Daily Briefing Sept. 14: Day 709 – IDF paves the way for imminent Gaza City ground op

Welcome to The Times of Israel’s Daily Briefing, your 20-minute audio update on what’s happening in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world.

Military correspondent Emanuel Fabian joins host Amanda Borschel-Dan for today’s episode.

On Tuesday, Israel targeted leaders from the Hamas terror group gathering in Qatar who were reportedly there to discuss a new ceasefire proposal put forward by Trump’s administration. Yesterday, Netanyahu appeared to acknowledge that the missile strike had failed to kill the targeted leaders. Fabian brings us new information on how the strike was carried out.

Following an evacuation warning, the IDF says it struck a high-rise tower in Gaza City that was being used by Hamas. Just after recording time, two more 10- to 15-story buildings were demolished, in each case after civilians were warned by the IDF to evacuate. We learn about why the IDF is targeting these buildings and how they are taken down.

A drone launched by the Houthis in Yemen was intercepted by Israeli air defenses near Ramon Airport in southern Israel this morning. Last week, a drone launched by Yemen’s Houthis evaded air defenses and smashed into the Ramon Airport terminal. Fabian speaks about the Houthis’ new targeting tactic and its results so far.

Israeli soldiers raided the home of Palestinian activist and Oscar-winning director Basel Adra in the southern West Bank yesterday after two Israelis were injured by stone throwing in the area, according to the military. Adra told The Associated Press that before the army raid, Israeli settlers had attacked his village of at-Tuwani, injuring two of his brothers and one cousin. Fabian discusses how these “he said-he said” attacks are all too common.

To close the program, we turn to last week’s violent terror attacks in Jerusalem and Kibbutz Tzuba. Fabian explains how intensive IDF efforts in the West Bank have brought attacks of this nature to almost zero — but that there is a steep price to be paid.

Check out The Times of Israel’s ongoing liveblog for more updates.

For further reading:

IDF says 280,000 Gaza City residents have left; high-rise said used by Hamas hit in strike

IDF downs Yemen missile aimed at Tel Aviv; Houthis claim it had cluster bomb warhead

West Bank home of Basel Adra, activist and Oscar-winning director, raided by IDF

IDF seals homes of Palestinian terrorists behind deadly Jerusalem shooting

Two wounded, one seriously, in terror stabbing at hotel west of Jerusalem

Subscribe to The Times of Israel Daily Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by Podwaves.

Below is a full transcript of today’s episode:

Amanda Borschel-Dan: Welcome to the Times of Israel’s Daily Briefing, today is Sunday, September 14, day 709 of the war. Amanda Borschel-Dan here with our military correspondent, Emmanuel “Mannie” Fabian.

Hi, Mannie. Thanks for joining me today.

Emmanuel Fabian: Hi, Amanda.

Amanda Borschel-Dan: Mannie will update us with more information on the Israel Air Force strike in Doha last week and how it was carried out. We’ll hear about what is happening on the ground in Gaza City and the IDF’s [Israel Defense Forces] reasons and processes for taking down a series of 10 to 12-story buildings there ahead of the expected wide-scale operation. We’ll hear about the Houthis’ recent activity and what is going on in the West Bank in light of the uptick of violent and deadly terror attacks in Israel. All of this and more when we’re back.

I’m Amanda Borschel-Dan here with our military correspondent, Emmanuel Fabian. United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in Israel for an official visit this morning, less than a week after the Israel Defense Forces attacked Hamas leaders inside the US-allied Qatar’s capital city of Doha. According to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, he and Rubio will visit the Western Wall in Jerusalem together. On the tarmac in Washington ahead of his flight, Rubio told reporters that the US was, quote, not happy about the Israeli strike targeting Hamas leaders in Qatar. Israel-targeted leaders from the Hamas terror group in Qatar are apparently about to discuss a new ceasefire proposal that was put forward by the Trump administration yesterday for the first time Netanyahu appeared to acknowledge that the missile strike had failed to kill the targeted leaders.

So Mannie, let’s talk about more what we’re learning about the strike and how it was carried out.

What have you heard?

Emmanuel Fabian: So the Washington Post revealed on Friday that the strike was carried out with, I would say, capabilities that Israel has not really fully demonstrated or talked about before. And effectively, Israel used air-launched ballistic missiles, so ballistic missiles that are mounted onto Israeli fighter jets, and then they are launched from quite a distance away to then strike the target. So what we understand is that the Israeli fighter jets flew south, not towards Qatar, but flew south in the same sort of path that Israel would fly to carry out strikes against the Houthis in Yemen, and then somewhere over the Red Sea turned towards the east and launched these missiles up into the air. Ballistic missiles go all the way up into space and then fly back down. We’re talking well over a thousand kilometers distance. And then these missiles all struck very accurately this building in Doha. Israel has at least been reported to use air-launched ballistic missiles in the past. They used them in the strikes against Iran previously, not during the war, possibly also during the war, but the first strike that was carried out in Iran. It did use one of these type of missiles. But in this case, we’re talking about a much, much larger distance, and it is a very, very interesting capability. And also what we hear from the report is that Israel did not notify the US when it was carrying out the strike, and only once the missiles were launched, the American military using its sensors, it has sensors in space as well, were able to detect the heat signature of these missiles, and they quickly figured out which direction they were heading. Of course, they didn’t really suspect an attack on Doha when these fighter jets were heading south towards Yemen, and then all of a sudden these missiles are now heading towards Qatar. So a very interesting capability that Israel has, that it’s demonstrated for the first time being able to reach very, very far distances even without having the fighter jets that close. And I’ll just add that I think the reason why Israel carried it out in this way was to not violate the airspace of any of the neighboring countries, so not going over Jordan or Saudi Arabia or even Qatar itself in order to carry out the strike. These missiles went way above all of these countries, basically in space, so it didn’t really violate any of their airspaces.

Amanda Borschel-Dan: So it didn’t violate international airspaces, rather interstellar, one could say, perhaps. Okay, so let’s turn to what’s happening on the ground. And following an evacuation warning in Gaza, the IDF says it struck a high-rise tower in Gaza City this morning that was being used by Hamas. Now, according to the military, Hamas placed surveillance equipment in the building to track troop movements in the area in order to, of course, advance its own attacks. So Mannie, in the past, what, week at least, if not two, we’ve seen the IDF taking down a series of these 10 to 12-story buildings. And first of all, tell us about the motivations for these buildings being taken down, and then we’ll talk about the process of doing it.

Emmanuel Fabian: So whenever the IDF has carried out ground operations in all areas of Gaza, sort of the main threat to them has been buildings, Hamas booby-trapped buildings, and especially the high-rise towers, they use them for surveillance. They attach cameras to them, or they have sniper posts in them, or they launch missiles from them at troops. And that is basically the main threat to troops in Gaza, is the buildings that Hamas uses. The tunnels, of course, as well, and in a lot of cases, these tunnels actually run underneath these buildings. So before the army pushes into Gaza City with its major ground operation, which I believe will be launched very soon, the IDF has said it will be taking out all of these high-rise towers that are being used by Hamas. In some of the cases we’re talking about, they’re being used for surveillance. In others, Hamas had sniper posts in them, or there was a tunnel running underneath them. But essentially, Israel has been systematically taking out all of these tall buildings in Gaza City and issuing evacuation orders. The army usually calls people in the area, drops leaflets, issues notifications online as well, telling civilians to leave the specific building. But in general, also all of Gaza City is under an evacuation order. So the specific warnings for buildings are, in addition to the general warning that all civilians in Gaza City should evacuate. As of yesterday, we heard that around 280,000 Palestinians have left Gaza City, according to IDF estimates, out of the around a million who were there before this whole operation began. Numbers from the UN [United Nations] are significantly lower, and even Hamas says the numbers are much, much lower than that. But of course, they have an interest to show that less people are leaving, and the army has an interest to show that more people are leaving. So it may be somewhere in between.

Amanda Borschel-Dan: And we’re also hearing that the IDF now has control of something like 40 percent of Gaza City, even before the real ground operation.

Emmanuel Fabian: So tell me, what does that mean? So the army has been operating in Gaza City for many months now, but mainly in the eastern side of the city, the areas close to basically the Israeli border. And right now we know that the army is operating in or has at least control of neighborhoods like Shajia, Zaytoun, and to the north, the IDF is in control of Jabalia. And it’s now also been begun pushing into areas like Sheikh Radwan, which is a neighborhood which is in the sort of northwest of Gaza City. And strikes recently have been targeting Sheikh Radwan and also the Shati [refugee] camp, which is on the sort of coast of Gaza City on the west of it. But right now, the army is in control of essentially all of the areas closer to the Israeli border, plus areas to the south of the city and areas to the north of the city. And when the ground offensive begins, then troops will push into the areas closer to the coast, such as the Rimal neighborhood, the more upscale area of Gaza City, Shati, Sheikh Radwan, Tal al-Hawa and all the other smaller neighborhoods in that area.

Amanda Borschel-Dan: So in this 40 percent that the IDF says it is in control of in Gaza City, has the population emptied from there?

Emmanuel Fabian: Yeah, in those areas, there’s no civilians. In areas where the IDF controls, no civilians are there.They’ve all left and they left a long time ago. Shajia, for example, the army’s been in control of it for many, many months now. Troops pushed in, civilians evacuated, and there’s been nobody there for a long time. The estimated million, now probably down to around 700,000, were all concentrated on the coast of the city and other areas in the west of the city.

Amanda Borschel-Dan: In these 10 to 12-story buildings, what part of Gaza are they in? What part of the city?

Emmanuel Fabian: A lot of the high rise towers are in Rimal, which is the more upscale neighborhood of Gaza City. The IDF operated there in the past. I’ve even, I was there twice with the army to see Hamas tunnels in the area. But many of these buildings were left standing when the army previously operated there. So most of them are in Rimal, Shati, Leso, it’s an old refugee camp. I mean, it’s a built up area now, but there isn’t that many high rise buildings in that area. But it’s mainly in Rimal where we see buildings that are 10 to even 15 stories.

Amanda Borschel-Dan: OK, so that’s what’s happening in Gaza City. Let’s talk about what’s happening in other parts of the strip right now.

Emmanuel Fabian: So we are still seeing operations in other areas, but less less intense, of course. In Khan Yunis, the army recently actually withdrew a division that was operating there, the 36th Division, because it is now preparing for the Gaza City offensive. The army is set to send five IDF divisions into Gaza City for this offensive, which is a very large number considering what was carried out in the past against Gaza City. But there’s still operations in Rafah. The army is systematically demolishing buildings there that are used by Hamas or pose a security threat to the forces there. There’s still tunnels that are being uncovered and mapped out and being demolished. It takes a long, long time for these operations to be carried out. But the main focus is currently Gaza City and areas in the north of the strip.

Amanda Borschel-Dan: OK, let’s go to a short break. And we’re back. I’m Amanda Borschel-Dan here with our military correspondent, Emmanuel Fabian. A drone was launched by the Houthis, and it was intercepted this morning by Israeli air defenses near the Ramon Airport in southern Israel. This isn’t the first time that this airport has been targeted. And Mannie, do you think that now that they achieved success, it was, what, about a week ago that a drone smashed there, that this is now going to be a real target for the Houthis moving forward?

Emmanuel Fabian: It was exactly a week ago, actually, that the Houthi drone hit Ramon Airport. And since then, in the past week, there have been several attempts by the Houthis to target the airport. They’ve also been targeting, and they have been for the past year or so, Ben-Gurion Airport in central Israel with ballistic missiles. They even claim, and I don’t know of any cases of this happening, but they also claim that some of their drones have also tried to hit Ben-Gurion Airport as well by flying them over the Mediterranean, although none of those cases have been successful. But those are the main targets of the Houthis. It’s Ramon Airport and Ben-Gurion Airport, and sometimes they claim to target what they call sensitive Israeli targets in various areas. It’s not always clear what they’re referring to. In the past, I think we saw a lot more attacks targeting Eilat. If you remember, a lot of drones that were launched at Eilat, one of them hit the naval base there, another one impacted near the port, at the civilian side of the port. So I think the Houthis have sort of changed their target. They’re more focused on Ramon, but maybe in the future they’ll decide that something else is more interesting to them and they’ll go for that instead. But it’s become almost a daily occurrence, a daily annoyance even, because most of them are intercepted and they don’t cause any significant damage. But there are the times, of course, when they slip through, like we saw last week with this strike on Ramon Airport. I think it’s important to say that the airport reopened about two hours later. So the strike was not hugely significant to the airport’s operations. Right.

Amanda Borschel-Dan: As you said, it’s a daily annoyance. And definitely where I live, I can hear the interceptions, if not the sirens, the boom, boom, boom going through the air Friday into Saturday morning. We heard something like that. And they’re not only sending drones, of course, they’re also using this cluster head ballistic missile. Is that correct, Mannie?

Emmanuel Fabian: Yes. So the Houthis have launched many ballistic missiles at Israel in the past year or nearly two years now. And recently they’ve been attaching, instead of the sort of large warhead with hundreds of kilograms of explosives, they’re using cluster bomb warheads, which essentially they open up in the air and they deploy several smaller munitions, submunitions that hit a wide area. They’re not guided or anything like that. So they just kind of fall randomly and explode on impact.We know, of course, of one case where officially Israel knows that they used the cluster bomb warhead because they had failed to intercept the missile, and one of these submunitions struck next to a home in central Israel. But the Houthis have since claimed to launch several more missiles using this type of warhead. Israel, of course, can’t really confirm this because when they’ve intercepted the missile, it’s in space. It’s basically impossible to tell what kind of warhead it was carrying. But the Houthis claim they’ve been launching this type of munition. The Iranians, of course, launched this type of munition at Israel during the war. It is important to say that the guidelines for civilians are identical. You go to a shelter regardless of what threat is incoming. The main difference here is that the explosive sort of impact of these of these missiles is much less, but the threat can be sort of spread over a much wider area. And in many cases, these submunitions don’t actually explode and they’re effectively left on the ground as landmines. And so civilians should be careful not to touch any suspicious items following missile attacks. Sometimes fragments can still contain explosive material on them that could be dangerous. So that’s really the only difference there with these with these cluster bomb munitions.

Amanda Borschel-Dan: Okay, let’s turn to the West Bank. And yesterday evening, Israeli soldiers raided the home of Palestinian activist and Oscar-winning director Basel Adra in the southern West Bank after two Israelis were injured by stone throwing in the area, according to the military. Now, Adra told the Associated Press that before the army raided, Israeli settlers had attacked his village of At-Tuwani, injuring two of his brothers and one cousin. So we have a bit of a he said, he said situation here, which is not uncommon in the West Bank. And what essentially happens now? Do you have any idea, Mannie?

Emmanuel Fabian: Not really, to be honest. I mean, the army says that it raided the town. It questioned suspects and among them was Adra. They entered his home. He initially wasn’t there. He was at a hospital with his relatives who were injured in this clash with the Israeli settlers. The army hasn’t really provided any more details on this incident, but it wouldn’t be really the first time that we’re seeing clashes in Adra’s hometown. We’ve seen several times where Israeli settlers of nearby outposts or nearby settlements will will clash with residents of the area. We saw several weeks ago where a resident of sort of these villages in the southern West Bank area, one of them was killed by an Israeli man, a sanctioned Israeli settler. He was shot basically at random. So clashes in this area and attacks by Israelis against Palestinians in this in this area is not particularly uncommon. And the army, of course, is doing whatever it says it needs to be doing and questioning suspects. But that’s as much as we have on this incident.

Amanda Borschel-Dan: Okay, now let’s turn to Palestinian violence in Israel. And in light of the recent violent and deadly terror attacks, I’m talking about Monday’s shooting in Jerusalem and Friday’s stabbing in Kibbutz Tzuba. Manny, have there been any changes in how the IDF is operating in the West Bank at this point?

Emmanuel Fabian: So I’ll say that the stabbing in Jerusalem is not really under the IDF responsibility since the stabber was from East Jerusalem. So it’s completely under the police. So the army doesn’t really change much there. But following the shooting attack by two West Bank Palestinian terrorists who breached into Israel and carried out the deadly shooting at Ramot (Junction), the army has been operating pretty intensely in the two villages that they that the terrorists came from. They’ve scanned more than 700 sites there. They’ve detained over 20 suspects. The civil administration, it’s a defense ministry body, also demolished illegal structures in the villages. And also over the weekend, the army sealed the homes of the two attackers. It’s a sort of a stopgap before actually demolishing, demolishing the the homes because the sort of demolition process usually takes many months. The high court needs to address appeals and by the by the family and the IDF needs to wait for the optimal time to enter the area and actually demolish them. So the homes were sealed.Meanwhile, the idea of welded them shut and in the future, probably in the coming months or in a year or so, even sometimes it takes a very long time. The army will raise these two homes as it as it does as a matter of policy.

Amanda Borschel-Dan: Right. That’s a matter of policy after the fact. Right. And so I guess what I’m wondering, the IDF has been operating in the West Bank intensively even before the October 7, 2023 war started. And I just wonder, I mean, are we seeing the results here?Is it possible that the situation would have been much, much, much worse had the IDF not been operating for so long, so intensively? Or is there kind of a situation in which it’s going to ramp up its efforts again?

Emmanuel Fabian: No, I think that the operations that the IDF has been carrying out in the West Bank during the war have significantly and you can you can check the stats on this, significantly reduced the amount of terror coming from the West Bank, especially in the past year. There’s obviously a price to this.The army has still and remains deployed to all the refugee camps in the northern West Bank in Jenin, Nablus and in Tulkarm. The price, of course, being displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians who live in these refugee camps, but also at the same time, the army has removed, I guess, pushed out, killed or arrested all of these members of terror groups, [Palestinian] Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Hamas, mainly, that were using the refugee camps to organize and plan and carry out attacks against Israel. So in the past year, we’ve seen a huge decrease, I think, according to the army, it’s an 80 percent decrease in the amount of attacks coming from the West Bank and mainly thanks to preventing the organization of these attacks. There’s still other areas where Hamas are trying to organize themselves in the West Bank, but I think that there is definitely results to the to these army operations. But of course, there’s no there’s nothing but zero. You can’t get you can’t get the number of attacks to zero. And as we saw with the attack in Ramot, it didn’t come from an organized Hamas cell. I mean, Hamas claims that two gunmen were members, but it came from two very small villages on the outskirts of Ramallah. So we’re not talking about a large organized cell. Additionally, I don’t know if you’ve maybe noticed, but in the past year or so, there’s been very few major attacks on IDF troops. If you remember a couple of years ago and even in the beginning of the war, there were repeated shooting attacks against IDF posts in the West Bank, drive by shootings, bombing attacks, bombs planted onto roads, attacking soldiers. That’s been increasingly ran in the last few months. There was an incident near Tulkarem just the other day where a bomb was exploded next to an army vehicle and that likely injured two soldiers. But that was a very, very rare incident because of the intensive operations that the IDF has been carrying out. Hamas and Islamic Jihad are not able to organize these more, I would say, quality attacks against troops.

Amanda Borschel-Dan: Mannie, thank you so much for all of your updates and insights today. Thank you. Thanks for listening to The Times of Israel’s Daily Briefing. Please check out another installment tomorrow. This episode was produced by The Podwaves. If you have any questions or comments about this or any other episode, please drop us an email to podcast@timesofisrael.com. Until tomorrow. Shalom.

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