Twenty-four hours have passed, and then some, since Israel warned Gazans to evacuate the north end of the Strip, including Gaza City. The ground invasion has not yet started, although no one said that it would. The Israelis will step off that kind of major operation when the time suits them best, and when conditions in both the south and the north become most favorable to their security.

It may not be long now, however, especially after signals not just from the US but perhaps also Saudi Arabia. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with his counterpart in Riyadh, where both issued a call to minimize civilian casualties. The Times of Israel saw that as “a green light for [a] ground incursion“:

Both stress the importance of minimizing the harm to civilians as Israel prepared for an anticipated incursion against Hamas a week after the militant group’s unprecedented assault on Israel.

“As Israel pursues its legitimate right, to defending its people and to trying to ensure that this never happens again, it is vitally important that all of us look out for civilians, and we’re working together to do exactly that,” Blinken says before heading to the United Arab Emirates for similar discussions.

“None of us want to see suffering by civilians on any side, whether it’s in Israel, whether it’s in Gaza, whether it’s anywhere else,” he says.

The Associated Press report linked by the ToI doesn’t offer that explicit interpretation, but it’s clear that Blinken and Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan seem to be on the same page. At the very least, bin Farhan didn’t call for Israel to stop its military operations in Gaza or even to refrain from a ground invasion. Instead, bin Farhan offered the diplomatic pablum of “both sides” in at least a tacit acknowledgment of Hamas’ crimes. He also unfortunately offered the same, lame “cycle of violence” nonsense that Hamas’ ghastly massacre repudiates:

“It’s a disturbing situation,” he said. “It’s a very difficult situation. And, as you know, the primary sufferer of this situation are civilians, and civilian populations on both sides are being affected and it’s important, I think, that we all condemn the targeting of civilians in any form at any time by anyone.” …

Faisal said it was imperative for the violence between Israel and Hamas to end.

“We need to work together to find a way out of this cycle of violence,” he said. “Without a concerted effort to end this constant return to violence, it will always be the civilians that suffer first, it will always be civilians on both sides that end up paying the price.”

Consider this pablum as intended for the Saudi masses and the cocktail parties at the United Nations. Hamas has made clear over the past seventeen years, and especially over the last eight days, that it has no intention of ending a cycle of violence. Their bragging after this massacre exposes the foolishness of bin Farhan’s lament. Hamas wants to annihilate Israel, not find an accommodation with it, as does Hamas’ patron state Iran. And that’s what the Gazans wanted in 2006, too, when they elected Hamas to control Gaza.

However, it’s what bin Farhan didn’t say that matters here, at least in the AP report. The Saudis did not call for Israel to halt its operations. They didn’t even tell Israel to stop any plans for a major ground invasion in Gaza or an attack on Gaza City. That may speak even more loudly than the Blinken green light, especially given the now-delayed diplomatic normalization that the Israelis and Saudis were about to unveil before the Hamas attack.

Why? The Saudis likely want Hamas gone almost as much as the Israelis. Hamas is Iran’s proxy and therefore a threat to the Sunni nations in the region. Iran has built an encirclement strategy with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Assad regime in Syria, and the Shi’ite Houthis in Yemen, attempting to make Iran’s Shi’ite regime dominant in the region. Knocking Hamas out of Gaza will put a serious dent in Iran’s encirclement ambitions, and if Hezbollah joins the fight and gets significantly degraded as a result, it will be an even bigger setback for Iran.

That’s why Iran is demanding that Israel let Hamas off the hook, using Hezbollah as a threat:

Iran’s foreign minister on Saturday called on Israel to stop its attacks on Gaza, warning that the war might expand to other parts of the Middle East if Hezbollah joins the battle, and that would make Israel suffer “a huge earthquake.”

Hossein Amirabdollahian told reporters in Beirut that Lebanon’s Hezbollah group has taken all the scenarios of a war into consideration and Israel should stop its attacks on Gaza as soon as possible.

Israel considers Hezbollah its most serious immediate threat, estimating it has some 150,000 rockets and missiles, including precision-guided missiles that can hit anywhere in Israel. The group, which has thousands of battle-hardened fighters who participated in Syria’s 12-year conflict, also has different types of military drones.

That’s why Israel immediately mobilized 360,000 reservists for this war, though. They are planning to fight a two-front war if Hezbollah attempts to attack Israel in force. Let’s not forget that Israel has defeated a combination of five Arab armies in the field at once, too, and didn’t take all that long to accomplish it. At the same time, the US has committed two carrier groups to the eastern Mediterranean in support of Israel, whereas the Iranians can barely operate outside the Strait of Hormuz. These are real armies; Iran has little more than organized terror squads at the moment, much of which has to be focused on suppressing its own population to keep them from giving the mullahs the Mussolini treatment. (And the Palestinian cause is deeply unpopular among those masses, too.)

Does Iran really want to roll all its dice on this fight, especially given its very poor strategic positioning? They are about to lose Gaza; do they want to lose Lebanon as well? We’ll see soon enough, because the Israelis are in no mood to take Tehran’s advice, and Hezbollah may just be another threat whose time has come to eliminate for the unity government in Jerusalem.

Addendum: The operations in Gaza are going well enough for the IDF to get actionable intel on Hamas’ command structure. Israel claimed that two Hamas commanders reached room temperature overnight, including the one who led the grotesque massacres of 10/7:

The IDF said Ali Qadhi, a company commander in the so-called Nukhba commando unit who led one of the assaults on October 7, was killed in a drone strike following intelligence efforts by the Shin Bet security agency and Military Intelligence Directorate.

Qadhi was arrested by Israel in 2005 over the kidnapping and murder of Israeli businessman Sasson Nuriel and had been released to the Gaza Strip as part of the 2011 Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange.

The IDF also said it killed the head of Hamas’s aerial array, Murad Abu Murad, in an overnight airstrike on a terror target in the Gaza Strip.

The IDF said Abu Murad “took a significant part in directing terrorists during the massacre” last weekend, which included attackers who entered Israel from the air on hang gliders.

As with all war claims, we should wait for confirmation, although usually the IDF won’t make these claims until their enemies publish their obituaries. If accurate, want to bet that the IDF found some Gazans who are less enamored of their Hamas overlords this weekend than they were last weekend?