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capable to taking over Gaza. But what then, I asked. Unless we were prepared to
resume open-ended Israeli control, we’d be left with no one to run Gaza
afterwards. The obvious candidate, Egypt, was even less interested than we were in
assuming responsibility for the more than one-and-a-half million Palestinians who
lived there. I doubted that even Arafat would have been ready to do so. But
relations had only worsened, since his death in 2004, between the Fatah old guard
in the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank and the Hamas overlords in Gaza. I
doubted very much that Abu Mazen would want to get involved. I did send an aide
to see him to ask whether, in principle, he was open to reassuming control of Gaza
following an Israeli takeover. His answer was unsurprising and unequivocal: no.

I secured cabinet support for the more limited aim of restoring a period of calm
for Israeli citizens in the south. I said the military operation had to be as sharp and
short as possible, and end with some kind of political understanding that the
rockets would stop for a significant period of time. The final plan was presented to
ministers a few days before the operation. It would begin with surprise air strikes
and a naval bombardment, followed by a limited ground incursion to hit remaining
Hamas targets outside of the major refugee camps, which I was determined to
avoid. The whole operation was intended to last for two weeks at the most.
Hopefully, closer to a week, with diplomatic efforts through Egypt to secure a
lasting cease-fire and, ideally, prevent Hamas from resupplying its rocket
stockpiles through its smuggling tunnels from the Sinai.

When we launched Operation Cast Lead on the morning of December 27,
nearly all the Hamas forces were where we’d expected them to be. Two waves of
air strikes, with over a hundred jets and attack helicopters, killed 350 Hamas
fighters. We destroyed Hamas’s headquarters and dozens of its government and
police installations. The attacks continued in the days that followed. We took a
range of actions designed to minimize civilian casualties. We dropped leaflets
before bombing sorties, phoned residents, and fired light missiles before heavier
ordnance was used. Still, I realized that civilian casualties were unavoidable – if
only because Hamas, like Hizbollah in Lebanon, was deliberately firing its rockets
from civilian areas, sometimes even near schools or hospitals. Civilian casualties
were obviously tragic in themselves. They also made it inevitable that the longer
the operation went on, the more likely we were to face international criticism, and
diplomatic pressure to bring it to an end. That was an additional reason I had
insisted that the operation be well defined and time-limited.

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