Israel’s “second phase” of its war against Hamas consists of small unit attacks just inside the northern Gaza Strip border, accompanied by continual aerial bombing and artillery fire targeting the interior of the enclave.
One reason for the air strikes is to make sure Hamas doesn’t emerge from the war intact, a NATO general said.
“The air force is used because not all objectives are achievable with targeted ground operations. And because, at this moment, only the air force can carry out the IDF’s main aim: to strike the large network of underground tunnels,” declared the general, who spoke anonymously.
Israel’s continual bombing of the north Gaza Strip and shelling in Gaza is designed to kill, or at least dissuade, Hamas guerrillas from using an extensive tunnel network to ambush Israeli soldiers.
From the air, breaking into Hamas’ tunnel system should not be difficult, the NATO official said. “The bombs must go deep and explode underground. There are two types. For instance, one type is simple, enters at a certain depth with a delayed explosion that explodes underground,” he explained.
Israel has added an armed element that is needed to undo perhaps the most unexpected facet of Hamas’ October 7 surprise invasion: the taking of Israeli and other nations’ citizens as hostages.
It has dispatched commando units to rescue them. The use of special units to scour Gaza for the hostages answers domestic and international pressures, especially from relatives and friends of the missing, to free the hostages alive.
Late Monday, in an apparent first success of the effort to liberate hostages, Israel announced that one captive female soldier had been rescued by a military unit. Israeli officials say there are 238 others still in captivity.
It is unclear whether Israel’s current tactics stem from a long-standing invasion strategy or were devised this month in response to Hamas’ surprise raid. Some 300,000 Israeli troops were quickly gathered outside Gaza’s borders and it appeared that the force would invade quickly and massively.
Instead, tactics in Gaza so far seem more agile. They apparently stem from lessons learned from adverse experiences in 2006, when Israel invaded southern Lebanon. That war was ignited when Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite Muslim militia, abducted two Israeli soldiers and spirited them across the border.
Hezbollah guerrillas, emerging from underground tunnels, were able to thwart the Israeli advance at several points. After weeks of fighting, which included some Israeli air assaults on Lebanese infrastructure, the United Nations and the Lebanese government’s army arranged to patrol south Lebanon as a buffer zone.
The Israelis withdrew; the bodies of the two abducted soldiers were eventually found dead.
This current Hamas conflict has created a crisis of confidence that Israeli officials are trying quickly to end. Indeed, having apparently lacked, or ignored, intelligence about Hamas’ armed capabilities and intentions, Israeli officials are reassuring the public it has mapped locations of Hamas’ extensive spiderweb of underground tunnels.
Israel ought to be able to discover and destroy them, said the NATO officer, speaking on condition of anonymity. “The army uses very sensitive technologies to control earthquakes – the machines, for example, pick up vibrations from excavations. Israel’s surveillance tools are very sophisticated,” he said.
Some experts wonder whether Israel, even if it has mapped the tunnels, can really bomb Hamas out of them. “A significant number of Hamas terrorists will likely be able to survive air strikes by hiding in the tunnels below Gaza,” said Bradley Bowman, a senior military affairs researcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank in Washington.
“It is probably safe to assume that Hamas has stocked those tunnels with significant quantities of food, water, weapons and ammunition,” he added.
The downside of Israel’s step-by-step approach to defeating Hamas lies in obstacles that might arise as time passes. One is political: pressure from abroad.
Already, several countries are seeing anti-Israeli demonstrations, including the US, United Kingdom and France along with Iraq, Jordan and Turkey. Arab leaders, along with dozens of other countries, including China and Russia, are calling for a ceasefire. All the demonstrators are demanding, at the least, is a “humanitarian ceasefire” to permit supplies of food, water and fuel to enter Gaza from Egypt unimpeded.
The US, Egypt and Qatar have tried to persuade Israel to permit the movement of such supplies, but the Israelis have allowed no more than 20 aid trucks a day since Saturday. Palestinians in the south Gaza Strip looted several UN food storage facilities on Sunday, hauling away flour and other basic food items.
The US also appears concerned that the war might spread elsewhere in the Middle East. Israel and Hezbollah have gingerly exchanged daily artillery fire across their border for most of the past three weeks.
The US rocketed two bases inside Syria over the weekend to retaliate for more than a dozen attacks by Iranian-linked forces on small US military bases in both Syria and Iraq.
In addition, US President Joe Biden has dispatched two aircraft carrier-led flotillas to the eastern Mediterranean Sea to discourage direct intervention in the war by Iran.
US officials are confident that Israel will win the Gaza war. As a result, Washington has tried to address Israel’s plans for the immediate post-war future as well as longer-range efforts to resolve the overall Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Biden has said he favors the “two-state solution” designed to create a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. He has yet to offer a diplomatic mechanism for reaching that outcome.
In a television interview on Sunday, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, provided Israel’s point of view on both issues. ”They have told us in broad terms that making sure that Hamas can never again threaten Israel, in the way it threatened Israel before, is their core strategic objective,” he said.
“But in terms of what the specific milestones are, that is something that ultimately is up to Israel. This is their military operation, they will make that decision.”
Hamas has articulated no specific policy on how to end the war. Its original 1988 founding charter called for a single state between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River. It later said it would accept a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders when Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza.
Hamas officials say they want a ceasefire and an end to Israeli “war crimes.” More than 8,000 Palestinians have died during the Israeli counterattack.
Netanyahu’s political career has centered on rejecting the two-state solution and on claims to at least parts of the West Bank. Since the Gaza war erupted, he has declined to discuss specific post-war policy, saying only the government will take it up when Hamas is destroyed.
He refuses a ceasefire for any reason.