In it Ukrainian war front it’s hard to see combat tanks moving freely near the focus of hostilities. The Ukrainians hide their tanks in any thick forest to camouflage them and prevent them from being destroyed from the air by the Russian enemy. On the periphery of Loop everything is radically different. long columns of Israeli Merkava They wait comfortably parked under the sun until the order comes to enter the Strip. Hamas They do not have precision planes or missiles, only some drones that do not seem to worry the military of the Tzeelim base, where you can breathe a relaxed atmosphere. The disparity of forces between one of the best prepared armies in the world and a guerrilla isolated for years makes this war a completely asymmetrical battlean advantage that Israel will partially lose if the fight moves to the hundreds of kilometers of tunnels that pierce the subsoil of Gaza.
There are not too many details about how the Israeli infantry advance since the beginning ground operation a little over a week ago. His forces have penetrated two axes from the north and a third from the center. They intend split the enclave in two for isolate the entire north of the Strip, which also includes the capital, where its mechanized units are operating at this time. The only thing that is known with certainty is that not a single building remains intact in the areas they control, as Israeli and foreign television stations embedded with their troops have shown. The aviation, first, and the infantry, later, are flying everything in their path. More of 40,000 homes have been completely destroyed and another 220,000 damaged, according to UN data.
“Hamas uses civil infrastructure and that makes it very difficult to minimize the damage. They shoot rockets from hospitals, schools and mosques“says Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Elbo Arama from the base of Tzeelim. His defense minister, Yoav Gallant, has expressed it in other words. “The whole city is one large terrorist base“he said this week in an attempt to justify the indiscriminate nature of the offensive, which is ignoring basic principles of the International human right as the proportionality or the distinction between military and civilian objectives.
Long and complicated war
All of this is facilitating the assault, which has two declared objectives: to rescue those close to 240 hostages and destroy Hamas. Or at least, to its leaders and its military capabilities so that it cannot raise its head again. “That not only means many aerial bombardmentsas precise as possible, but once you enter by land, you have to clean every buildingeach floor, each room and every basement,” said the general recently David Petraeus who was also director of the CIA. All experts agree that to meet these objectives it will be necessary to long and bloody warat least several months.
He Pentagon has been warning Israel for weeks that its forces in Gaza will encounter a scenario similar to what the United States and its Iraqi allies faced in Mosulthe city taken by the Islamic State in Iraq that served as the capital of its extinct caliphate. A city where almost two million inhabitants lived in peacetime. With an addition that further complicates its mission: the close 500 kilometers of tunnels built by the armed factions in Gaza, where Hamas is believed to have command centers, weapons warehouses and to the hostages captured during the unprecedented attack that launched this war.
Some tunnels more sophisticated than those used by the Vietcong to end up repelling the US invasion. With reinforced concrete wallsthousands of entrances and exits and a gallery labyrinth about 2,000 meters deep, according to ‘The New York Times’. “In this area Hamas has the advantage,” writes specialist Daphne Richemond-Barak in ‘Foreign Policy’. “The tunnels neutralize Israeli military capabilities and serve to balance the forces of both sides.” To all this we must add the trap bombssnipers, suicides, anti-tank missiles and ambushes that Hamas is implementing. Which predicts a complicated battle. If Mosul is the reference, it took no less than nine months to fall.
Differences between Mosul and Gaza
The parallels with Gaza are many, but with some notable differences, according to Anthony King, Professor of War Studies at the British University of Warwick. The combat there was led by 94,000 Iraqi troops, closely supported by the US and its allies in the coalition against ISIS. In this war, Israel has 169,000 active soldiers and 300,0000 reservists mobilized. But a significant portion of those forces are deployed in West Bank and the border with Lebanon. “So the Israeli Army would have about 100,000 soldiers to blockade Gaza and clean it. But their combat troops They are much smaller. Some commentators have suggested that it would be around 20,000. “So they probably won’t be enough to clear all of Gaza,” King assures this newspaper. Palestinian factions are estimated to have between 20,000 and 40,000 fighters, at least before the war.
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Another important difference is that the coalition against ISIS made “enormous efforts” To try to separate jihadists from the population Iraqi with “sophisticated information campaigns” which also added recruits for the resistance groups in the city. “The Israeli Army appears to have completely failed to win over the population against Hamas. “His few precautions in the use of force have achieved quite the opposite,” says King. Nor is Israel knowing how to manage the enormous international support which he obtained as a result of the brutal attack by Hamas. Even his closest allies begin to shout at him to stop. kill children and womenas he did this week Emmanuel Macron.
The capture of Mosul in July 2017, after nine months of urban warfare, was the beginning of the end of ISIS. Its caliphate as a political entity was seriously diminished. Its borders were narrowed and its capital was moved to the Syrian city of Raqqa. “In the case of Israel, it is very difficult to understand what could I achieve politically“Even if it manages to sweep Hamas out of northern Gaza,” says the Warwick University professor. “They will continue to exist Hamas cells in the south, where you will probably find more support from the displaced. So the current operation looks like a mission doomed to failure”, says King.