Hamas supposedly “agreed” to the ceasefire deal brokered by Egyptian and Qatari mediators, just as Israel began its next offensive on Rafah in the Gaza Strip. Hamas “negotiators” insisted that a truce must also mean an end to Israel’s war on its cadres, never mind that they are still holding over 100 supposedly live Israeli hostages. But as Israel was not present at the Cairo talks and presumably had not seen the details of the deal, just who did Hamas agree with?
Besides, anyone with ‘skin in the game’ will realise that with Israeli hostages now ominously being described merely as “dozens” by the Qatari news outlet Al-Jazeera, Israel can hardly back down or Hamas off the hook. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can only follow through on Israel’s aim stated at the start of its counter-offensive after the October 7, 2023 attack: to totally “defeat, disarm and dismantle” the Palestinian Islamist outfit in Gaza.
Because if Israel does agree to even a temporary truce, Hamas will consider its unbelievably audacious gambit to force international pressure to help achieve its goal a success. A terrorist group will claim it has been able to channel the naïve fervour for “justice” in its favour, even overturning the post-World War consensus against anti-Semitism. Well worth the civilian collateral damage. The implicit message in that for terrorist outfits elsewhere is alarming.
Netanyahu will have to come clean on how Hamas pulled off the attack with such bloody precision and it may cost him his job. Clearly Israeli intelligence was lax, involuntarily or by secret order. But Hamas knew Israeli retaliation would be inevitable and unrelenting as the Netanyahu government—whether unforgivably negligent or criminally complacent—would seek to redeem its credibility by wiping out the force that dented Israel’s image of invincibility.
Thus Hamas also knew everyone in Gaza would be in danger once the Israeli counter-attack began. But it made no move to evacuate people. Collateral damage as leverage is a high stakes strategy and Hamas gambled on it by remaining embedded deep within residential areas. The way Israeli hostages were greeted with jeers and kicks by locals in Gaza indicates widespread support for the action too if not tacit acceptance of the consequences of Hamas’ actions.
Indeed, in all the precise information on casualties coming out of Gaza after every Israeli action, there is never any mention of how many among the dead and injured were Hamas militants. Surely civilian Palestinians are not firing rockets at targets inside Israel or shooting at Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) even 7 months into the ‘war’? Hamas cadres are there amid the devastation, death and despair, still keeping “dozens” of Israeli hostages out of reach or rescue.
Indians above a certain age, may recall a seemingly endless circle of violence and ethnic hate in Sri Lanka, where the Hamas-like Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) waged a war that spanned generations, for a separate homeland—Eelam—on the island. They had a charismatic and brutal leader in V Prabhakaran, besides many eloquent ideologues who fanned out in the US and Europe, steering the discourse and putting the Sri Lankan government on the back foot.
Back in 1985, the LTTE had raided the area around the revered Maha Bodhi tree, killing 146 people including monks, nuns and children in an incident now known as the Anuradhapura massacre. There was a predictable bloody backlash against civilian Tamils in the northern provinces by ‘civilian’ Sinhalas and the Sri Lankan Army. This set off a two-decade cycle of deadly LTTE attacks and brutal Army retaliation. The similarities with Gaza and Israel are obvious.
The then Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, made a tragically unsuccessful effort to resolve the issue first by airdropping supplies to Tamils in Jaffna (then under siege by the Sri Lankan Army) and later by sending a ‘peace-keeping’ mission in 1987 to end the violence. Not only did the Indian Army lose lives in someone else’s civil war, Rajiv Gandhi himself was assassinated by vengeful Tamil Tiger operatives while on the campaign trail in 1991.
Indian soldiers had realised to their horror back then that there was no dividing line between “terrorist” and “civilian” in Sri Lanka’s troubled north. Women and children were committed to the ‘cause’ and as likely to attack government (and peacekeeping) forces as trained Tamil Tigers. Therefore, eliminating LTTE definitely portended a high civilian toll, and not merely because the latter were used as shields. Human rights groups ignored that fact.
The Sri Lankan government had different approaches to the Tamil separatist issue depending on the exigencies of the parties in power. But neither coopting the Tamil Tigers with money nor internationally brokered ‘negotiated settlements’ worked. Like the current Egyptian-Qatari mediations for Hamas, talks with LTTE collapsed repeatedly and in the meantime, Sri Lankan Tamil terrorists continued to attack and kill Sinhalese civilians and troops.
But when in 2006 LTTE ended a Norwegian-brokered ceasefire by declaring ‘war’, the Sri Lankan government finally decided to destroy it. The difference between that and the current Israeli action against Hamas is that the Sri Lankan authorities based their strategy on a long, in-depth assessment of LTTE’s vulnerabilities—especially its rising difficulty in getting new cadres and arms— rather than being goaded again into a retaliatory attack like Israel.
It combined that analysis with an economic, diplomatic, intelligence and communication offensive to back its military response. To cut a long story short, it spruced up the Army, isolated the LTTE from its popular base and convinced war-weary Sri Lankans about the probability of neutralising it. And then proceeded to implacably hunt down LTTE cadres and destroy their bases with focused military action—and some Indian and US help too.
Some 34 per cent of the casualties were ‘civilian’ by the time the action to ‘disarm and dismantle’ LTTE finally ended in 2009—far less than when the West waded into Iraq, where the non-combatant toll was 67 per cent of the total. There was “international outrage” over the Army’s “brutal” actions against “innocent Tamil civilians” and accusations of human rights violations, as if there was a non-violent option. Sri Lanka did not back down, because its very future was at stake.
The lesson in this bit of South Asian history for Israel and the “concerned” world at large is manifest. Compromising or negotiating with committed separatist, militant forces when a country’s very sovereignty is at stake yields little positive dividends. Israel cannot back down now from ‘disarming and dismantling’ Hamas, buckling to pressure from university campuses thousands of miles away. It will only set the stage for the next round of violence.
The author is a freelance writer. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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