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Israel-Hamas war: UN expects wave of Palestinian refugees after Gaza war
The United Nations refugee chief warned that the Gaza conflict could spur more displacement in the wider region as UN officials, politicians and aid groups gathered in Geneva on Wednesday to seek solutions to a global displacement crisis.
A record 114 million people around the world have been driven from their homes, including about 40 million refugees fleeing dozens of active conflicts including in Sudan and Ukraine.
Flight from Israel’s bombardment of Gaza since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists in southern Israel has also internally displaced 85% of the Palestinian enclave’s population.
“A major human catastrophe is unfolding in the Gaza Strip and so far the Security Council has failed to stop the violence,” Filippo Grandi, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, told the Global Refugee Forum in Geneva, an event hosted every four years.“We foresee more civilian deaths and suffering and also further displacement that threatens the region.”
Grandi also urged the international community not to forget other crises spurring displacement.
“While a strong focus remains and must remain on Gaza, I have a plea: please do not lose sight of other pressing humanitarian and refugee crises,” he said.
An issue faced by refugees
Attendees at the forum, which runs until Friday, are expected to make pledges around specific refugee-related issues, such as education and promoting the voluntary return to home countries. Only 60% of refugee children are enrolled in school.
Grandi said he hoped there would also be funding pledges to the UN agency, which has a $400 million shortfall for 2023. He said there was “great uncertainty” about how much UNHCR donors, including the United States and Germany, can give in 2024.
In an interview before the forum, Grandi said many Western politicians were becoming less welcoming in the face of an influx of refugees.
On Wednesday, he said host countries facing refugees should not be taken for granted.
“Let’s remember that most refugees – 75% to be precise – are hosted by low- and middle-income countries, often already struggling themselves to provide and care for their own citizens,” he said.
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Ex-CENTCOM chief: Lower Iranian officials can push nuke breakout without Khamenei – interview
Lower Iranian officials could potentially push the country to break out to a nuclear weapon even without consulting their Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, former CENTCOM chief and JINSA distinguished fellow General Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie has told the Jerusalem Post.
In a recent interview, McKenzie was asked about recent reports by the Jerusalem Post and others, including US and Israeli officials, that the Islamic Republic is finally advancing its nuclear “weapons group” activities, such as nuclear detonation issues, and not only its uranium enrichment activities.
He responded, “I think they are flirting with breaking out, but they have not made a decision to do it. The command and control in Iran is so rickety, that you cannot assume a decision by the Supreme Leader. This could happen at a lower level.”
“The Iranians routinely have taken military action at lower levels without approval of the Supreme Leader. There is no reason not to apply this to other elements as well and I would not be surprised,” said McKenzie.The former CENTCOM chief and JINSA distinguished fellow added that his analysis on this point was based “on actions we have seen in the military sphere.”
McKenzie’s comment were extremely significant because the conventional wisdom tends to be that Khamenei has tight control over nuclear policy, buy former IDF intelligence chief Tamir Hayman has told the Post in the past that the best way to track any potential Iranian decision to breakout to a nuclear bomb would be to follow nuclear scientists and officials at the lower levels.
With all of the focus on the Iranian nuclear threat, McKenzie had some other interesting views on the Islamic Republic, including that its ballistic missiles threat is currently more dangerous than the nuclear threat.
“My argument about Iran, which is contrary to lots of people, is that Iran doesn’t want to possess a nuclear weapon, but wants to be able to possess a nuclear weapon. They are flirting with breakout. They can produce enough fissile material in a matter of weeks. But they have not chosen to do it. By not crossing that line, from which they could never come back from, they can work on the US and the Europeans for concessions,” he said.
Further, he stated, “The other half of the equation, the Iran nuclear weapons problem is not a physics problem, because they are so close…But they must have a missile to take it there [to the target] and a warhead which can survive reentry into the atmosphere. It will take months, perhaps many months. The physics problem can be solved quickly. This is an aeronautical engineering problem.”
Regarding, “the other half of the equation – we [the US and Israel] agreed that Tehran should not be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. However, what the Iranians have done over the last 10-15 years is improve their ballistic missile, drone, land attack cruise missile capabilities” against the Saudis, the UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar, such that Iran “can gain overmatch [overpower] against them.”
The Iran missile attack
On April 13-14, Iran fired around 120 ballistic missiles, 170 drones, and dozens of cruise missiles at Israel.
“What is new to the equation? They tasted their template in mid-April. By any objective situational assessment, the attack [against Israel] failed.” Then explaining why Iran’s April attack failed, he said, “the Israelis are pretty good, the US assisted, neighbors in the region assisted, geography assisted given that Iranian missiles had to travel a long way. This gave Israel strategic depth in which to intercept those weapons. So Iran must recalculate,” how much it can threaten Israel.
McKenzie recounted that former Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi said after US President Joe Biden was elected and “there was talk about returning to the JCPOA and there was talk also about other weapons,” being limited within the deal. The Iranians said, “we are never going to give up our ballistic missiles. They represent the center of gravity of Iranian capabilities – not necessarily the nuclear program.”
Further, McKenzie argued that Iran’s April attack on Israel had nothing to do with Gaza. Rather, he said it was a show of how desperate Iran was to do something to stop Israel from pummeling it in the “shadow war” between the countries.
Digging into the details of the ballistic missile threat Iran posed in April versus the threat they could pose going forward, he explained that out of around 3,000 total ballistic missiles, the Iranians have around 1,000 total ballistic missiles which have sufficient range to reach Tel Aviv.
But both to the Post and in a separate JINSA event, he discussed Iran’s “salvo rate”: meaning that Tehran probably can only fire a couple hundred missiles at a time maximum because it only has around 300 ballistic missile launchers and even fewer TEL (Transporter Erector Launcher] tractors, around 100-250, for moving the ballistic missiles to launch positions. This limits the number of ballistic missiles it could launch at Israel at a time probably to between 100-250, as opposed to the full 1,000.
The former CENTCOM chief said, “This has been a problem for the Iranians throughout. April probably represented the most ballistic missiles they can shoot at any time – based on the number of launchers.”
He did acknowledge that the Islamic Republic “could reload, but it takes time to do that. This is an important technical and tactical distinction.”
Told by the Post that current US defense officials urged Israel not to respond at all to Iran’s April attack, given that Tehran was embarrassed by Israel and its allies’ success in shooting down 99% of the aerial threats, McKenzie said that this approach “was a misunderstanding of the basic relationships in the Middle East. Turning the other cheek does not go a long way in the region.”
“The level of the Israeli response was brilliant and carefully calibrated. They walked a very fine line – it was just enough, but not too much,” referring to Israel’s destruction on April 19 of a key part of Iran’s S-300 antiaircraft missile system meant to protect its critical Natanz nuclear facility.
Next, McKenzie was asked about what lessons should be drawn from the more recent exchange of attacks and threatened attacks between Israel, Iran, and Hezbollah over the killing of Hezbollah military chief Fuad Shukr and the killing of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh while he was visiting Tehran.
Will Iran still launch a new major attack in the near future as its Supreme Leader Khamenei had promised? McKenzie responded, “I think he got cold feet. The Supreme Leader said right after the strike in Tehran, that they would respond in 48 hours. Then nothing happened. Here is why. He listened to his military guys who told him ‘our options against Israel will probably lead to the same result’” as Israel’s embarrassment of Iran in April.
He added, “Israel’s response to [Iran’s aerial attack] on April 13, was brilliant. They went into the Isfahan corridor and caused minimal damage. They used technological superiority with restraint. The Iranians are befuddled by it. They [Israel] didn’t push the US away [by overreacting], they didn’t push other countries away from Israel… and the Iranians don’t have a capability to hurt Israel directly.”
However, he warned “Lebanese Hezbollah does have such a capability [to harm Israel directly], but if they generate a massive attack – such as hundreds of missiles into Tel Aviv and Haifa over a short period of time, the Israeli response would be massive and overwhelming. They [Israel] can hurt Hezbollah deeply and [Hezbollah Chief Hassan] Nasrallah understands that. It will not be a stalking horse for Iran, even though it is supported by it.”
Further, he said, “Nasrallah’s relative position in Lebanon is weaker than in the past. The government is in paralysis. Hezbollah is getting the blame. He is not as strong politically as [during the Second Lebanon War] in 2006. He is committed to destroying Israel, but he won’t engage in strategic combat” if he would face strategic defeat.
Continuing, he said, “There is lower level back and forth and this moved Israeli citizens south [fleeing Hezbollah missile fire in the North]. But Lebanese Hezbollah has no interest in getting into a big war, and they know about Iran’s limited ability” to strike at Israel.
Questioned about whether Iran could adjust its ballistic missile delivery process to achieve greater strategic surprise against Israel, he said, “Nothing stays the same. The Iranians work very hard to get better. They can build more TELS, drones and land [based] cruise missiles to destroy Israeli radars. All air defenses are ineffective against ballistic missiles without radars.”
But no matter how Iran improves, he said Israel would have a long warning time, with the Post noting around a 16 minute warning time in April: “16 minutes is a long time. Iran’s ballistic missiles are more Gulf-oriented. They could go to underground sites and fixed sites. But fixed sites can be destroyed. We should encourage them to do fixed moves,” he said with a sly smile.
Addressing the question of whether Israel has missed the opportunity to normalize with the Saudis due to the current war extending for nearly a year, and given that McKenzie knew Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman personally as CENTCOM chief, he said, “Normalization is inevitable because it is driven by Iranian behavior, which poses an existential threat to the close Saudi and Gulf states. It may be delayed a bit, but it is inevitable that nations must act about what threatens their highest survival.”
Confronting the state of the war in Gaza, McKenzie said, “In 11 months, there has been significant military attrition of Hamas. But I don’t think it is completely finished militarily. If the US or Israel militarily take 20-30% casualties, they become combat ineffective because we maneuver on attack.”
In contrast, Hamas is “fighting in fixed cells and does not maneuver, so it can absorb much larger casualties. They cannot carry out command and control functions, but they can fight until they die. That’s why Hamas on the ground is still a factor in Gaza.”
Signaling an optimistic hope, he said, “My Israeli friends laugh, but I think the future must involve the two state solution. In the future in Gaza, there must be some other force other than the Israeli military. If Israel’s military will fight forever, I don’t think Israel wants that. Hamas does want that.”
“There needs to be in the future some form of limited sovereignty,” noting many “don’t want to talk about that until they finish the campaign.” He added that in some past wars, “the US had campaigns without a clear end state,” which led to many problems. He suggested that in Gaza, “The vision would not necessarily envision a continuous sustained occupation on the ground, though lots of people disagree. But unless they are willing to fight forever, with the trickle of casualties every day and the loss of Gazan lives, they need to find a way forward
IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi on Monday told the IAEA Board of Governors that he has corresponded with new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and is hopeful that a near future meeting will lead to progress regarding the nuclear standoff.
At the same time, Grossi noted that since Pezeshkian’s inauguration on July 30, there has been no progress whatsoever with the Islamic Republic despite public statements some of its officials have made about trying to improve the situation with the West.
Grossi said, ” There has been no progress in the past 15 months towards implementing the Joint Statement of 4 March 2023,” in which Tehran had promised to start to fix a number of its nuclear violations and lack of cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog.
Further, he said, “It has been more than three and a half years since Iran stopped implementing its nuclear-related commitments under the JCPOA, including provisionally applying its Additional Protocol, and therefore, it is also over three and a half years since the Agency was able to conduct complementary access in Iran.”“Consequently, the Agency has lost continuity of knowledge in relation to the production and inventory of centrifuges, rotors and bellows, heavy water and uranium ore concentrate,” stated Grossi.
Inconsistent Iranian statement
Moreover, the IAEA chief noted, “Iran says it has declared all nuclear material, activities and locations required under its NPT Safeguards Agreement. However, this statement is inconsistent with the Agency’s findings of uranium particles of anthropogenic origin at undeclared locations in Iran. The Agency needs to know the current location(s) of the nuclear material and/or of contaminated equipment involved.”
Grossi was referring to extensive evidence of Iranian nuclear violations, which Mossad exposed when it raided Tehran’s nuclear archives in 2018.
In addition, Grossi highlighted that the Islamic Republic continues to increase its 20% and 60% enriched uranium stock as well as the number of cascades it has for enriching uranium – all in violation of the 2015 nuclear deal.
Every few months in recent years, the IAEA Board has met to confront the Iran nuclear issue, with it issuing a condemnation of Tehran in June of this year and in 2022, but to date, it has failed to refer the issue to the UN Security Council where global sanctions could potentially be “snapped back” on Iran.
Pezeshkian is viewed as more moderate than his predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, and more moderate than the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but so far, there are no clear signs that he will have the power or be able to make the concessions to the West necessary to end the ongoing stalemate.
Some police officials have accused the IDF and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) of withholding security threat information overnight between October 6 and 7, which, if it had been shared with the police, could have saved the lives of 364 civilians who were killed at the Nova party and the 44 hostages who were taken.
First reported by Channel 12 at the end of the weekend, the Acting Police Commander for the Negev Area in the South Eyal Azulai is quoted as saying that the police had always been unsure about the safety of the Nova party attendees and that if they had known about the enhanced security threat, they might have ended the party before the invasion took place.
The warnings that Azulai was referring to led to at least two consultations among and between the Shin Bet and the IDF in the middle of the night between October 6 and 7.
It appears that an aspect of these warnings were IDF intelligence seeing somewhere between dozens to hundreds of Israeli SIM cellphone cards switching on within Gaza, something drawing suspicion of a potential attempted penetration into Israel since Israelis cannot safely reside in Gaza.The various warnings eventually led to a decisive conference call between IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi, Shin Bet Chief Ronen Bar, and other senior IDF officials in which the Shin Bet decided to send a small additional crew of reinforcements to the border, and all of the security officials agreed to discuss the situation more the next day.
However, either because the security chiefs did not view the threat as terribly significant or because they did not want to widen the circle of intelligence sharing to the police, who they might have trusted less with such sensitive information, they did not even tell the police that anything problematic was afoot.
Asked to respond to the allegations, the IDF gave a generic non-denial denial, saying only that it is still probing the Nova party incident and that it will present its findings to the public when it concludes the probe.
However, given that the IDF had originally said it would publish the probe in June and then sometime over the course of July and August, IDF and police officials have been now regularly leaking findings from all of the different military probes in order to try to frame the public’s view of them before the official reports are issued.
In the past, certain IDF officials have tried to blame the police for allowing the Nova party to go forward in such a secure area and for reacting slowly to save the Nova party attendees, given that technically, it had more direct responsibility for their safety than for the many Gaza border towns which Hamas invaded and which were supposed to be protected by the IDF.
This latest leak places the onus on the IDF and the Shin Bet (which has been even more opaque than the IDF, not providing a single public update to date about its October 7 failures) for failing to warn the police of the increased danger they knew about overnight between October 6 and 7.
No Israeli official had any idea of the scale of Hamas’s invasion
Even though no one in the IDF or the Shin Bet had any idea of the scale of the size of the impending invasion, even a warning of a small penetration, which they were worried about, might have been enough to get the police to close the Nova party and evacuate the attendees.
Next, the Channel 12 report tries to compliment the police for evacuating a significant percentage of the Nova party attendees once Hamas’s invasion started, as well as for setting up a defense position on Route 232, which slowed Hamas’s advance against some of the attendees.
However, the report also said that then-Israel Police chief Kobi Shabtai did not even call Halevi for more help until 11:45 a.m., by which time it was already too late to save many of the Nova party residents.
Also, at that point, neither Halevi nor Shabtai made any bold moves to send a larger amount of reinforcement forces rapidly to the Nova party despite the fact that there were far more civilians there than in the many other locations that Hamas was invading.
As has become clear by a variety of IDF briefings, top IDF officials were either still in shock or lacked a clear picture of myriad places where Hamas had invaded and did not even assign field commanders to certain areas until around 1:00 or 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon, and full reinforcement forces did not arrive in some places until even later.
By then, the entire police position at Route 232 had been overrun, and most Nova party civilians who had stayed near police were either killed or kidnapped.
There is an ongoing unresolved disagreement between the IDF and the police about which side had more doubts about holding the Nova party and which side was more negligent in allowing it to go forward in such a dangerous area so close to Gaza in the first place.
A variety of IDF officials have said they had not even been updated by other IDF officials that the party was taking place.
Yet, IDF Southern Command Chief of Staff Brig.-Gen. Manor Yanai had told Azulai that there was no security issue with the Nova party, and despite that statement, did not later update Azulai or any other police officials that the situation had changed, according to Channel 12.
The lack of updates to the police from ]IDF Southern Command would stand even more since IDF Southern Commander Maj.-Gen. Yaron Finkleman, Yanai’s boss, abandoned his vacation in northern Israel in the middle of the night to rush south to his base at Beersheba to have a closer hand on the situation.
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