/ BARAK / 120 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. Th