Weekly Israel-Hamas war megathread - week of June 10

Inside Israel’s hostage rescue: Secret plans and a deadly ‘wall of fire’ (Washington Post)

“We understood that in those apartments with those guards, daytime will be the ultimate surprise,” said Adm. Daniel Hagari, an IDF spokesman.

It would mean greater risk getting into and out of the buildings. And it would mean more Palestinian civilians on the streets.

...

Palestinian witnesses described some troops arriving in two undercover vehicles, one of which resembled the trucks used by Israel to bring commercial goods into Gaza. The other was a white Mercedes truck, piled high with furniture and other belongings, a common sight in a camp that’s home to thousands of displaced families.

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The white Mercedes is visible in a third verified video filmed from the balcony of a residential building in the center of the camp. Two ladders can be seen resting against the side of a house, leading to an upper floor next to the truck. “Here they have arrived,” says the voice of the woman who furtively filmed the six-second scene.

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Israeli troops succeeded in reaching Argamani’s apartment without tipping off her guards, according to Hagari, who was watching video feeds from drones circling above and soldiers’ helmet cameras. Almost simultaneously, other units entered the building holding the three male hostages, about 220 yards away.

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The chopper lifted off, heading for a hospital near Tel Aviv. At 12:20 p.m., Argamani’s family was told she was free.

By then, the operation in Nuseirat had gone off course. The guards with the three male hostages had not been taken by surprise. A Yamam commander was shot as they entered the building. A firefight erupted, exposing the covert mission.

...

The soldiers were able to get the three hostages and the injured man into a vehicle, but it broke down under Hamas fire from rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, officials said. At one point, Avivi said, they were forced to abandon the vehicle and seek refuge in a building nearby.

The commanders called for air support.

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Explosions rocked the narrow streets, which have only grown more crowded in recent weeks with families displaced by Israel’s offensive in southern Gaza.

There was carnage everywhere, Abu Asi said, including dead women and children. The roads were filled with “tanks, artillery, body parts and injured … nothing but a hall of blood.”

Centrist Benny Gantz is quitting Israel’s war Cabinet, citing frustrations with Netanyahu

Well, at this point in time it's clear that Israel has no plan yet for the day after the operation in Gaza is finished(which with Netanyaha's goal is unlikely to ever finish due to Hamas's insurgency tactics). It's now mostly a question of how long Netanyaha can remain in power.

I really hope that this isn't going to further sow cracks inside Israel given the troubled political situation pre Oct 7. But I'm not holding my breath.

New York Times: Protest against Gaza war draws thousands to the White House (June 8th)

Somewhat old, but I still wanted to post about it, if for no other reason than to show that protests are still ongoing. Older instances of this weekly thread can't be posted in, but I'm not sure it called for its own topic, so I'm posting here.

In the search for hostages, U.S. is Israel’s key intelligence partner (Washington Post)

The Biden administration has forbidden Israel from using any U.S.-supplied intelligence to target regular Hamas fighters in military operations. The intelligence is only to be used for locating the hostages, eight of whom have U.S. citizenship, as well as the top leadership of Hamas — including Yehiya Sinwar, the alleged architect of the Oct. 7 attacks, and Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing. The State Department in 2015 designated both men as terrorists. Three of the eight U.S. hostages have been confirmed dead, and their bodies are still being held in Gaza, according to Israeli officials.

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The United States provided some of the intelligence used to locate and eventually rescue four Israeli hostages last week, The Post has reported. The information, which included overhead imagery, appears to have been secondary to what Israel collected on its own ahead of the operation, which resulted in the deaths of more than 270 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, making it one of the deadliest single events in the eight-month-old war.

Before the Oct. 7 attacks, the U.S. intelligence community did not consider Hamas a priority target, current and former officials said. That changed almost immediately following the group’s attacks on Israel, which killed more than 1,200 civilians and soldiers and netted upward of 250 hostages.

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In the first weeks of the war, Israeli officials in charge of locating the hostages in the densely populated Gaza Strip requested specific information from the United States to help bridge gaps in what they knew from their own sources, current and former U.S. and Israeli officials said. This included specific pieces of information, as well as technologies and expertise for analyzing large volumes of imagery and overlaying different images to create more detailed pictures, including in three dimensions, of the terrain in Gaza.

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Last week’s successful hostage rescue relied on precise information about the captives’ location. That level of “actionable” intelligence is something Israel has lacked for years in Gaza, owing to an overreliance on technology and a failure to build a network of human spies on the ground. The paucity of human intelligence, in part, was responsible for Israel’s failure to detect and understand Hamas’s planning for the Oct. 7 attacks, current and former officials in the country said.

Recent efforts to locate the hostages have underscored the importance of human intelligence. In May, Israeli forces recovered the remains of some hostages after the interrogation of a Hamas fighter, who pointed soldiers to their location, Israeli officials said. Interrogations of prisoners captured since the war began have become an important component of the overall intelligence picture, officials said.
Israeli intelligence analysts also have found useful pieces of intelligence among the servers, computers, cellphones, notebooks and other documents recovered from Hamas hideouts or command posts, officials said. U.S. analysts have helped mine those sources for clues about hostage whereabouts, they noted. One senior Israeli official said that the fusion of information obtained from electronic and physical records with other sources of intelligence has helped Israel locate hostages during two rescue operations that preceded the one last week.