Islamic Republic, I would say it’s safe to say, is fighting Israel to the last Palestinian, to the last Lebanese, to the last Yemeni, to the last Yemeni, to the last Syrian and the last Iraqi.

They are fighting Israel by proxy so they don’t have to. The regime stays comfortable and safe within their own borders while war rages halfway across the region. And so this is, I think, an important lens with which we must view the conflict A lot of people would like to make this about its Palestinians and Israelis. It’s about social justice. It’s about a piece of real estate that belongs to two people.

I think sure. You could look at it that way, but if you can’t understand the way in which Iran has been stoking this now, for a decade and a half, two decades now, then you’re missing a big piece of the puzzle. But the second lens may be just important just as important. And that is that there is a domestic battle that is taking place within Palestinian politics between the Hamas faction and the Fatafaction, which is the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority. These two factions have been battling one another since the late nineteen eighties, early nineteen nineties.

Hamasas views itself as the vanguard of the Palestinian resistance, and the Fatafaction sees itself as the international recognized body that, governs the Palestinian authority. They, have actually gone to war with one another. In two thousand and seven, and I wrote about this in my book, Hamás versus Fata, the struggle for Palestine. These two factions have actually been in a hot war. In a civil war with one another, it ultimately ended in a split of the Palestinian territories.

Right? Gaza is now controlled by Hamas. We could call it Hamasa Stan, if you will. The West Bank is controlled by Fata. They have two separate governments, two separate economies, two separate bureaucracies, it’s one of those things where, you know, over the years, people continue to talk about the importance of the two state solution.

And I always say, aren’t we really talking about a three state solution here? Because there are already two Palestinian states. And that explains why the Gaza script is at war today, and the West Bank is not. And this divide, I think, really does inform quite a bit of what’s going on here as well.

There is also, I think one other dimension, of course, which is, something you and I’ve talked about a lot, which is the role of, not the a shia international community, but the sunni international community in the form of Turkey and Qatar, which has been a major financier, and in the case of Turkey, a a major point of, repose as it were for exiled Hamas leaders and moral support, for Hamas, which we’ve seen in spades, these past few weeks in the statements that president Rejupai Erdogan has made. Would you wanna talk about that, element of it? The guttery strike me as sort of your classic arsonist fireman, you know, routine, which is they fund Hamas. And then when conflict breaks out, they, come in and, and, you know, opposed as the, arbiters and, mediators of the conflict. And now, in this case, hostage negotiators.

Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, when we look at both of these countries, and they are, of course, both cut from the same cloth. These are Muslim brotherhood aligned nations, that see themselves as the protectors and promoters of, political Islam in the Sony world that is. Their role as Hamas sponsors is actually born out of the last major hostage crisis. Here I’m referring to the Gilad Chalit hostage crisis.

This is a, an Israeli soldier who was taken by Hamas in two thousand and six, and he was held until two thousand eleven. When the Israelis traded one thousand Hamas prisoners for this one individual. Included in that, by the way, was Yahya Senwar, the head of the Hamas Organization and Gaza, who is largely seen as the architect behind the ten seven slaughter. In there also with were a handful of other Hamas fighters, convicted Hamas fighters who were then deported to two countries, in particular, Qatar and Turkey. I can I can address the Turks first?

They’re actually a little bit easier to analyze because quite frankly, Rajabtayyip Erdogan’s approach to, Hamas has been a rather blunt one. He doesn’t try to be arsonist and firefighter. He’s basically fine being an arsonist. He has allowed Istanbul to be the, home of Hamas, Turkey. There are somewhere between a dozen and two dozen convicted, Hamas terrorists that have been operating there.

Among the more famous of them is a guy by the name of Salah ala Rory. Arori made headlines. You may recall Eric in twenty fourteen when he got up in front of a large crowd, in Istanbul. Which included the deputy prime minister of Turkey at the time, and he announced after a fifty one day knock down drag out battle between Hamas and Israel that he was responsible for the precipitating event that sparked that war. I’m talking here about the triple homicide of three teens in the West Bank that was ultimately what led the Israelis to actually put boots on the ground in Gaza.

That’s the last time we saw that. And Arrhea has since gone on to I mean, it’s amazing what he’s done out of Turkey. He’s actually helped build a rocket arsenal for Hamas in Lebanon. He was, I believe, the first, Hamas figure to come out and claim responsibility for kidnapping of two hundred and forty plus people on the ten seven massacre. So the Turks have been, home to a lot of pretty nasty people, associated with Hamas over the years.

The Mosad has tried to get them in a few cases. And, the, MIT has stopped them in some cases. It’s been an ongoing cat and mouse game. But the Israelis, you know, at one point, I hope that Erdogan would get better that he would moderate. He hasn’t, and I think he’s really shown his true colors here.

During the, the ongoing war here, in Gaza. The Qatar are a little different in the sense that they have try to convince the United States and perhaps others around the world that they can help. And that’s the reason that they say they are sponsors of So they too have a headquarters in Doha. It’s right down the street from the Aludeade, Kayak, the combined air operations center.

That’s the centcom air force base that we we, have. It’s, where centcom has its forward headquarters

That’s right. And it’s where most of the, bombing runs against ISIS and Al Qaeda have taken place over the years. That is our that is the tip of the spear for us. And so it’s a bit weird to have, you know, groups like Hamas down the street, but of course we also know that the Taliban is down the street. We know that Al Qaeda, financiers and Isis’s financiers run around in in Qatar.

This is their brand. That they’ve developed over the years, that they wanna be seen as an asset to work with some of these unsavory characters And over the years, they have convinced not just the United States, but the Israelis that if they would just be able to pay the salaries of the Hamas government. And if they would just be able to transfer additional humanitarian assistance or even just cash, that this would ultimately lead to calm, on the Gaza Israel border. And but I think as you noted, Eric, there have been five rounds of war. The qataris have not been able to stop Hamas once, in all of this.

They may have been able to curtail the fighting by you know, a period of days, but usually these battles have just played out the way one would expect where the Israelis are provoked and they respond with overwhelming force and Hamas ultimately relents. In this case, they have emerged as the hostage negotiators. The Israelis, I think, were happy to use their offices for the short time that they did for seven or eight days. After the Israelis were able to get out a hundred or so of their hostages, I think the Israelis made it clear that they were no longer interested in using the good offices of the qataris. They started actually bombing, buildings that had Hamas infrastructure in them that the qataris had built.

I will actually be very interested to find the Israelis actually also captured what was considered to be the Qatari Embassy near the Shifah hospital complex, which is been widely identified as the Hamas command center. It is likely that the Israelis have uncovered documents that may reveal the depths to which the qataris were helping Hamas not just meet the salary needs of the bureaucracy But I believe we’ll probably see some documents pointing to military and terrorist cooperation. So that will be interesting to see as this war drags on.

So that’s a pretty good, you know, summary, I would say of the, you know, broader kind of regional picture here. We’ve we’ve talked about, you know, the Iranian, the internal Palestinian dynamic, and now the Turks and and Gutter. There is another internal dynamic, which you address in in your book on the twenty twenty one Gaza war, which is a little different this time around. So one of the things that was, I think, for many Israelis, is shocking in twenty twenty one. Was the fact that for the first time really in these various go rounds with Hamas, there there was, substantial unrest, not in just in the West Bank where occasionally that’ll happen when there’s something going on with Hamas, but among Israeli Arabs in, inside the the green line as it were inside the, state of Israel, with Israeli citizens.

These are people who are Israeli citizens. And this time around, the reaction has been quite quite different. Some of which may have to do with the fact that, some bedouin and some Israeli Arabs were actually killed on October seventh But it does seem that the Israeli Arab population is as traumatized as the Jewish population of Israel by what they saw happening on, on October seventh. You talk a little bit about the contrast, John between twenty twenty one and today with the Israeli Arabs.

Oh, absolutely. It’s amazing what, two years difference can make here. It’s been light and it’s been night and day. Look, what happened in twenty twenty one was undeniably a shock to Israelis and and it was really disheartening to hear the way that Israelis talked about the situation after, that twenty twenty one war because You heard some Israelis, mostly, you know, right wing usual suspects, on the political spectrum, but they were talking about Israeli Arabs as a fifth column. And and that, of course, is just terrible news when you think about the way in which, Israel has worked so hard over the years to integrate its Arab population you know, they are entitled to the same rights as other Israelis.

They serve on the Supreme Court. They serve in the knesset. They serve as judges, they serve as, you know, their doctors, their lawyers, their pillars of society. Now it doesn’t mean that everything’s perfect. You know, every minority in just about every country I’ve ever been to still has their grievances, but one always had the sense that things were okay.

At least okay. If not good. And then during this last round of conflict in twenty twenty one, we saw them coming out into the streets in these mixed towns, like in Lode and in beersheva and in Jerusalem itself and in other places, where they were actually taking to the streets and engaging in violence. And in some cases, you know, trying to attack Israelis. And So I think the Israeli security establishment spent, the last two years really trying to figure out what happened.

I think there were some arrests but I also think that there was a lot of dialogue and a lot of attempts to integrate more In fact during the last, government under, Natalia Bennett, we saw the inclusion of Arab parties for the first time in a coalition. And I think that there was something truly transformational about about that decision. Now, Tali Bennett, I think at some point down the line. Even though he was only prime minister for a year, he will get credit for a lot of interesting things that, that transpired during his time at office. And this was one of them.

And Monsor Abbas, the leader of this, of this Arab Party, has actually emerged in this most recent round as something of a hero. I mean, he has come out and unequivocally condemned what happened on ten seven. And, and I think has, really it’s it’s been a it’s been a source of inspiration for a number of Israelis who were clearly disheartened by what happened on ten seven and shocked and they were wondering about the future of the country. So I think in that sense things are looking pretty good. There is of course a difference between the war of twenty twenty one and the war of twenty twenty three.

The twenty twenty one war focused I don’t know if it was grounded in reality, but at least the narrative was focused on Jerusalem. And so there was a religious component to the last war where Muslims thought they were fighting for the Al Aqsa mosque. They were fighting for their rights to take part in, you know, religious ceremonies in, you know, in the third holiest site in Islam, this I think may have sparked some of the heat that we saw coming out of the Arab sector as they call it in in Israel. This most recent round was completely one hundred percent provoked by bloodlust on the part of Hamas, and I think that the Arab Israelis’s just don’t have the stomach for that. And, of course, for anyone who has seen the kinds of visuals that came out of that day on ten seven, It’s not hard to be disgusted.

Speaking of the visuals, John, you you talk a little bit in the book about the kind of the methodology that you, used to, you know, put it together. You were writing a lot in real time about the war, in twenty twenty one for, for Fdd and for, you know, variety of of news, and op ed outlets. But in the modern age, it’s possible to sort of follow these kinds of conflicts in real time, you know, using social media and open source intelligence, and you, of course, have been a, you know, an intelligence analyst as a terrorism finance analyst listed at the treasury department. And I assume you’re doing the same thing now. Talk a little bit about what it’s like to, you know, be a consumer but I know it’s it’s sort of obviously impeding your sleep cycle since you’re up, you know, since we’re, you know, big time difference between Israel and here.

So to watch the things in real time on Israeli television and regional media, sort of does cut into your your sleep a little bit. But talk a little bit about what it’s like to monitor all this and how have you seen things play out in ways that you think are either improperly reflected or inadequately reflected in the US media.

Maybe I’ll just start by just going through kind of what what the day looks like, when when these wars break out, the work life balance is not great. I’ll I’ll see that. And my my wife will be the first one to foot stomp that usually on my foot when when we talk about the the kinds of time that that is required to go into monitoring all of this. But, you know, you can watch four Israeli news channels in real time on Apple TV. By the way, I I don’t have Apple stock, so I’m not trying to promote any other products.

But, you know, you can watch channel eleven, which is sort of their PBS. You can watch channel twelve, which is sort of their CNN. Channel thirteen, which is, I don’t know, it’s kind of no man’s land. It it seems kind of non aligned. And then channel fourteen is the Fox News of Israel.

And so you can watch all of those in real time around the clock, which I often do. And it helps to speak the language. I’ve learned Hebrew when I got my master’s degree. And so I’m able to track their news. What’s amazing about their news is that, you know, you’re watching it in real time, and it usually takes a good half hour or forty five minutes for these headlines to reach America because the reporters from the wire services are not gonna run with something right away out of the Israeli press until they’re able to chase down a second source, and that may take a while.

And meanwhile, you know, I’ve already seen this news that comes out an hour later, and I find it very frustrating that there is not sort of a regular translation service for Americans that wanna stay up on this stuff because it’s you know, our stuff is slow and it’s late and it’s often watered down. And I I think we see our politics creep into some of this. The language gets weird. You know, the inability to seed, you know, that one side side has carried out an atrocity, for example, is sometimes hard. For our media to, you know, to to admit.

So that’s part of what I do on a regular basis, but then there’s watching Arabic media. So I’m able to watch, Al Arabia, and Aljazeera. Aljazeera, of course, is controlled and owned by the Qatar. And that is often vitriolic. But it’s important to see the kinds of messaging that they’re putting out into Arabic.

And the way in which that they are really trying to cite against the Israelis. They’re trying to incite against the United States. They want their audience to believe that there’s some kind of wanton slaughter that is going on in Gaza. And we’ve seen this now five different times. It’s really a pattern Al Arabia is interesting because as the Saudis and the Amerates and others have drawn closer to Israel, the coverage has gotten more muted.

Which I think is a very positive thing. They’re not out to vilify the Israelis twenty four seven. They will still be critical But they are, I think, increasingly trying to demonstrate something more of a balance, and I think it’s a more moderate content. To watch. And then, you know, the other screens to watch are of course our media.

So I get to see the politicized coverage that we see in MSBC, which is a left wing brand and Fox News, which is a right wing brand and looking at how all of that plays out and the kinds of guests that they bring on and remarkably you know, we see people who don’t really know much about the conflict being brought on as guests in a lot of these channels, which is also very frustrating. And then there’s the real time analysis that’s happening nonstop on Twitter or sorry. Now we’re calling it X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, where you can watch, you know, sort of hot takes from analysts and from journalists. And, you know, what’s what’s so important for me is to try to watch all of that at once. So I could at least attempt to, convey what’s happening in the region and to balance that with some of the the mistakes that are happening, in our, legacy media, so to speak, and in the real time content that is being produced that often goes viral before anyone’s even had a chance to check it.

So it is really a lot, of information to track. But if you can get your head wrapped around it, you can see the playing field a lot better. Then, for example, just, you know, sitting at home trying to make phone calls to people who you know in the region but probably can’t talk to you.

Can you offer a couple of specific examples of things you’ve seen that you think are inadequately reflected in the media here? I mean, I I can think of one example of what you were talking about, which was the the, strike on the parking lot of the L Ali hospital, which was, you know, immediately, you know, broadcast as a and a headline famously in the New York Times said it was an Israeli strike turns out to have been a failed Hamas missile that didn’t hit the hospital but hit the parking lot. But, you know, can you other things that you’ve seen that I think you feel have been either inadequately or inappropriately treated here in the media?

Sure. Well, I mean, in twenty twenty one, and I talk about this in in the book, there was an Israeli airstrike on a I think it was a nine story building that happened to also have some media offices in there. I think the AP building or it was the AP offices were in that building as well as a handful of others.

AP was in there. Yeah.

Right. And the Israelis warned that they were going to strike that building and the reason why they did was because Hamas was operating an office inside that building too, and they were trying to jam the iron dome missile defense system. When the Israeli struck the building, they got absolutely hammered by every media outlet in America. They were hammered by, by the, by the White House it was just a free for all. It was a pile on where the Israelis were just excoriated for having attacked the media.

And then eventually the news came out that this was actually a place where Hamas had offices and then the media found themselves in this very awkward position where they had to explain how it was that they that these people consider themselves to be investigative reporters and yet couldn’t quite figure out that Hamas was operating in the same building that they were. That’s just one example. During this most recent round conflict, you know, the other hospital that’s come into the, spotlight is the Al Shifa hospital, which the Israelis identified early on as the command center for Hamas military operations in the Gaza script. This is, by the way, something that I have known since two thousand and six, and the reason why I know it is because the Washington Post AP, human rights watch, and a handful of other outlets, media, and NGOs have reported on it themselves. And yet, the media was, constantly throwing shade on the Israeli assertion of there was a significant infrastructure that lay beneath the hospital, and they were blaming the Israelis for attacking medical buildings where there were and civilians and patients and the like.

This, you know, I gotta say this conflict always brings out the worst in a lot of people. I’m sure I’m not alone in this assessment. We see people who are normally mild mannered, just coming out just with dripping with anger and fury about what they perceive or crimes on one side or the other, and it happens on both sides. And I would argue that the media falls prey to this as well that the media will find itself becoming part of the melee as opposed to being that kind of dispassionate observer that we would expect from you know, from from our media outlets from our reporters. We just don’t see it.

They seem to want to believe one side or the other. And, it’s led to a lot of mistakes. It’s a it’s it’s led to a lot of erroneous coverage. It’s led to a lot of distrust on the part of the Israelis. They don’t want to share a lot of information now, with, with some of their media.

And then, of course, there are all the questions that are swirling within the sort of right side of the spectrum about how legacy media leans left you know, reflexively and that they’re just inclined to buy into a narrative that would, you know, sort of fly in the face of reality as we know it. And so it’s actually exacerbating the lack of trust that some Americans already have in the media, which is highly problematic There needs to be a serious overhaul. Part of it, I’ll just, I maybe end here, but part of it has to do with the fact that very few of the reporters that I’ve watched in this region, know the language, know the culture, know the history. They are often air dropped in when the conflict begins. And they want to know more than they do.

They try to convey more than they know. And they work it under certain assumptions, which just should not be the case. And so it’s a it’s a frustrating thing to watch, but I don’t think it’s gonna change anytime soon.

John, I wanna pick up on, some things you were talking about, with regard to El Shefa. You were talking about the hospital serving as a command center. And of course, one of the big stories in the media was, well, you know, Willie, Israelis find these tunnels that they’ve been claiming exist under the hospital. Of course, they have found them, and they have documented that now. They’ve flown drones through some of the tunnels, and they’ve begun to, you know, blow up and collapse.

Some of the tunnels pour, foam into smoke and foam into them, etcetera. But the tunnels are a very interesting story, and they’re kind of, I guess, two two dimensions to it that I would love to hear you comment on. One is that the tunnels turn out as I understand it from, some of the Israelis I’ve talked to who are knowledgeable about this. That, tunnel network they are discovering in this go round turns out to be significantly larger and more complex and, more sophisticated than even the Israelis had and deeper than even the Israelis had had imagined You know, some some of the Hamas leaders have talked about, you know, the, the tunnel network, which is frequently referred to as the Gaza metro, I think in your book, you talk about it being, if it’s not in your book, I read it somewhere else that it’s, in fact, larger than the London underground in terms of mileage. I I think I’ve seen it, you know, Hamas leader is quoted as saying that it’s like three kilometers long.

It seems to have turned out to be even much bigger than that. You know, maybe as much as five hundred miles worth of of tunneling underneath, which is really a kind of astonishing thing. And that’s one element. And so that allows, of course, Hamas fighters to, you know, move around unobserved by, Israeli, over flights, and, you know, drone surveillance of of, It also, of of course, allows them to hide hostages and and, you know, to, you know, build, rocket factories that are hidden from view, etcetera, rocket and missile factories. There’s another element, of course, which is the tunneling from Gaza into Sinai, which allows Hamas to import the materials and the weapons, whole weapon systems, from Iran, which is where we started this conversation, that they’ve used to rain down you know, death and destruction on Israel.

And, you know, even today, despite the, you know, Israeli intense military operations in the last seven weeks, Hamas continues to fire, you know, rockets into into Israel. I was just before we got on to record this, I was with someone who was in Israel actually on October seventh and who has the the early warning app that Israelis have on their phone that allows them, you know, to get alerted when there’s incoming from Gaza. And he was while we were talking was getting you know, the signal for for incoming, and this is after seven weeks of operation. So, obviously, a deep magazine of of rockets and missiles has been accumulated by Hamas through these tunnels. Now the the Israelis is you know, from reading your book, I I got the impression that the Israelis thought they had destroyed a lot of that infrastructure in previous go Ron DeSantis that the Egyptians, of course, had an interest in doing this as well.

But apparently, that also turns out to have been, you know, a a bigger sort of operation and a more ramified set of tunnels and even the Israelis, I think, had originally anticipated. You wanna talk a little bit about the tunnels.

Yeah. The the tunnels, you know, have become a major problem for the Israelis. I think we first saw it in twenty fourteen, if I’m not mistaken. I mean, actually, it was the tunnels were used to kidnap Gilat Chalit, who we talked about, who was taken in two thousand and six. But we began to see a much, sort of a spike, if you will, in in the the amount of tunneling that was going on.

Really in response to a couple of things. Number one, the Israelis had built a, a fairly effective fence. It was effective until ten seven. Keeping Gaza out of Israel. They they had built this fence, in response to the intifada of two thousand two thousand five, the, the Palestinian second uprising against Israel that included a lot more deadly tactics like suicide bombings.

So the Israelis closed off access, to the country above ground. After that stopped the suicide bombings, then we started to see rockets. Right? And so the Israelis developed iron dome, this incredible missile defense system that’s been ninety or ninety five percent effective against Hamas Rockets. And then when that was, baked into Hamas’s calculations.

They began building, commando tunnels, to try to infiltrate Israel and the Israelis have done a ent job, I think, of trying to close those up. But where they can’t stop those tunnels is inside the Gaza strip itself. And so in twenty twenty one, the Israelis did talk about that metro system. It was the first time they they were kind of openly talking about it with its nickname. Talking about how many kilometers.

My understanding, Eric, we’re all I think, you know, we’re still all over the place in terms of official numbers. I’ve heard six hundred kilometers or four hundred fifty miles, give or take, of this tunnel system. But what’s really amazing about it is the varying levels of depth with these tunnels. There is the sort of upper upper level, which are ten meters or so beneath the ground, and that’s really for fighters to be able to go from one place to another, and possibly to be able to grab Israeli soldiers if they’re fighting on the ground and then pull them into the tunnels. The next level down is where they hold the rockets that they bring up to fire.

And then the level below that is the leadership level where we see command centers and the like. It’s complex it’s not easy to build. It’s even harder to maintain because the the lower down they are, the harder it is to pump air and electricity into these tunnels. And so this has been actually part of the debate that we’ve seen gone on. Between Hamas and Israel of the international community.

Right? Hamas keeps saying, well, the only way we’re gonna agree to a ceasefire is if we get more humanitarian assistance and we talk about human humanitarian assistance, we want more fuel. And the Israeli say no. And then, you know, the international community says, look at you. You’re depriving, you know, the people of Gaza and the Israelis are saying, no, no, no, wait a minute.

We’re talking about the fuel that is going to allow humbass to operate in these tunnels more effectively against us, the battlefield. And so this explains a lot of what’s been going on, the back and forth in this, you know, debate, let’s call it, or the negotiation that’s been going on. By the way, I’ll also note that I heard from an Israeli source the other day that, the Israelis are going around destroying solar panels right now in the Gaza strip because the solar panels are keeping the electricity and air pumping into these tunnels that that Hamas knew that this day would come and that the fuel would be cut off. And so this is what they did instead. So, really an interesting kind of dynamic there in terms of the combat tunnels.

And then the other set of tunnels that you mentioned is no less important. That is, of course, the tunnels connecting the Sinai peninsula to the Gaza script. This is all happening beneath the Ruffa Crossing where the official transfer of humanitarian goods has been taking place What we’ve learned though is that the, security has been incredibly lax with the trucks going in and out of Raffa. And so Raffa has actually been the source for a lot of the replenishing of those rockets, or the explosive materials or cylinders that are used either parts or in whole. And then there’s what happens underground.

And this is something, you know, the Egyptians back in twenty thirteen when Abdul Fottal cece came to power in the coup or revolution or the coup evolution or whatever we wanna call it, He began to destroy those tunnels, with some enthusiasm because he saw Hamas as part of the Muslim brotherhood network, which of course they are. But over time, as I understand it, as the Egyptian economy is cratered, CC has allowed for the Sinai Betowind to return to operating these tunnels because it is lucrative for all. But what that’s done is it’s pushed the region to the brink of a regional war. I’m not blaming all of this on the Egyptians, but I have gotten the distinct sense from talking to people around the region that there will need to be a revision of the security contracts that govern, what takes place above and below the ground at Raffa.

The tunnels, I think, are also an interesting or important key, to understand some of what the Israelis are doing in their, military operations. One of the things that’s been striking, about, the military operations is the number of air strikes and the number of munitions that the Israelis have dropped. I mean, dwarfing in terms of scale, what we did in our counter isil campaign, for instance, in urban warfare against Mosul and, when we reduced the isil capital in Syria, Iraq, I mean, we did not have nearly this many sorties, not nearly this many individual missiles and bombs dropped. Do you wanna talk about why you think, the Israelis have been so heavy on the munitions? Cause it is related to this whole, issue of tunneling.

Yeah. I mean, you know, I think, you know, when you hear Israel’s detractors talking about this, primarily in the American media and certainly on al jazeera, I think there’s an attempt to depict the Israelis as, you know, out for blood, you know, carpet bombing, maximum damage, you know, that kind of thing. My understanding is that the Israelis are still being look, they’re they’re maybe not dropping as many knock knock bombs before they destroy buildings, but they’re dropping leaflets and they’re letting people know that they need to get out of the field of fight and They’re doing, I think, a lot of what they have done in the past, but they’re dropping a lot more ordinance. The reason for that at least in part is because they are trying to destroy the tunnels. And in order to destroy the tunnels, you’ve gotta get ten meters beneath the ground.

At least, sometimes more. I’ve actually heard that in some cases, the Israelis have had to drop two or three or four bombs in the same exact spot in order to get to the source of the tunnel that they’re trying to hit. And so we have seen, I think, a lot more, bombs dropped with the goal of destroying that military infrastructure. Of course, that doesn’t help anyone when you think about the kind of trauma that the Gaza people are contending with the nonstop noise and obliteration of, of infrastructure. It is, you know, I don’t wanna belittle what Gaza are going through, but I don’t get the sense that everything that Israel’s doing is, you know, taking out one building after another, I think they are still trying to be targeted.

It’s just not an easy terrain to work with. I think it may be worth, you know, remembering here that Gaza is about the size of Washington DC in its total area. But it’s got about, I think, four times as many people living there. It’s two point two million people. You know, we’re I think we’re roughly a half million in in DC, you know, before everybody starts coming in for rush hour every day.

And so it’s, you know, it is not easy for the Israelis to operate in this crowded environment. I think they’ve done as best as probably one could But I do find it actually really amazing that, you know, when, you know, in, in today’s day and age, when war is started, especially in a way that this war was started on October seventh with just total brutality. It was clearly an act of war on the part of Hamas. They started the war. And then when the war starts up, you know, immediately, we start hearing calls for assassination to violence.

We start hearing about war crimes. We start hearing about international criminal court. There is something very odd about the way in which the public now views hostilities. We never had rules like this before where people walked in feeling thoroughly constrained because they know that there’s gonna be video, that there’s gonna be documentation that they’re going to be, you know, before even anything starts, you know, they go right to the ICC. And, it’s interesting to me.

The Israelis, I think, are very used to this. They operate often in this chairman. And so far, I think they’ve navigated it okay. I think this one will be more of a challenge given the amount of ordinance that you’ve talked about, Eric, that it is a large amount and that there is a larger amount of destruction, and that will, of course, prompt the Israelis to have to answer different kinds of questions this time around.

Of course, one of the, you know, great tragedies for the Gaza is that you know, as they go as the Israelis as the IDF goes after this tunnel infrastructure. Of course, a lot of it is underneath mosques, underneath schools, underneath, apartment buildings. And so, the reconstruction, of Gaza is gonna be an immense task after this this all ends. And if you were saying the Gods are, you know, suffering enormously under all of this, it, you know, we talked you were talking about the knock knock bombs. These are dummy bombs that, Israelis would, typically in previous, go rounds with, Hamas and Gaza drop on the roofs of buildings.

To let the inhabitants know that it was really time to get out that they were about to strike. In this instance, just to put a scale on it a little bit, as I understand it, the Israelis have dropped over a million and a half leaflets. I think it’s well over now four million text messages that have been sent to the inhabitants of buildings, as well as, a similar number for five million of mobile phone calls made by Arabic speaking IDF officers to tell people, you know, get out because we’re about to you know, you know, hit this hit this building. So, you know, obviously there’s been a lot of collateral damage. It’s important to point out that the laws of armed conflict applied to both sides, and it is a war crime to put military material and infrastructure in schools, in hospitals, and amongst civilians.

So, you know, the the burden here, as you were saying, I think Jonathan Last, you know, I’m not started the war and they are fighting it in a way that violates the law of armed conflict.

We see a lot of, human shields. Right? The the deliberate firing of rockets or storing of rockets, or fighting, you know, in densely populated areas you know, they have been waiting for the Israelis. They want the Israelis to wage that war, and then they often parade around they’re dead in ways that, I think are are designed to try to sway public opinion. And it’s, you know, I think it’s it’s obviously frustrating for the Israelis, but I’ve got to imagine this cannot be easy for the Gaza people.

We’ve seen actually a few examples of, people coming out there being interviewed, and they actually start to take aim at the Iranians or the Turks or the Qatar or at Hamas itself, as the, Hamas rule is weakened, you get a sense that the Gaza people are sort of at least finally feeling a bit more comfortable to share what’s, you know, what’s been on their mind maybe for the last, sixteen years. But one last thing I’ll just say on this is that, Kareem Khan, the, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court just paid a visit to Israel He actually went down to Southern Gaza to take a look at the damage, that was done on ten seven. He’s gone to Ramal up to talk to Mohammad Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority. I don’t know if he’ll go into the Gaza script or not, you know, probably at safety concerns. But the ICC prosecutor is there, and he’s basically been telling the Israelis, look, you know, work with me on this.

Which I think we’ve never really seen before where an ICC prosecutor is actually on the scene saying, look, I like this. I don’t like this. I mean, I I can’t remember a war where I’ve seen something that’s really feels too generous to me.

Yeah. That’s amazing. I I wasn’t aware of that. I’m I’m I’m glad you you you mentioned that. You know, look urban warfare is the toughest kind of warfare, there is, and and that’s when you’re fighting above ground.

You know, when you’re now also adding this subterranean dimension of this, it, the degree of difficulty is just enormous. It’s not a military. Problem as a former senior defense official. It’s not a military problem that I, you know, envy my Israeli colleagues for having to to deal with. We’re kind of beginning to run low on time.

John, I wanted to get to, you know, two final questions if I might, with you. One is ten seven was obviously a a massive intelligence failure. Ronan Bergman, a very well connected Israeli journalist had a big piece in the New York Times about unit, eighty two hundred, which is monitoring Gaza, it appears at least from some of the reporting that there clearly was intelligence about Hamas planning and operation like the one that they launched and some Intel analysts trying to get their superiors to take it seriously, and it was apparently disregarded. Could you comment a little bit on the intelligence failure? Right?

I, obviously, it’s early days you know, a lot’s gonna come out, you know, down the road. One thing we know about the Israelis is that there will be a commission to investigate this. They’ve done it after every previous Intel failure, whether it was the Agronaut Commission after the nineteen seventy three war or after the sovereign Tila massacre in nineteen eighty two or after the Lebanon war in two thousand six. I mean, they always, do a deep dive into what you know, what went wrong and and why and and, and there is a lot of accountability. Head’s role actually in Israel.

Can’t always be said about, you know, the United States. What’s your take though on, failure on, on October seventh?

Sure. I mean, look, first of all, I do think that heads are gonna roll. I think it’s a foregone conclusion that the head of the Mosad, the head of the shin bet head of military intelligence. I the, the, the, the chief of the army is gonna go. Think they’re all gonna go.

I think Benjamin Netanyahu is still trying to bargain with the Israeli people and maybe with himself about his longevity. In politics, but I think he’s likely going to have to face the music too. The reports that have come out about, you know, Egyptian warnings or unit eighty two hundred warnings. That’s their, that’s their NSA equivalent, by the way, their cyber unit. There have been a lot of reports suggesting that Israel had information.

The question is, was that information credible? You know, was it actionable? Did it come from sources that Israelis trusted? I haven’t seen any good intel on that. I do know that a lot of the military observers that watch screens all day.

There’s a whole, there’s been a lot of talk about those in the Israeli media, over the last day or so. They’re typically female officers. That are watching their screens and tracking this, that if they apparently went to their superiors who then promptly ignored their warnings and they are frustrated. Fair enough. But I can tell you that I had a different experience, about a week before ten seven that has stuck with me for the last, you know, two months.

And, I spoke to a senior Israeli official. I had to testify before Congress about things that were going on in the West Bank. It’s the Palestinian Authority. You know, there was a hearing that was called by house members on the practice known as pay for sleigh. I’m sure you’re familiar with.

This is where the Palestinian authority has been paying the salaries or paying for the lifestyles of the families of those convicted of terror attacks. And in other words, it’s sort of a social security for

suicide bombers and the like

Yes. It’s Social Security for people that have carried out terrorism against Israel. And Congress has wanted to cut that off. It’s been a you know, a B in Congress’s Bonnet for quite some time. So I called a, a guy that I knew.

In fact, there’s pending legend. There’s there’s pending legislation, the Taylor Force Act to in in fact, deal precisely with this. Correct. Correct.

Anyway, so I I called an Israeli official who I’d been in contact with a couple of times over the years, knew that he worked on the City file. And and we talked about, you know, all this stuff in the West Bank for, I don’t know, a good half hour. And then, I said, look, I’m gonna let you jump, but, you know, before I do, Could you just give me a sense of what’s going on in Gaza? Because I haven’t heard you say anything about Gaza. And he said, look, we think Gaza’s gonna be quiet.

For months to come. We believe that Yahah Sanwar, the head of Hamas in the Gaza script, is a pragmatist. We believe that he’s somebody that we can do business with. We believe that he wants to give more products and and more opportunities to the people of Gaza and that we understand that he’s tried to promote violence in the West Bank because that’s a territory that he would like to conquer, but we think that Gaza is gonna be quiet. And I heard that a week before, and this was a senior Israeli official.

And so there was, I think, a narrative or as the Israelis would call it a concepsia. That’s the word they use as sort of security concept that had really just thoroughly seeped into the security establishment. It was dead wrong. It was based not on intelligence, but I think on wishful thinking. And so when the unit eight thousand two hundred, you know, junior folks flagged this to their officials.

The officials had already bought in to that concept, and that is why I think they rejected what they heard. And this is just, I think, a warning to all of us about herd based intelligence we have to constantly question our assumptions, constantly question what we’re seeing because there are always people on the other side engaging in counter intelligence, engaging in subterfuge, trying to mask their true intentions. And I think the Israelis’s truly lost sight of that, and, they paid a hefty hefty price for it.

Unfortunately, we’re running out of time, so that that’ll be It for this episode of shield of Republic. I’m very grateful to John Chancellor for joining us. The book is Gaza Conflict twenty twenty one Hamasas Israel in eleven days of war, if you wanna understand the current conflict, I can’t think of a better read to get you up to speed on what came before. And we’ll be back to this topic. I’m afraid, in the weeks ahead as this conflict goes on.

I wanna thank all our listeners If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a a rating on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts from.