Armored columns, backed up by weeks of intense airstrikes and heavy artillery barrages, are pushing into Gaza City in what is expected to be the most difficult stage of Israel’s war against Hamas: a pitched battle against a determined enemy in a densely populated urban labyrinth.
The Israel Defense Forces is considered one of the world’s premier fighting forces, but the Palestinian militant group has had about 15 years to prepare a defense-in-depth plan to integrate various fighting positions, underground passages, booby traps, fortifications and minefields. Even the buildings Israeli airstrikes destroy can become “strong points” for the enemy that must be reconquered.
Military strategists are closely watching to see how urban warfare — the most brutal of struggles for traditional armed forces — has been altered in an age of drones and integrated battle spaces.
It was a generation ago in military doctrine terms, but the Biden administration has moved to share U.S. expertise with the Israelis on urban warfare. In Iraq, the U.S. military learned hard lessons from the 2004 battle of Fallujah and the 2016-2017 fight to liberate Mosul from the Islamic State terrorist group.
The Pentagon last week dispatched Lt. Gen. James Glynn to Israel to consult with the IDF on urban operations. The veteran Marine Corps officer helped lead troops combating Islamic State forces in Iraq and Syria and saw heavy fighting in the fierce battles for control of Fallujah.
Senior Defense Department officials said Gen. Glynn went to Israel to offer observations based on his experience in urban warfare and to stress the importance of protecting civilians caught in the crossfire. Analysts said the general likely also brought a cautionary message to underscore the risks to a conventional army in such a chaotic and close-in environment.
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Gen. Glynn and the other U.S. officers dispatched to confer with the IDF “have experience that is appropriate to the sorts of operations that Israel is conducting,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters at the White House last month. The American advisers will not take part in the actual fighting.
Many see the battle to oust Islamic State terrorists from Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, as a likely template for Gaza. In the battle for Mosul, the U.S. and its Iraqi allies lost an estimated 1,000 troops. ISIS lost as many as 16,000 fighters before it was forced to withdraw.
Although Israel has not fought a major urban battle since clashes in Gaza more than 15 years ago, experts say the IDF has intensely studied the challenges of fighting in a densely populated city. As part of basic infantry training, every Israeli soldier is instructed on the finer points of tunnel warfare. The IDF created the Yahalom Unit, a combat engineering commando corps specifically trained to find, clear and destroy tunnels.
Yahalom Unit fighters carry a “toolkit of specialized gear for such operations,” the Military Times reported last month, “including ground and aerial sensors, ground-penetrating radar, drilling equipment, radios and navigation equipment designed for use underground, thermal equipment and a suite of flying and ground robots for mapping tunnels.”
Units are also equipped with munitions that can penetrate 20 feet of concrete. Remote-controlled bulldozers are likely to play a prominent role as well.
Even so, “Israel has not fought something on this scale in quite some time,” Raphael Cohen, an Iraq War veteran and now a senior political scientist at the Rand Corp. think tank, told the Military Times. “This is already one of the more bloody conflicts in its history, and it’s only going to get bloodier.”
SEE ALSO: Gaza City encircled by Israeli troops as IDF cuts the Hamas enclave in half
Preparing to fight
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Sunday with IDF personnel at the Ramon air force base in the Negev desert. He said the operation to destroy Hamas would continue regardless of the challenges. The mission is retaliation for the unprecedented surprise Hamas terrorist assault a month ago that killed more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and took hundreds of Israeli and foreign hostages back to Gaza’s warren of underground networks.
“We will simply continue until we defeat them. We have no alternative. I think we all understand this today,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “The entire nation is united and relies on you, appreciates what you are doing and believes in you. We will continue together until victory.”
On Oct. 12, the IDF warned residents of Gaza City, the largest and most populous area in the Gaza Strip, to evacuate within 24 hours. It signaled that an urban ground battle was imminent.
Michael Knights, a fellow at The Washington Institute think tank, said Israel has been preparing significant offensive operations into Gaza and Lebanon for several years.
“Whether it’s the tunnel aspect, whether it’s the infantry combat tactics, whether it’s counterdrone [operations], they’ve been working very effectively on how to do the tactical pieces of this,” he said.
The IDF set up several heavily fortified tactical assembly areas just outside Gaza City to use as launch points for raids into the city and positions for artillery. The forces also continue isolating areas of heavy fighting in the north from southern Gaza, Mr. Knights said.
“We’re starting to see the beginning of more intense, very close combat with Palestinian forces engaging main battle tanks with limpet mines and [rocket-propelled grenades],” he said. “It means that the Israelis are starting to push on places that Hamas has to defend.”
After bombarding the outer regions of Gaza City for three weeks, the IDF troops are advancing into broken shells of buildings that may not be able to support defensive operations, Mr. Knights said.
Block-by-block urban warfare in Gaza City will force Israeli troops to clear buildings occupied by innocent civilians along with armed Hamas fighters, said retired Army Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahoe, a former commander of the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Moore, Georgia. The battlefield will be three-dimensional virtually every step of the way, with tunnels belowground, debris-strewn streets and Hamas firing posts on buildings still standing.
“In Gaza, they will have to ‘clear down’ as well as ‘[clear] up’ as Hamas has constructed a warren of tunnels underneath the strip, which poses significant problems on how the IDF will apply its technological advantages,” said Gen. Donahoe.
Although the use of tunnels in combat is hardly recent, the scale of Gaza’s subterranean passages is unique. IDF troops often refer to the tunnel systems as the “Metro.” Analysts say Hamas had at least 300 miles of tunnels in 2021 when the IDF launched an 11-day bombing campaign that is estimated to have destroyed 60 miles of tunnels.
“Defensively, Hamas will use tunnels to escape IDF observation and attack. Any Hamas military capability that survives Israel’s current air campaign will mostly be deep underground,” John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, said in an essay for the think tank. “The tunnels will allow fighters to move between a series of fighting positions safely and freely under massive buildings, even after the IDF drops thousand-pound bombs on them.”
Mr. Knights said the U.S. military officers, no matter how senior in rank, aren’t in a position to give lessons on urban fighting to Israeli forces.
“I think our experience in urban combat is a little bit long in the tooth,” he said. “These Israelis have done intense urban combat in Gaza much more recently than we’ve had to be the main force in urban combat operations.”
He said the U.S. can provide valuable intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities for Israel’s fight against Hamas, which is expected to take several months. Washington will act as Israel’s supply officer to keep its military cupboard replenished.
U.S. officials stress that American support for Israel’s mission could waver with public opinion. The high number of casualties from the IDF mission in Gaza has triggered mass demonstrations across the U.S.
“The more you take humanitarian concerns, governance and post-conflict stabilization seriously, the longer we can support you,” Mr. Knights said. “If you want to fight it ‘super hard,’ you’re probably only going to have our backing for a couple of weeks.”
Hectoring and pandering
Caroline Glick, an Israeli commentator and former member of the IDF, expressed weariness with what she described as constant hectoring from the Biden administration about Israel’s need to follow the rules of warfare. She said the purpose of the badgering is to create some sort of moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas, which the U.S. and Israel consider a terrorist group.
“I think it’s also gaslighting and pandering. Of course we follow the rules of war. We always do,” Ms. Glick said. “It’s a suggestion that there’s something morally corrupt and compromised about Israel.”
Israel has repeatedly said its battle is against the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group, not the people of Gaza, said Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank. It is the Palestinian militants, he noted, who are preventing ordinary Gaza residents from evacuating from the northern part of the enclave, where Israel is targeting its operations.
“More light must be shed on the actions taken by Hamas to prevent the exodus of Gazans from the north,” Mr. Schanzer said. “There is also a need to investigate reports out of Israel which suggest Hamas may be smuggling humanitarian goods from the south to the north via tunnels.”
• Mike Glenn can be reached at mglenn@washingtontimes.com.
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