Israel discovers that breaking up the opposition in urban warfare is hard to do

I'd love to know how long the Israel Defence Forces thought it would take to defeat Hamas and get the whole of Gaza under control. Six months maybe? Perhaps three months? The reality is that urban warfare is the toughest type of conflict because unless you are a barbarian, you have an obligation and a desire to limit collateral damage, ie keep civilian deaths to a minimum. But this is almost impossible when the enemy is hiding within and under the civilian population, just as the Islamic State fighters did in Mosul in Iraq and in Rafa in Syria. Hamas from the very beginning has exposed civilians in Gaza to maximum danger by using people and residential properties as shields for attacking the IDF. This method of fighting a war has both prolonged the conflict and guaranteed a high casualty toll. The IDF in response have literally turned large swathes of Gaza into rubble. It's claimed 80 per cent of the buildings in northern Gaza have been destroyed. Just as the US-led coalition killed civilians in Mosul and Raffa and elsewhere in Iraq and Syria in the hunt for Isis, so the IDF have killed thousands of Palestinians while pursuing their objective, or the objective given them by Binyamin Netanyahu, of annihilating Hamas. Wars like this always lead to appalling collateral damage and anyone who claims otherwise is a fool.