Battle for southern Gaza could take months, says Israeli military
Israeli military officials say they have been surprised by the extent of Hamas’s vast military network, as guerrilla tactics cause mounting casualties among IDF troops.
The Israeli military says it could take months to assert control over a key city in southern Gaza, as Hamas guerrilla tactics are causing casualties to mount among Israeli troops.
At least 16 Israeli soldiers were killed across Gaza over the past three days, as the military is now focusing on killing Hamas’s leaders and dismantling its extensive tunnel network.
On Saturday, four Israeli soldiers were killed by improvised explosive devices, and another four were killed by an antitank missile fired at their armoured vehicle, according to Israel’s state-owned Army Radio and partially confirmed by the military. Five additional soldiers were killed in fighting across the Strip on Friday. Israel’s military confirmed on its website two more additional deaths on Saturday and another on Sunday.
The growing death toll has led to some internal criticism that Israel is endangering soldiers by scaling back its use of force in response to US demands to limit civilian casualties. Israeli security officials and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deny any change to tactics because of American pressure.
But the growing casualties in the Israeli military highlight the difficulties in wiping out Hamas, which is splintering into a part-guerrilla army and launching attacks from populated areas.
Israeli military officials say they have been surprised by the extent of Hamas’s vast military network in southern Gaza and are finding more tunnels and weapons than they expected. A senior Israeli military officer commanding the battalion inside the city of Khan Younis said it could take months before they have control over the city the same way the Israeli military now controls northern Gaza.
“Their modus operandi now is to harass our soldiers and then go back into the tunnels,” said the officer. Hamas is keeping its attacks to cells of two to five fighters, the officer added.
The officer said Hamas is also attacking Israeli forces from civilian shelters, and using women and children to gather intelligence or move sensitive equipment around, such as weapons. Hamas is also storing weapons in hundreds or thousands of empty homes. This allows its fighters to move around freely, passing as civilians, and to retrieve the weapons at the last moment before mounting an attack.
Hamas is organised into battalion and brigade formations, but more than three months of air assault and two months of ground operations have broken the core of its command infrastructure. But Hamas is still able to mount effective guerrilla attacks.
“We’re speaking about half a guerrilla and half an army,” said Michael Milshtein, a former senior Israeli military intelligence officer, referring to the current Hamas force.
Some in Israel believe the mounting Israeli soldier death toll in southern Gaza is due to a more limited use of destructive firepower, such as air strikes, which would remove danger to advancing troops, such as booby-trapped buildings, but likely lead to more civilian deaths among Palestinians.
“It’s untenable that we are endangering our soldiers’ lives and sending them exposed into buildings before striking them,” said Nir Barkat, Israel’s minister of economy and industry, on Sunday. “Folding to outside pressure, even from our best friends, is a terrible mistake.” Responding to the criticism, the Israeli military on Sunday said that ground troops in Gaza are fully covered by air support and ground-based firepower.
The senior Israeli officer commanding forces in Khan Younis said there is no change in policy. Israel has more boots on the ground in Khan Younis than they had in northern Gaza during the start of the ground operation, and so there are less widespread air strikes to avoid harming Israeli troops, the officer added. Israel, he said, has four bridges operating in the heart of Khan Younis and an additional two forming a defensive perimeter around the Israeli positions and bolstering logistical support.
He also said the army sometimes decides to send troops into a building before destroying it because they believe they can gather intelligence.
At least 154 Israeli soldiers have been killed since the ground invasion of Gaza began eight weeks ago, making a total of 487 Israeli military deaths since Hamas’s October 7 attack. The death toll is the largest of any Israeli war since the country battled Palestinian militants in Lebanon in the early 1980s in what is now called the First Lebanon War.
Israel’s war against Hamas is shifting from the northern part of the enclave, where Israel says it has largely gained operational control, to Hamas’s stronghold in the south at Khan Younis. There, Israeli troops are focusing on hunting for Hamas’s tunnels and the group’s leaders, who are believed to be hiding inside the underground structures.
In Khan Younis, the Israeli military is using a recently established grid system to move civilians out of areas it plans to attack rather than demanding they evacuate all at once as it did in northern Gaza at the start of the war.
The Israeli officer said the system is working and that civilians are evacuating areas before Israel attacks. He said this has led to fewer civilian casualties, and the majority of casualties in Khan Younis are now militants, a reversal from northern Gaza, where Israeli officials admitted civilian casualties had greatly outnumbered militants.
The statements about lower civilian deaths in Khan Younis couldn’t be immediately verified.
Dr. Ashraf Al Qedra, spokesman for the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, said 70 per cent of the people killed everywhere in Gaza are women and children, and that complete families were killed in Khan Younis.
“If the army says the ones killed are militants, let them give us a single name,” he said.
On Sunday, the Gaza health authorities in the Hamas-run enclave said 166 people were killed there over the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 20,424 since the start of the war. The numbers don’t distinguish between combatants and civilians.
Many residents across the Gaza Strip are without electricity and face frequent telecommunications blackouts. In Khan Younis, some residents said they were able to follow the Israeli military instructions using limited internet access.
Israeli officials say they are readying to transition soon to the third phase of the war. In this phase, Israeli security analysts say, Israel will redeploy many of its troops along the border with Gaza and rely on targeted raids to finish off the goals of the war – destroying Hamas’s ability to attack Israel from Gaza and free hostages held by the group.
Such a redeployment would limit the number of troops vulnerable to Hamas’s guerrilla tactics but also reduce their ability to find and destroy the group’s critical tunnel network, raising questions about the timing of this move. Israel believes Hamas is holding its hostages inside the tunnels and that destroying the underground network is critical to eliminating the group’s ability to fight.
Bolstering the claim, the bodies of five Israeli hostages were recovered from a tunnel, the Israeli military said Sunday. The five were named by the military earlier this month.
If Israel withdraws its ground forces from Hamas strongholds, eliminating tunnels “won’t be difficult, it would be impossible,” said retired Israeli general and former National Security Council head Uzi Dayan. “Without full control over territory, above ground, we can’t control what happens below ground.” As part of its transition to lower-intensity fighting while retaining security control over Gaza, Israel is weighing the creation of a slightly more than half-mile-wide buffer zone within the Strip, running along the length of its Israeli border, said Giora Eiland, a former general who also used to head Israel’s National Security Council.
“We will clean everything that exists in this security zone, including buildings, greenhouses, whatever, in order to create a possible better security situation for the day after,” Eiland said.
The Biden administration has said it opposes this idea because it would shrink the enclave’s territory.
In his opening remarks to Sunday’s weekly cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Netanyahu denied American pressure is determining Israel’s operational decisions, saying that the US isn’t preventing Israel from taking military action in the region.
“Israel is a sovereign country. Our war decisions are based upon our operational considerations, and I won’t expand upon that,” said Netanyahu. “They are not determined by external pressures.” Netanyahu’s comments follow a Wall Street Journal report on Saturday that said President Biden had convinced Netanyahu to refrain from a pre-emptive strike against the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah during the early stages of the war.
Netanyahu has vowed to keep going until Israel achieves its war aims. “The war is exacting a very heavy price, but we have no choice but to continue fighting,” he said.
Retired general Dayan said that Israel’s public, which initially gave unprecedented support to the campaign to eliminate Hamas, is growing weary of war losses. “The Israeli public also wants to see the end of this,” he said.
Abeer Ayyoub contributed to this article
The Wall Street Journal
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