STRIKE AND RESPONSE LEAVE MIDDLE EAST IN A QUANDARY

There are no easy ways out of the grim warren of war the Israelis and Palestinians face. The possibility of a wider conflict is not far with rumblings near Israel's northern front

- LT GEN SYED ATA HASNAIN RETD)

FROM Israel's intelligence failure to Hamas's brutality, from the lessons of yet another conflict initiation to the chances of a larger war, and from strategies that can be employed to the chances of victory in a high-intensity urban war-there are wide-open domains to analyse and comment on in the world's freshest conflict. To do justice to the analyses on this emerging set of scenarios, one needs to have reasonable clarity on the history of the region, particularly since the Balfour Declaration of 1917, on modern-day strategies of hybrid war including the technologies used, and on the current regional geopolitics.

The region has endured various political and ideological standoffs such as Iran-Israel, Iran-Saudi Arabia, Palestine (Arab)-Israel, Shia-Sunni and various intra-Arab feuds; the cauldron has always boiled, ready for another conflict. We will touch upon some of these aspects in this column. This war is not ending anytime soon and definitely not before subsuming the efforts at creating stability in this turbulent zone.

The Israeli inability to anticipate an action of such proportions by Hamas despite apparently receiving confirmed warnings from the US and Egypt is being counted as a monumental intelligence failure for a nation whose survival depends on proactiveness. Hubris after many military victories is a natural phenomenon.

However, what Israel has never realised is that none of these victories was strategic enough to put an end to all the threats it faced; they only multiplied. Israel should have heeded lessons from the Yom Kippur war of 1973 which clearly indicated that a vanquished adversary will always find ways and means of near perfection to overcome weaknesses.