Missed opportunities

Former Israeli major general Dan Harel, who was head of the country’s Southern Command during the 2005 disengagement, remembers the toll of protecting a few thousand settlers.

There were an average of 10 attacks per day against Israeli settlers and soldiers, including rockets, roadside bombs big enough to destroy a tank, tunnels to attack Israeli soldiers and military positions, and frequent gunfire.

“Bringing a school bus of kids from one place to another required a military escort,” said Harel. “There wasn’t a future. People paint it as how wonderful it was there, but it wasn’t wonderful.”

Harel says the decision to evacuate Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip was the right one, but that Israel missed crucial opportunities.

Most egregious, he said, was a unilateral withdrawal without obtaining any concessions from the Palestinians in Gaza or from the Palestinian Authority.

He also sharply criticised Israel’s policy of containment toward Hamas after the disengagement. There were short but destructive conflicts over the years between the two sides, but otherwise the policy gave Hamas “an opportunity to do whatever they wanted”.

“We had such a blind spot with Hamas, we didn’t see them morph from a terror organisation into an organised military, with battalions and commanders and infrastructure,” he said.

The 7 October 2023 attack, Israel’s largest military intelligence failure to date, was not a result of the disengagement, however, said Harel. “The main issue is what we did in the 18 years in between.”