Israeli Military Given ‘Green Light’ For Gaza Incursion, Post-Hamas Plan Emerges: CNN’s Nic Robertson
Nic Robertson, CNN’s international diplomatic editor, spoke to Anderson Cooper on Thursday and laid out what officials are telling him is the plan for Gaza after Israel’s ground assault, which he reports has already been “green-lit.”
Robertson spoke to Cooper from Sderot, in southern Israel, immediately after a rocket barrage from Gaza. Still a bit shaken, he noted, “One landed not far from here a couple of days ago, and it really smashed through the side of the house, through the inside of the house, out through another wall, right inside of the house. So obviously, you take as you do, I know our colleagues do, take precautions and take cover.”
“But that seems to have passed. Yes, I think I think it’s over,” he added.
“Well, Nic, right now, Nic let me ask you. You spoke to government ministers who gave you an outline of what a postwar Gaza might look like,” Cooper then noted, adding:
That’s something a lot of us, security officials have been raising questions about publicly. I spoke to David Petraeus, former director of the CIA, among many other positions. And one of the things he was sort of stressing is assuming Israel is successful on the ground with their with what they want to do with Hamas, what happens in any vacuum that is created, ‘What happens to Gaza then?’ What did you hear from the official who you talked to?
“Yeah, there were several things today from both these government ministers,” Robertson replied, adding:
One is they made it very clear that the decision to go to war has been made. We understand that. But the green light for a military incursion has already been given to the military. It’s up to the military now. When they choose to go in, there’s no more political steps required.
But on the questions of what does a post-incursion Gaza look like? I think it’s going to look radically different.
That border fence area that has an electronic border fence that has sensors on it, that has cameras on it, the wall behind it that drops down deep into the ground to protect against tunnels and a small buffer zone behind that. That’s going to become much, much wider, a zone along the whole 67 kilometers of the border fence. We were told a zone that no one will be allowed to go into.
So essentially, the Israeli Defense Forces will have free fire in that zone. It creates a much bigger buffer and would prevent any physical incursion. So that’s one way it seems that the mistakes, some of the mistakes that were made on Saturday the seventh will be overcome.
“But the other thing that’s a very big takeaway, I think, is this, that if you compare the Gaza worry to the West Bank today and I gave the example of the West Bank today, Israeli Defense Force were able to go in there and arrest more than 60 different Hamas operatives in the West Bank,” he continued, adding:
It wasn’t an incursion. They were able to go in with a military force and do that. What the IDF, it appears, is planning for Gaza is a similar scenario where it is so completely disarmed, where a new authority will have to be built and created, I was told, that the defense forces would be able to go in as they can in the West Bank and make arrests. That would be a monumental shift from where we are today and would seem to indicate that a huge ground incursion or military force is going to be required to achieve that.
We know that the government says Hamas is going to be completely destroyed. But what we’re hearing now are the steps that would follow on from that, which could only take place if if Hamas was completely gone from the scene. You could not have a situation as it is today where the IDF could go in and arrest people if they wanted to. So I think these are the first indications we’re getting.
Watch the full clip above via CNN.
