Israel underestimated Hamas

No nation is militarily invincible. The US found this out in Vietnam and Afghanistan, Russia is discovering its vulnerabilities in Ukraine. Israel, however, has proved again and again that on the battlefield it has a deserved reputation for military prowess. In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel defeated three Arab armies, captured and occupied the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan and the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. Taken by surprise when Egypt and Syria launched a joint attack on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur in October 1973, Israel fought them off and in 19 days the Egyptians and Syrians had lost 15,600 men, 440 combat aircraft and 2,250 tanks. Now Israel is facing an enemy which, while incapable of launching a full-scale offensive and lacking the sort of military capabilities to threaten the whole country, is using a combination of underground urban fighting, hostage retention and psychological warfare to put maximum pressure on an opponent with far superior technology, firepower and manpower. The inexplicable intelligence failure prior to the Hamas onslaught over the border on October 7 laid the groundwork for what looked like a hurried operation to try and eliminate the terrorist-designated organisation by mass airstrikes, artillery bombardment and tank warfare. The revelation that the high command of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had received and dismissed a detailed intelligence analysis report, codenamed Jericho Wall, a year before which outlined precisely what Hamas was planning to do, according to The New York Times, has underlined how Tel Aviv totally underestimated the enemy across the border. Israeli intelligence on the underground network beneath Gaza also appears to have been out of date. “The underground tunnel infrastructure is way deeper and more complex than even the Israelis had imagined,” a former senior US defence official told The Times. “So the degree of difficulty of what they are up against is enormous, and because Hamas co-locates so much of its command and operational infrastructure, including rocket manufacturing facilities and arms caches, in civilian buildings, hospitals and religious sites, the optics look terrible for the Israelis,” he said. Responding to these challenges, Israel has dropped more than 20,000 munitions on targets but, by Israeli estimates, have only managed to kill 5,000-10,000 out of Hamas’s total force of around 40,000 “hardened terrorist fighters” over a period of seven weeks. In the process, about 60 per cent of Gaza’s housing stock has either been destroyed or damaged, around 280,000 houses and flats, according to the United Nations. “As they look to the south, the Israelis will have to take a more nuanced and targeted approach,” the former defence official said, reflecting the advice urged on Tel Aviv by the Biden administration. Apart from the international pressure on Israel to temper its air and land bombardments, there are now fresh reasons for a change in tactics. “They have succeeded in compressing the Hamas fighting force into a smaller geographic area in the south which means that Hamas can generate more combat power and inflict more casualties on the IDF,” the former defence official said. “Until now, the Israelis have been pleasantly surprised that they have not suffered more KIA [killed in action], around 70 so far,” he said. “But their stocks of munition are running down and they need reserves for the potential that they might face a conflict on the northern front [Hezbollah in southern Lebanon] as well,” he said. “Understandably, Israelis are enraged over the butchery and barbarism of the Hamas attack on October 7 but there are no easy answers when it comes to destroying Hamas and preventing Israel from ever being attacked like this again,” he said. There is one other challenge for the future. Many former senior US military officers, including those involved in the sieges of Fallujah and Mosul in Iraq, and Raqqa in Syria, have expressed concerns that the Israelis may be creating more terrorists than they are killing.