The war in Gaza is not over ... but we are nearing the beginning of the end
With Yahya Sinwar’s death, Israel is stronger, Hamas is on the way out, and Hezbollah and the Houthis with them. Iran is in deep trouble ... but highly dangerous.
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar didn’t find his death hiding in a tunnel. He was caught above ground by an Israel Defence Forces foot patrol of “trainee squad commanders”.
The patrol encountered Hamas terrorists, engaged and killed some in a firefight. Sinwar took shelter in a building that the IDF hit with precision weapons.
Video footage shows a drone-mounted camera entering a second-storey window of a heavily damaged building. The drone moves deeper into a rubble-strewn room and hovers to focus on a figure slumped in a lounge chair. Covered in dust, a wound to his right-hand seeping blood, Sinwar looks with exhausted eyes at the drone. He throws a piece of wood at the camera, which follows the movement.
Moments later Sinwar is dead. Perhaps the drone detonated an antipersonnel weapon. Sinwar’s face was recognised by the Israeli soldiers and his body evacuated from the scene.
Four elements of warfare stand out in this encounter.
The first is foot patrolling, as old as conflict itself. There never will be a substitute in war for taking and holding ground. That means soldiers with packs and rifles, backed up with armour and heavy weapons, maintaining a dominant presence.
Second, there was a pinpoint precision strike on the building, possibly from long-range artillery or a drone or aircraft strike. Note that the building wasn’t levelled. A 2000-pound bomb wasn’t used but a lighter weapon that reduces wider damage and limits casualties to those specifically targeted.
Precise targeting at range came into its own in the first Gulf War in 1990. Building a capacity to engage targets like this takes heavy investment in technology and war stocks.
The third feature is using first-person-view drones. An individual in the IDF patrol was probably using a headset to see the quadcopter’s video as it flew into Sinwar’s shelter.
My guess is that the drone also had an antipersonnel explosive device – powerful enough to kill or disable a target without wider damage.
Drone technology has been a core part of infantry warfare at least since Islamic State used quadcopters to hit Iraqi forces attacking their positions in Mosul in 2017.
Drones dominate the battlefield in Ukraine as they will dominate all warfare in future. Forces that don’t adopt drones as a fundamental war-fighting skill are destined to be defeated by them.
All soldiers hope for the fourth feature of this combat action: luck. This patrol wasn’t necessarily looking for Sinwar, they stumbled over him, responded quickly and were alert enough to realise who they had found.
For all of the vast intelligence effort expended on finding Sinwar and his commanders, Israel’s tactical success came from having smart soldiers on the ground able to act with initiative.
This isn’t to decry the value of intelligence. Sinwar’s appearance above ground shows that he had judged hiding in a tunnel was no longer safe.
So, months of patient intelligence gathering – literally digging for evidence – and bloodcurdling fighting in airless tunnels deep underground brought the IDF to this point.
Luck for military forces is always built on grinding preparation.
What does the death of Sinwar mean for Israel, for Gaza, for Iran and for Israel’s fairweather friends in the democracies? I have six preliminary conclusions.
First, the war in Gaza is not over. To sound vaguely like Winston Churchill, we are nearing the beginning of the end. Jerusalem will conclude that it needs to keep prosecuting the fight. There will be individuals in Hamas prepared to take on Sinwar’s role, starting, it seems, with the dead leader’s brother, Muhammad.
Remember that the core of Hamas ideology is an end-of-days Islamist millenarianism. These people will fight to their death. So be it.
Second, now is the moment for the innocents of Gaza to rise up and destroy the Hamas thugs who have willed such destruction on them. Hamas ruled Gaza through a mixture of violence and brainwashing. The terror group’s ability to inflict violence on Gazans is still there but much reduced. Is this the point at which Gazans will shed the brainwashing?
Anthony Albanese has declared there is no place for Hamas in Gaza’s future. Israel – and only Israel – has made it possible for Gazans to grasp that future.
Third, we should reflect that if Benjamin Netanyahu had been silly enough to follow American, European and Australian advice to opt for a ceasefire weeks or months ago, Sinwar would still be alive, leading Hamas and pretending to negotiate over hostages.
The truth is that advocating ceasefires served the interests of Hamas and its Iranian sponsors.
Fourth, our government should reflect on how strategically vacuous its policy on Gaza has been. At every turn we have undermined Israel’s legitimate interest to fight for its own survival and given comfort to those who wanted Hamas to keep its malign grip on power.
There is something even worse than a horrible war – it’s settling for a peace that entrenches enemies that want to destroy you. That is the effect of the Prime Minister’s and Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s policy approach to this conflict.
My fifth conclusion is that Iran is suffering a major strategic defeat. It has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and other terror groups. Much of this money was made available to Tehran when Joe Biden eased sanctions in 2021.
Tehran’s strategy of using proxies to strangle Israel is failing. I wrote last week in this paper that one result is that Iran may decide to race faster to acquiring nuclear weapons as a last-ditch fallback plan.
What this means is that the world is moving to a full-on Middle East crisis precisely at the time of the US election, through to the presidential inauguration in late January next year.
We can take some comfort that the American military is a serious strategic player even when its political leaders are less than capable. On Thursday AEDT US B-2 bombers attacked Houthi hardened underground weapons-storage locations in Yemen.
Whatever Biden and presidential candidate Kamala Harris are saying publicly to please the “Hamas wing” of the Democratic Party, the US is working hard to strengthen deterrence against Iranian military behaviour.
An Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear reprocessing facilities needed to make nuclear weapons material is, in my view, advisable and in all our interests.
Whether or not that happens, the next six months will be critical for the future of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It’s too early to predict the demise of the regime that has destabilised the Middle East since 1979, but there is an end in sight if the Iranian people want that outcome.
My sixth and final conclusion is that this weekend and after we will probably see Australian protesters waving Hamas flags – or near replicas – and some people even mourning the fate of Sinwar. We are here because the Albanese government has brought us to this point. It chose to tolerate a rise in Jew hatred and to look the other way as a weird alliance of Islamists and Marxist “progressives” practised their protest techniques. It’s not just the Middle East that is unravelling, it’s our own society.
With Sinwar’s death Israel is stronger, Hamas is on the way out, and Hezbollah and the Houthis with them. Iran is in deep trouble but highly dangerous. The US faces the most difficult presidential transition in at least half a century.
And our government is bewildered that a foreign policy built on platitudes is greeted with contempt from all parts of the political spectrum.
Peter Jennings is director of Strategic Analysis Australia and was executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute from 2012 to 2022. He is a former deputy secretary for strategy in the Defence Department (2009-12).
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