TEHRAN – With the Israeli regime completely baffled by the October 7 operation by the Palestinian resistance groups, a number of former and current American officials have stepped in to provide the regime with strategic pieces of advice. 

One such piece of advice came from General David Petraeus, the former director of the CIA. In a meeting with Israeli officials, Petraeus offered a detailed roadmap for Israel on how to take over the Gaza Strip and then administer it afterward.  The Tehran Times and Mehr News obtained an exclusive recording of the meeting, which was also attended by the former chief of general staff of Israel’s army Aviv Kochavi. 

To begin with, Petraeus’s assessment of the whole Gaza situation is premised on the assumption that the Israeli military will successfully reoccupy the Gaza Strip entirely, something that Israel is incapable of given the incompetence of its army in fighting head-on ground battles. Aside from 1948, when Jewish militias slaughtered defenseless Palestinian Arabs, the Israeli army has historically failed to win any ground war. Israel is famously known to have won only wars that were short-timed and relied almost exclusively on air power.  This was on full display in the 1967 war with Egypt and other Arab states. 

But Gaza is an entirely different story. Israeli soldiers and commanders are stunned by jaw-dropping Palestinian bravery in the besieged strip, where they are being reaped like rotten fruits by fighters equipped with faith and fortitude. 

Petraeus instead focuses on post-war Gaza, where the main challenge would be how to prevent Palestinian resistance groups from “reconstituting” themselves. 

“I see no alternative to the destruction of Hamas and I use that term specifically because as Aviv [Kochavi] knows there is a military doctrinal term, it’s a gradation you know, you can disrupt, you can deny, you can defeat you can destroy, I think that it [Hamas] has to be destroyed, destruction means in military terms that you are rendering an enemy incapable of accomplishing his mission without reconstitution, keep in mind the reconstitution piece because this is huge task,” the battle-hardened American general is heard saying in the recording. 

Petraeus said if Israel is to completely destroy the Hamas movement and the Islamic Jihad movement, then it should start occupying Gaza City in the north and gradually take over all the strip. 

But the main problem, according to Petraeus, is how to administer Gaza after taking it. He says that the Palestinian people won’t help Israel in its campaign against Gaza. He advised Israel to make clear that it won’t administer Gaza in the future.

“I think there has to be an acknowledgment that Israel is going after to run Gaza for a while and no one wants to reoccupy, I know the challenges associated with that, but I just don’t foresee any confident and capable organization coming in,” he said, “So, who is going to administer, and keep in mind the administration not just handing out humanitarian assistance, restoring basic services, starting reconstruction, getting schools, markets, clinics, opening all that.”

The American general also offered lessons from Iraq, saying, “Frankly we did not acknowledge sufficiently when we went into Iraq and discover that in our phase for planning our post-conflict wholly inadequate and then took really stupid counterproductive decisions that created hundreds of thousands oppose to the new Iraq rather than supporting it.”

The Americans have now made it clear that they would like to hear from the Israelis about their post-conflict plans. While the Biden administration has qualms about Israel’s objectives in Gaza, Tony Blinken, the secretary of state, who has been keen to highlight his Jewish identity, is now reviewing naïve, yet dangerous, plans to salvage Israel. One such plan is to establish a sort of international administration in Gaza after destroying the resistance groups. Arab media indicated that Blinken would raise this idea during his current tour of the region.

Press reports suggest that the Israelis and their American allies are willing to get an Arab force to administer Gaza in the future. But Arab states roundly reject this idea as it will put them in a situation where they would overtly act as protectors of Israel by suppressing resistance from Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. 

Germany has also entertained the idea of forming a European force. But the problem is that the idea is not backed by all European states. 

Of course, all these speculations are based on the idea that the Palestinian resistance groups will be defeated, something that is highly unlikely. 

Israel is in a strategic bind and there is no way out but to end its long-standing oppression of the Palestinian people. The balance of power in the region is rapidly changing. Ironically, the Israeli leadership said immediately after October 7 that they would change the region. The region is changing but not in the way the Israeli regime expected.

By Sadegh Fereydounabadi