Gaza ground war holds huge risks, deep uncertainties for both sides

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly told President Biden that his armed forces have no choice but to launch a ground operation in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, given the destruction following this weekend’s deadly attacks on Israel by Hamas militants based there. But military analysts are already warning such a mission will be lengthy and likely result in high casualties on both sides.

Israel is calling up 300,000 army reservists as it prepares to escalate a conflict now focused on a densely packed area just over twice the size of Washington, D.C. with a population of more than 2 million people. Israel boasts one of the world’s most effective fighting forces, but the nature of the coming fight could nullify many of its advantages.

“There are few things more difficult than urban warfare,” said Bradley Bowman, director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank.

Hamas must have anticipated that a ground incursion by Israel was likely after its forces killed an estimated 900 people — the vast majority of them civilians — and took at least 150 hostages, Mr. Bowman said.

“Hamas has probably been thinking about this for a long time,” he said. “Hamas has had time to prepare [and] they’re going to make this difficult urban warfare even more difficult.”

Hamas often treats its own people as human shields against attack by locating weapons and military units near hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings, Mr. Bowman said. A top Hamas official Monday said the group was already prepared to start executing its hostages if Israeli forces launched unannounced strikes on civilian targets inside Gaza.

“We can certainly expect them to house the extraordinary number of hostages they’ve taken in a brutally illicit way as well,” he said.

Michael Doran, director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute, said he doesn’t see how Israel can avoid launching some kind of ground attack into Gaza if it wants to deal with the long-term threat posed by Hamas, which the U.S. and Israel consider a terrorist movement.

“Whether it’s going to be a complete occupation or just an occupation of the northern strip and then incursions southward from there, I don’t know,” he said. “That is going to inflame relations between Israel and just about any Arab and Islamic country.”

The Israel Defense Forces are organized to fight at a distance — relying on their superiority in air power, reconnaissance, and firepower — before having to engage an enemy with close-in battles. The block-by-block urban warfare they could face in Gaza will level the playing field in many respects. It will force Israeli troops to engage in the messy prospect of clearing buildings occupied by both innocent civilians and armed fighters, said retired Army Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahoe.

“In Gaza, they will have to clear ‘down’ as well as ‘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, a former commander of the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Moore, Georgia.

The IDF is also primarily structured as an armored force. Fighting inside city blocks and among underground bunkers will allow Hamas to inflict significant casualties and reduce its technological disadvantages, Gen. Donahoe said. Israel’s last incursion into Gaza, 2014’s Operation Protective Edge, resulted in the deaths of about 70 IDF soldiers — and that was without the complication of the more than 150 hostages Hamas is believed to have captured during its weekend assault across southern Israel.

Gen. Donahoe said the difference between 2014 and today may be a higher threshold for casualties on the Israeli side based on the number of dead and wounded by this weekend’s Hamas attack. The troops are also being led by a nationalist  Israeli government that prides itself on maintaining a hard line on the Palestinian issue.

“If that is true, we should steel ourselves for a brutal application of force in Gaza,” Gen. Donahoe said.

U.S. support

A senior U.S. Defense Department official said Monday American officials have been in regular contact with their Israeli counterparts since the Hamas assault began on Saturday. The brutal tactics used by Hamas call for an equally punitive response, the official said.

“This is an unprecedented attack on Israel,” the Pentagon official said. “This is ISIS-level savagery that we’ve seen committed against Israeli civilians — houses burned down [and] young people massacred at a music festival.”

Israel must determine the character of the operation before it sends tanks rolling across the border into Gaza. Options include a preliminary rescue mission to free hostages, a relatively simple punitive raid, or a full-blown military expedition to cripple militant groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad for decades to come, said Can Kasapoglu, a senior fellow and military analyst at the Hudson Institute.

Avoiding harm to any hostages will be a prime concern for Israeli troops fighting their way through Gaza, Mr. Kasapoglu said.

“All of these categories are easier said than done. They all come with different force-generation requirements, different weapon systems [and] difficult calculations to minimize casualties,” he said. 

Hamas officials say they want to trade their hostages for thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, although that may be a hard sell given the level of carnage from their weekend attacks. Their leadership may even hope that Israel chooses to make the costly and diplomatically unpopular move of sending troops into Gaza.

“An incursion will likely trigger a terribly bloody fight in which many more people could be killed, including Israeli soldiers, and parts of Gaza could suffer utter destruction,” according to a report by the International Crisis Group. 

Israel has won crucial support from lawmakers in Washington, like Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, who said the U.S. must ensure that Israel has all the weapons it needs in its ongoing battles with Hamas.

“Thousands of Israelis and a still-unknown number of citizens from other countries are dead, wounded, or kidnapped. Dozens of Americans are reportedly among them,” Mr. Cruz said. “The United States must ensure that Israel has all the weapons and all the time that it needs to utterly eradicate Hamas, and we must be unambiguous about that commitment.”

But Mr. Netanyahu and his military brain trust must factor in another risk: that other actors — Iran, the Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, or even other Palestinians living in the West Bank or Israel itself — may come to the aid of Hamas if the fighting drags on, forcing Israel to fight a multi-front war when its forces are concentrated heavily on the Gaza battle. During the 2021 clash in Gaza, Hamas and Hezbollah set up a joint war room to coordinate strategy against Israeli military forces.

And analysts say it is not clear time is on Israel’s side if the ground war in Gaza fails to score a quick victory.