The Israeli military is continuing its ground incursion under intense air cover in Gaza. The superiority of firepower has turned parts of Gaza into moonscape yet the advance remains sluggish. The Gazan Ministry of Health reports accumulative deaths exceeding 20,000, a death toll 900% higher so far than Israel’s previous ground war in 2014, which lasted for 50 days. The shock-and-awe unfolds as some 200 Israeli hostages still remain in Hamas captivity. The Palestinian group claims that the captives include personnel of the Israeli army and officials working with the military. Tel Aviv disagrees.“We will continue the operation as if they are not there,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s former advisor Major General (retd) Yaakov Amidror, articulating Tel Aviv’s strategy on the ground. Though Washington is publicly sounding the alarm to Israel over its diminishing support, the Biden administration adamantly opposes a ceasefire on the pretext of denying Hamas another chance for survival, disregarding the plight of thousands of Palestinian families trapped in Gaza.
Strategic and Tactical Outlook
Since Israel invoked Article 40 of its Basic Law on October 9, declaring itself officially at war with Hamas, it has mobilized a 550,000-strong force, including 350,000 reservists, against its estimated 25,000-30,000 Hamas combatants. A few thousand are estimated to have died in the hostilities since October 7 while approximately 20,000 are thought to be hiding in subterranean shelters and a network of tunnels. Alongside its grinding and costly ground offensive, the Israeli army is opting to flood the tunnels with seawater, a tactic that may cost the lives of the Israeli hostages alongside their abductors. It was first reported in November that Israel’s army has set up five pumps to flood the tunnels with thousands of cubic meters of water per hour. The military seeks to flush out the Hamas fighters from its known tunnel network and then eliminate them with ground or aerial fire.
Gaza’s 2 million inhabitants are packed into an area roughly the size of Philadelphia or roughly twice the size of Washington, DC. Relative to the carpet bombing of Gaza settlements, the consequences of tunnel flooding to the soil and aquifers will be long lasting. This tactic reaffirms the Israeli army’s hasty knee-jerk response instead of a well-crafted strategy based on thorough intelligence.
The doctrine of collective punishment on the pretext of Hamas fighters hiding in plain sight imposes diplomatic, economic and ideological costs, exceedingly far beyond a military campaign’s domain. Israel has yet to capture or kill Hamas’ operational top brass led by Yahya Sinwar while losing soldiers to enemy fire (whose numbers have not been publicly revealed yet).
The “mowing the grass” strategy failed spectacularly on October 7 and so did Israel’s notion of deterrence against its enemies. Yet, Israel’s politicians and strategic community advocate Israeli soldiers undertaking 18 months of door-to-door arrest operations. The lessons from Israel’s last land operation in Gaza seem forgotten. Jewish Institute for National Security of America’s study of the 2021 Israel-Hamas conflict, notes, “The most telling feature of the Gaza conflict was the strategy mismatch between Israel’s purely military and operational objectives to degrade Hamas’ military capabilities – assisted by impressive advances in identifying and precisely striking targets – and Hamas’ information-based strategic objectives.” Had ridding an embedded unconventional force from a dense urban center been so easy, such operations in Fallujah in 2004, Mosul and Raqqa in 2016–2017 would have been unheard of. The giant reprisal attack currently underway can neither withstand public scrutiny nor satisfy Israel’s committed but weary allies in the West. Israel’s failure to restore deterrence on the ground will determine its place amongst it friends and foes alike. Reliance on excessive use of force devoid of realistic mission objectives leads to a bloody entanglement. And then, there is Hezbollah in the north ready to pounce hard on Israel with its immense firepower to overwhelm its air defences.
Israel’s vanished deterrence rested on three pillars: denial, posturing and vested dependence. Denial is implemented by operational and intelligence superiority and preemptive actions to degrade and destroy Hamas’ capabilities and infrastructure. Posturing is enforced by kinetic act of denial as well as Israel’s propagation of deterrence signaling to other rival outfits. Vested dependence, the third pillar, was to let Hamas stay in power ever since it won the election in 2006 by giving them a stake in the system.
Hamas’ Persisting Stratagem
Hamas’ October 7 attack was crafted by Yahya Sinwar who spent some two decades of his life in Israeli prisons. Not only did he become fluent in Hebrew, but he also gained an understanding of the Israeli mindset during his incarceration. Being one of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners freed for a single Israeli soldier, Sinwar knows what can hurt his enemy the most. Now he is playing with the Israeli psyche by keeping the hostages and releasing them in small batches. Every Israeli soldier in his captivity can be traded for the price of his choosing, or so he believes. Sinwar believes that the longer he can keep them, the better his bargain may become amidst the mounting image cost for Israel’s leaders and commanders alike.
If saner heads prevail and Tel Aviv puts a premium on its captive citizens, it can end the embarrassingly convoluted operation by reaching a deal with Hamas. While the exercise in damage control may deliver a short-term victory to Sinwar and his clique, Israel would get another shot at re-establishing deterrence within and on the borders while devising solutions to the political imbroglio in Gaza.
Opinions in this article reflect the writer’s point of view, not necessarily the view of Rasanah
