February 04, 2014
The shaky
ceasefire between Hamas and Israel has grown increasingly more unstable over
the past month, leading to a rise in cross-border shootings, rockets, and mortars from Gaza; as well as Israel
Defense Forces (IDF) infiltrations, airstrikes, and assassinations in
the strip. The Egyptian-brokered ceasefire—that ended the weeklong Operation Pillar of
Defense in November 2012, the last round of major military confrontation
between Israel and Hamas—has been put under severe strain due to a lack of
strategic political foundation.
In
addition to prompting an immediate halt to the hostilities, the written
agreement aimed to initiate a process to normalize movements of goods and
people to and from Gaza. In the year following the ceasefire, the number of
rocket and mortar attacks originating from Gaza against Israel dropped to 67 from 641 in the year prior; and there
were only nine Palestinians killed in Gaza as a result of Israeli
operations between December 2012 and the end of 2013, as opposed to 246 in the first
eleven months of 2012 (the majority of whom were killed during Pillar of
Defense). Yet, in the past month alone, more than twenty rockets have
been launched from Gaza, and five people have been killed (four Palestinians
and one Israeli).
What is
clear today is that the decline in military activities in 2013 did not
translate into a more stable and long-term period of quiet, likely because the
cessation of hostilities in December 2012 was not grounded in a more normalized
relationship between Israel and Gaza. In the aftermath of the ceasefire, Israel
and Hamas held indirect talks in Cairo, but these efforts did not lead
to substantial changes in Israel’s policy toward the Gaza Strip. Despite some
initial alleviations of the economic restrictions in place—including the extension of Gaza’s fishing zone—the total number of
truckloads of consumer goods and construction materials entering and (even more
importantly) leaving Gaza between 2012 and 2013 remains well below the totals prior to 2007, when Hamas
took over the strip and Israel’s policy of isolating the territory went into
full force.
To date,
the precarious ceasefire still holds, even though it has risked implosion on
more than one occasion. The fact that avoiding another all-out military
engagement continues to be in the mutual interest of Israel and Hamas has
prevented a military escalation, yet the current arrangement is far from
stable.
From
Israel’s point of view, the status quo based on mutual restraint and political
stagnation serves its short-term interest in stability. Indeed, Israel is
interested in keeping the border quiet with Gaza and, lacking a broader
political strategy to deal with the strip or Hamas, it would rather manage the
border without spending military or political capital on yet another military
operation. What is more, a full-fledged military operation in Gaza would
cripple the fragile Israeli-Palestinian peace process and further drive a wedge
between Israel and the international community.
Hamas’s
interest in preserving the status quo can be understood in the context of the
group’s increasingly isolated position. Hamas’s regional status has
significantly deteriorated since it lost its main regional ally,
the Muslim Brotherhood-led government in Egypt. The highly antagonistic
relationship between the interim Egyptian government and Hamas is especially
damaging, as the group has already fallen out with both Iran and Syria. Turkey
and Qatar currently represent Hamas’s only significant regional supporters, but
even their combined financial and political backing falls short of compensating
for the loss of support in Cairo and Tehran.
In addition
to its international isolation, Hamas’s predicament is further complicated by
the worsening economic situation in Gaza, which is tied to Egypt’s restrictions on inflows of goods from
the Rafah crossing and its military action against the underground tunnels
operating between Gaza and Sinai. The impact of this hardened Egyptian policy
with respect to both Hamas and Gaza has been deeply felt within the strip. Finally, Hamas’s
administration in Gaza is increasingly more contested at the local level, with
Gaza-based armed factionsgrowing more defiant and the rise of political opposition
to Hamas, for example from the civil society-based Tamarod movement.
Yet the
current equilibrium between Hamas and Israel, based on mutual deterrence and
short-term interests in preserving the status quo, continues to be incredibly
ephemeral. Each side’s strategy to preserve deterrence threatens the uneasy
equilibrium, creating a permanent security dilemma. For Israel’s part,
maintaining deterrence means retaliating for every violation. Israeli leaders
know the sporadic rockets and mortars fired from Gaza have mostly been launched
by renegade militants from Salafi-jihadi groups and the Palestinian Islamic
Jihad, but they place blame squarely on Hamas: both as Gaza’s governing
authority and as party to the ceasefire. These actors, therefore, can easily
play the role of spoilers, goading Israel and Hamas into confrontation.
Meanwhile,
Hamas is pursuing domestic projectile production to make up for the drop in
weapons importation by Egypt’s Sinai tunnel crackdown. It also seems to be investing in offensive tunnels dug
under the Gaza-Israel border—since the effectiveness of Israel’s Iron Dome
rocket defense system has diminished Hamas’s projectile threat—three of which
Israeli forces uncovered in 2013. These tunnels are likely seen as backup plans
for Hamas. When the quiet with Israel breaks, Hamas fighters can blow up
tunnels underneath IDF patrols or send hit squads to attack nearby communities
or kidnap soldiers. But preparing for such contingencies risks initiating a
break in the quiet in the first place.
For
instance, on October 31, five Israeli soldiers were injured by an explosive that was
set off as they cleared a 1.7 kilometer-long (approximately 1 mile) tunnel
between Israel and the Gaza Strip. In response, the Israeli Air Force attacked
a different Hamas tunnel operation, killing and burying three Hamas commanders inside.
An IDF spokesman tweeted that Hamas’s action “breached the
‘Pillar of Defense’ understandings.” Hamas has avenged its soldiers with
retaliation in the past, but in this instance both sides walked back from the
brink.
Since
then, latest events—including an increase in rocket attacks and Israeli
military operations—display the inherent fragility of the current arrangement.
It is focused on fulfilling the first clause in the ceasefire (a halt to
military operations) while falling short of achieving significant progress on
the political front. The movement of goods and people to and from Gaza is still
far from normalized, and Israel still relies on easing or tightening
restrictions on Gaza as a bargaining chip against Hamas. For example, following
the discovery of the underground tunnel between Gaza and Israel in October 2013,
the Israeli government decided to forbid importation of construction material
intended for civilian purposes in the strip. Explaining the importance of
tightening restrictions on construction materials, Defense Minister Moshe
Ya’alon stated, “That’s the price that, unfortunately, the
population will have to pay,” a telling sign of the strong reluctance to pursue
a more stable policy than just deterrence when dealing with Hamas and the Gazan
population.
Major
General Sami Turgeman of the IDF’s Southern Command admitted this past
September that Israel has “no alternative” to Hamas for maintaining quiet from
Gaza. Yet at the same time, Israel and Hamas continue to prepare for the next
war. In doing so, they contribute to the weakening of the ceasefire they both
have an interest in preserving. Without fulfilling the ceasefire pledge of
normalcy between Israel and Gaza, it is only a matter of time before such
preparations spark a resumption of hostilities.
This article is reprinted with permission from
Sada. It can be accessed online at:
http://carnegieendowment.org/sada/2014/01/28/why-is-israel-hamas-ceasefire-eroding/gzi3
Benedetta Berti is a research fellow at the
Institute for National Security Studies, a lecturer at Tel Aviv University, and
the author of Armed Political Organizations. On Twitter: @benedettabertiw.
Zack Gold is a Washington-based Middle East
analyst and author of the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center analysis paper “Sinai Security: Opportunities
for Unlikely Cooperation Among Egypt, Israel, and Hamas.” On Twitter: @ZLGold.