LONDON: Israel has miscalculated the costs of a potential new war with Hezbollah, a former US military intelligence analyst warned on Tuesday, noting that it could result in significant civilian casualties in both Lebanon and Israel.

Harrison Mann, a major in the Defense Intelligence Agency and the highest-ranking US military officer to resign over the Gaza conflict, expressed his concerns in an interview with The Guardian.

Mann underscored the high risk of Israel engaging in a war on its northern border for internal political reasons, primarily driven by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s hold on power and his insulation from corruption charges are seen as reliant on maintaining a state of war.

“I don’t know how realistic their assessments are of the destruction that Israel would incur, and I’m pretty sure they don’t have a realistic idea of how successful they would be against Hezbollah,” the former army officer and intelligence analyst said.

He said that the Israeli military was aware it could not decisively strike Hezbollah’s extensive arsenal, which is entrenched in the Lebanese mountains.

Instead, Mann suggested the IDF would target Hezbollah leaders and Shia residential areas to demoralize the group’s support base, a tactic referred to as the Dahiya doctrine, after the Beirut district was heavily bombed in the 2006 war.

“It’s not like an actual written doctrine, but I think we can be very comfortable assessing that bombing civilian centers as a way to compel the enemy is clearly an accepted and shared belief in the IDF and Israeli leadership. We’ve just seen them do it in Gaza for the past nine months,” Mann said, but he said that such a plan would backfire.

Mann told the Guardian that he expected Hezbollah would respond to any existential threat with a massive rocket and missile assault.

“They probably have the ability to at least partially overwhelm Israel’s air defenses, strike civilian infrastructure around the country, and inflict a level of destruction on Israel that I’m not sure Israel has really ever experienced in its history — certainly not in its recent history,” Mann said.

With Hezbollah’s arsenal seemingly out of reach from air strikes, Mann suggested that the IDF would initiate a ground offensive into southern Lebanon, which would come at a high cost in Israeli casualties.

He warned that sustained shelling of Israeli cities could compel the administration of US President Joe Biden, especially during an election period, to accede to Netanyahu’s calls for greater US involvement.

“Our least escalatory participation will be possibly striking supply lines or associated targets in Iraq and Syria to help cut off lines of communication and armaments flowing to Hezbollah,” Mann said. “But that on its own is risky, because if we start doing that, some of the people that we hit could be Hezbollah, but they could be IRGC (Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps).”

While Mann believes the Biden administration would aim to avoid direct conflict with Iran, he acknowledged that the risk of such an escalation remained.

“We know specifically that the Israeli prime minister must continue to be a wartime leader if he wants to prolong his political career and stay out of court, so that motivation is there,” Mann said, adding that any Israeli government would also be pressured by the displacement of tens of thousands of Israelis due to Hezbollah attacks.

Mann also pointed out the Israeli military establishment’s belief that the Iranian-backed Hezbollah must be confronted as it continues to grow in strength.

Mann’s resignation, submitted in November and effective from June, was accompanied by a public letter on LinkedIn in May. In the letter, he condemned US support for Israel’s actions in Gaza, stating it had “enabled and empowered the killing and starvation of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians.”

As a descendant of European Jews, Mann wrote: “I was raised in a particularly unforgiving moral environment when it came to the topic of bearing responsibility for ethnic cleansing.”

He said that his resignation was met with a largely positive response from former colleagues, with many expressing similar sentiments.

“A lot of people I worked with reached out to me, a lot of people I didn’t work with as well, and expressed that they felt the same way,” he said. “It’s not just a generational thing. There’s quite senior people who feel the same way.”
 

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: The Hamdan family — around a dozen people from three generations — fled their home in the middle of the night after the Israeli military ordered an evacuation from the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.
They found refuge with extended relatives in a building further north, inside an Israeli-declared safe zone. But hours after they arrived, an Israeli airstrike on Tuesday afternoon hit the building in the town of Deir Al-Balah, killing nine members of the family and three others.
In all, five children and three women were among the dead, according to hospital records and a relative who survived.
Israel’s order on Monday for people to leave the eastern half of Khan Younis has triggered the third mass flight of Palestinians in as many months, throwing the population deeper into confusion, chaos and misery as they scramble once again to find safety.
About 250,000 people live in the area covered by the order, according to the United Nations. Many of them had just returned to their homes there after fleeing Israel’s invasion of Khan Younis earlier this year — or had just taken refuge there after escaping Israel’s offensive in the city of Rafah, further south.
The order also prompted a panicked evacuation from European General Hospital, one of the main medical facilities still operating in the Gaza Strip. Videos circulating on social media shows people wheeling a hospital bed down a street from the hospital.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement that the hospital could no longer function because so many of its staff had evacuated. Hours after issuing the initial evacuation orders, the military said the facility itself was not included, though it is located within the zone.
On Tuesday, cars loaded with personal belongings streamed out of eastern Khan Younis, though the number of those fleeing was not immediately known. The new exodus comes on top of the 1 million people who fled Rafah since May, as well as tens of thousands who were displaced the past week from a new Israeli offensive in the Shujaiyah district of northern Gaza.
“We left everything behind,” said Munir Hamza, a father of three children who on Monday night fled his home in an eastern district of Khan Younis for the second time. “We are tired of moving and displacement.
Once we settle in a place and start to cope,” the Israeli military “forces people to move again,” he said. “This is unbearable.”
Nowhere safe
Up to 15 members of the Hamdan family fled their Khan Younis home and arrived late on Monday at their extended family’s building in Deir Al-Balah, said Asmaa Salim, a relative who lived in the building.
The building was located inside the extended humanitarian zone that the Israeli military had declared when it began its offensive in Rafah in May, telling Palestinians to evacuate there for safety.
The strike came around 3 p.m. on Tuesday. Associated Press video shows an entire floor of the building gutted. “Almost everyone inside was martyred, only two or three survived,” Salim told the AP.
A list of the dead posted at the nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital said those killed included the family patriarch, 62-year-old dermatologist Hossam Hamdan, as well as his wife and their adult son and daughter. Four of their grandchildren, aged 3 to 5, and the mother of two of the children were also killed. A man and his 5-year-old son who lived in the building and a man on the street outside were also killed in the strike, which wounded 10 other people, including several children.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the strike.
On Tuesday, the Israeli army said it estimates that some 1.8 million Palestinians are now in the humanitarian zone it declared, covering a stretch along Gaza’s coast running about 14 kilometers (8.6 miles). Much of that area is now blanketed with tent camps that lack sanitation and medical facilities with limited access to aid, UN and aid groups say. Families live amid mountains of trash and streams of water contaminated by sewage.
The amount of food and other supplies getting into Gaza has plunged since the Rafah offensive began. The UN says fighting, Israeli military restrictions and general chaos — including looting of trucks by criminal gangs in Gaza — make it near impossible for it to pick up truckloads of goods that Israel has let in. As a result, cargo is stacked up uncollected just inside Gaza at the main Kerem Shalom crossing with Israel, near Rafah.
The Norwegian Refugee Council said last week that it surveyed nearly 1,100 families who fled Rafah and 83 percent of them reported having no access to food and more than half had no access to safe water.
On Tuesday, more families fleeing Khan Younis were trying to find space in the zone. Um Abdel-Rahman said she and her family of four children — the youngest 3 years old — walked for hours during the night to reach the zone only to find no place to stay.
“There is no room for anyone,” she said. “We are waiting and have nothing to do but wait.”
Some crowded into empty lots around a largely destroyed housing complex in the western part of Khan Younis that lies within the “humanitarian zone.”
Among them was Noha Al-Bana, who has been displaced four times since fleeing Gaza City in the north early in the war.
“We have been humiliated,” she said. “No proper food, no proper water, no proper bathrooms, no proper place for sleep. … Fear, fear, fear. There is no safety. No safety at home, no safety in the tents.”