Israel braces for Gaza war report

JERUSALEM: Israeli politicians and ex-generals are scrambling for cover ahead of the publication on Tuesday of a report expected to slam their conduct of the costly 2014 Gaza war.
The findings of a two-year inquiry, due to be released at 10pm (Malaysian time), are widely expected to inflict collateral damage on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then-defence minister Moshe Yaalon and former army chief of staff Benny Gantz for failing to prepare for the threat posed by Hamas tunnels from Gaza, despite intelligence warnings.
Players past and present have been frantically "briefing reporters, providing leaks, and besmirching their opponents, some directly and some obliquely", as Maariv daily put it on Monday.
"Those who played politics in the security cabinet in an unprecedented way during the war will continue to do so this week," Yaalon wrote in Hebrew on his Facebook page.
The report – 200 pages including annexes – was compiled by state comptroller Yossef Shapira, who is in charge of assessing governance and use of public funds.
He launched his probe in September 2014, immediately after the July-August conflict between Israel and Hamas, the Islamist group which controls the Gaza Strip.
Fallout from the report is likely to pit Netanyahu against his coalition partner and political rival Naftali Bennett, head of the nationalist Jewish Home party.
Bennett has said he and fellow members of the security cabinet were not properly briefed by Netanyahu on the extent of the tunnel threat and he therefore used his own personal military contacts to get information.
Cabinet contention
He later boasted that he had been the first political leader to grasp the extent of the threat.
Also weighing in is Yair Lapid, a centrist fired as finance minister in Netanyahu's previous government who sat in the 2014 security cabinet but is now a bitter foe of both Bennett and the premier.
"Even if it was not put to the security cabinet, the prime minister should have told the military to prepare a plan of action, that's his job," he said in a weekend interview with Israeli Channel Two TV.
"There was no methodology on how to deal with the tunnels."
Hamas and its allies used the tunnels into southern Israel for cross-border attacks.
The report examines "the way in which decisions were made within the security cabinet before and at the start of Operation Protective Edge", Shapira's spokesman said on Friday using Israel's codename for the assault.
A draft, released to ministers and military officials in November and leaked to media soon after, reportedly says Netanyahu and Yaalon only partially informed their inner cabinet of the threat posed by the tunnels.
Netanyahu struck out against those claims on Monday, telling members of his Likud faction: "No cabinet in the country's history was updated more" than his wartime cabinet.
He accused his political opponents of bringing "petty politics and personal interests" into the security discourse.
The premier also said Israel had dealt Hamas "the most powerful blow in its history" during the 2014 conflict, with forces killing "a thousand Hamas terrorists" and "its most senior commanders".
Opposition head Isaac Herzog of Labour charged the report proved yet again that "Bibi is a failure in peace as well as in security", using Netanyahu's nickname.
Destroying the tunnels and stopping Gaza-based Palestinian militants launching rockets into Israel were the key declared goals of Israel's third offensive in the coastal territory in six years.
The tunnels were among the Palestinians' most effective weapons during the 50-day conflict.
Israel's military found 32 tunnels, including 14 from the Gaza Strip into Israel, according to a UN inquiry on the conflict. Hamas says it has continued to dig new ones.
Sporadic cross-border attacks have continued. On Monday, Israeli aircraft hit targets in Gaza, hours after a rocket fired from the territory slammed into southern Israel.
The 2014 war killed 2,251 Palestinians and left 100,000 homeless, according to the UN. On the Israeli side, 74 people were killed, all but six of them soldiers. — AFP