Close quarters fight in Gaza
The real war in the Gaza Strip is only now unfolding in brutal fashion as Israeli ground forces enter the urban jungle of Gaza City for the first time to engage with Hamas fighters.
It is barely a month since the horrific October 7 terror attacks on Israel by Hamas, yet the world we knew has been transformed.
As many as 12,000 Palestinians and Israelis now lie dead. The Middle East is aflame with fury and ancient hatreds. Israel is in deep shock and says it’s in a fight for its existence. The US is sending nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers and troops to prevent a regional war. The international community recoils with horror as Palestinians carry injured children like rag-dolls into filthy hospitals amid bitter debate about the extent of Israel’s bombing of Gaza in its war against Hamas. Violent anti-Semitism is on the rise across the globe and intelligence agencies fear a new era of Islamic terrorism.
Yet, despite all of this, the conflict between Israel and Hamas is likely to get much worse.
The real war in the Gaza Strip is only now unfolding in a grim and brutal fashion as Israeli ground forces this week entered the urban jungle of Gaza City for the first time to engage with Hamas fighters. It is a battle that is being fought house by house and street by street above the ground and tunnel by tunnel below the ground as Israeli forces try to dismantle the honeycomb-like maze of underground passages used by Hamas to move its fighters around Gaza.
For the Hamas militants in northern Gaza, there now appears to be no escape. Israeli forces have cut the Gaza Strip into north and south, and have surrounded the north where they are methodically advancing from three sides into Gaza City, where Israel believes the bulk of Hamas forces are.
“We’ve completed our encirclement, separating Hamas strongholds in the north and the south, and it’s proving to be effective,” Israeli military spokesman Lieutenant colonel Richard Hecht says. “It’s close-quarters urban warfare.”
Israeli Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant says his forces are now in “the heart of Gaza City” and “we are tightening the noose”.
The military says it is moving closer to the ‘heart of intelligence and operational activities’ near the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City.
The Israel Defence Forces claim to have destroyed 130 of Hamas’s tunnel shafts and say they have killed Muhsin Abu Zina, a top figure in Hamas’s weapons production, and have surrounded Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind behind the October 7 massacre, in a tunnel where he is cut off from fellow fighters.
But this is a close-quarters war that also is being fought alongside at least 300,000 civilians, with neither side able to guarantee their safety during the heat of battle.
There have been growing tensions between the US and Israel over how to minimise civilian casualities which the US believes is essential if Israel is to maintain the full support of the west which is increasingly uncomfortable with the large civilian death toll so far in the conflict.
The world body says 1.5 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says the human suffering in Gaza “defies humanity”.
“Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children,” he says as the UN estimates that 160 children are dying each day in Gaza. The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry claims more than 10,000 people have died in Gaza in the past month and, while these figures cannot be verified, the US admits the civilian death toll is now in the many thousands.
Israel and the US forged an uneasy compromise on civilian safety this week when Israel agreed to a daily ‘tactical local pause’ in fighting to allow citizens in north Gaza safe passage to the south and for humanitarian aid to enter.
This follows several days of unofficial daily pauses for around four hours at a time which Israel claims led to as many as 40,000 people per day fleeing norther Gaza by road, some waving white flags.
It wasn’t quite what the US wanted, with Joe Biden having asked Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week for a ‘humanitarian pause’ of at least three days. Both Israel and Biden are opposed to any formal ‘ceasefire’ which they say would only favour Hamas and allow the terrorists to regroup.
“These are tactical local pauses for humanitarian aid, which are limited in time and area,” said Richard Hecht, a spokesman for the IDF. “There’s no shift.”
Despite international debate over the civilian cost of Israel’s offensive Netanyahu has signalled he will not slow the Israeli advance. Any longer pauses in fighting, he says, will be done only in exchange for some of the 240 Israeli hostages held by the terror group.
“We intend to go on until the end. I want to tell you that what we’re seeing on the ground … it’s an incredible success,” Netanyahu says.
“It’s true that there are problems, too: There are drones and IEDs and antitank fire. Sometimes even very painful casualties. But all in all, the success is phenomenal.”
Former Australian Army major-general Mick Ryan says, on the available evidence, the Israeli ground offensive is proceeding better than expected.
“The Israelis have gone in with overwhelming force and I think Hamas has been surprised by the ferocity, scale and penetration into Gaza City,” he says. “I think that Israeli casualties so far have been relatively light for this type of warfare in really dense urban built-up areas, which also includes a lot of subterranean warfare in tunnels.”
But the ground advances into Gaza are being accompanied by frenetic diplomacy amid differences between the US and Israel over the conduct of the war and what comes afterwards.
Although the US continues to support fully Israel’s military ambition to destroy Hamas in Gaza, the Biden administration appears more alarmed than Netanyahu is about the international backlash caused by Israel’s month-long bombardment of Gaza.
The White House has argued for a more limited surgical military campaign against Hamas rather than a sweeping ground battle it fears could cause thousands more civilian deaths. So far, its calls for more military restraint from Israel and a more surgical approach to the war have been rebuffed.
The President is walking a fine line here. Although he has been a strong supporter of Israel’s “right and responsibility” to destroy Hamas, the tide of public opinion in the US is becoming more critical of Israel as civilian casualties have mounted. In the US, as elsewhere around the world, enormous pro-Palestinian rallies have pressured governments to amplify calls for Israel to do more to protect civilians in Gaza.
An Associated Press-NORC poll released in the US this week found 58 per cent of Biden’s own Democratic Party viewed Israel’s counter-attack in Gaza as excessive. Forty per cent of all Americans agreed they had been too harsh, while 38 per cent said Israel’s response had been about right and 18 per cent said it had not gone far enough.
Biden faces a multi-pronged challenge of not only keeping Israel’s Western allies firmly aligned behind Israel but also retaining the support of US voters in a conflict that is likely to stretch into next year’s US presidential election campaign.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is engaged in Henry Kissinger-style shuttle diplomacy across the Middle East, visiting Jordan, Iraq and Turkey this week, to try to prevent the conflict from spreading.
Arab nations are increasingly furious about Israel’s campaign in Gaza and have stepped up calls on the US to pressure Israel to agree to a ceasefire.
“The whole region is sinking in a sea of hatred that will define generations to come,” Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi warns.
The conflict has led Arab nations, at least temporarily, to put aside their differences to speak in solidarity with Palestinians.
Even the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which both have normalised relations with Israel under the much-touted Abraham Accords of 2020, have chosen to condemn Israel.
Saudi Arabia also will host an extraordinary meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation on Sunday to discuss the conflict that Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi expected to attend.
But the good news so far for Israel and its allies is that the anger of Arab nations shows no immediate sign of spilling over into a regional war.
The key player in this equation, Iran, has shown no appetite for a broader conflict despite its inflammatory rhetoric and its encouragement of its terror proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq to harass Israeli and US forces.
Israel’s greatest fear after the October 7 Hamas terror attacks was that the Iran-backed Hezbollah in southern Lebanon would launch a full-scale assault on Israel, forcing Israel to fight a war on two fronts.
Instead, while we have seen Hezbollah ramp up daily missile attacks on targets in northern Israel, the terror group deliberately has sidestepped a full-scale conflict. As Blinken said this week, “Sometimes the absence of something bad happening may not be the most obvious evidence of progress, but it is.”
There have now been several potential red lines that Israel has crossed that might have triggered a response from Iran and its proxies but did not. These included its weeks-long heavy bombardment of Gaza and now the start of the ground offensive.
Although Iran is highly unpredictable and could yet change its mind, there are growing hopes that it has chosen not to expand this war and thereby risk the defeat of Hezbollah and invite a full Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
This interpretation has been bolstered further by the speech from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last week in which he indicated, without explicitly saying so, that Hezbollah would not lead a separate front against Israel and that Lebanon would not be destroyed for the sake of the Gaza Strip.
“I think they’ve understood that if they enter the war in a significant way the response will be very, very powerful and I hope they don’t make that mistake,” Netanyahu said after the speech.
Says Ryan: “I think Hezbollah is very reluctant to take on the Israelis because they know the Israelis will cause an inordinate amount of damage to them.
“If you have a look at Nasrallah’s speech, he basically threw Hamas under the bus by saying (of the October 7 attacks) that it wasn’t us, this was 100 per cent Palestinian, we knew nothing about it. There was no call for a broader war.”
Ryan says Iran sees the survival of Hezbollah as important because it provides a strategic deterrent to any attempt by Israel to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. This, he says, is more valuable to Iran than seeing Hezbollah provoke an all-out war with Israel that it ultimately would lose.
Even so, the US is flexing its military muscles in an attempt to deter Iran from triggering a broader conflict. It took the unusual step this week of publicly announcing on social media platform X that an Ohio-class nuclear-powered guided missile submarine, capable of carrying up to 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles, had arrived in the Middle East.
It already has deployed two carrier strike groups to the region along with troops and air defence systems.
The US also has launched its second airstrike in as many weeks on Iranian targets in eastern Syria as it seeks to deter attacks on its troops by Iranian proxy forces in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
The Pentagon says the roughly 3500 US troops in Iraq and Syria already have been subjected to more than 40 drone and rocket attacks by Iran-aligned militias since the October 7 Hamas terror attacks. A US military surveillance drone was shot down off the coast of Yemen by Iran-backed Houthi rebels.
As Israel steps up its ground offensive in Gaza, differences also are emerging over with Washington over who will take responsibility for the battered enclave when Israel decides it has fulfilled its mission to dismantle Hamas.
Netanyahu raised eyebrows when he announced this week that Israel would be responsible for Gaza’s security for an “indefinite period” after the conflict was over. Biden has said previously that Israeli occupation of Gaza after the conflict would be a mistake.
Israeli officials quickly tried to water down Netanyahu’s claim, with his senior adviser, Mark Regev, saying: “We have to distinguish between a security presence and political control.
“When this is over and we have defeated Hamas, it is crucial that there won’t be a resurgent terrorist element, a resurgent Hamas,” Regev says.
“There is no point doing this and just going back to square one. There will have to be an Israeli security presence, but that doesn’t mean Israel is reoccupying Gaza, that doesn’t mean that Israel is there to govern the Gazans.
“On the contrary, we are interested in establishing new frameworks where the Gazans can rule themselves, where there can be international support for the reconstruction of Gaza. Hopefully, we can bring in countries – Arab countries as well – for a reconstruction of a demilitarised, post-Hamas Gaza.”
But the US vision for a post-war Gaza is different, with Blinken suggesting Gaza should be unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority when the fighting is over.
“These must include the Palestinian people’s voices and aspirations at the centre of post-crisis governance in Gaza,” Blinken says. “It must include Palestinian-led governance and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority.”
He says there must be no forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza and no reduction in that enclave’s territory.
But such a solution may not be possible on several levels. First, the Palestinian Authority under its 87-year-old leader, Mahmoud Abbas, is widely seen as so corrupt and ineffectual that it can barely exert effective control of the West Bank.
Hamas threw the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza in 2007 and it is unlikely the group would be welcomed back in. It is also difficult to see how the Palestinian Authority could rule Gaza when Israel maintains an on-and-off security presence there.
“We will not return to Gaza atop an Israeli tank,” says Ahmed Majdalani, a senior Palestinian official. “We need a political solution, international guarantees. We won’t repeat the same story as before.”
Netanyahu’s government is also unlikely to embrace the Palestinian Authority as the next ruler of Gaza. His ragtag coalition is stacked with right-wing hardliners who detest the PA. Netanyahu’s Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has a long history of hostility towards Arabs and the Palestinian Authority and even ordered that guns be given to Israeli settler groups in the West Bank after October 7.
However, Netanyahu’s government may yet be short-lived. He is considered unlikely to survive as Prime Minister after this war given the historic intelligence failure that allowed Hamas to attack his people on such a scale.
For now, Israel is more focused on the immediate task of defeating Hamas and ensuring the group can never again threaten its citizens. “Once the Gaza area is safe … we will sit down and review an alternative mechanism for Gaza,” Israeli war cabinet minister and former defence minister Benny Gantz says. “I do not know what it will be. But I do know what cannot be there – an active presence of Hamas.”
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