A war with no accredited war correspondents

We have become so used to having wars via CNN, BBC, The Times, the New York Times and the myriads of other media outlets sending reporters to be attached to military units to inform the world of what is happening. But this latest war, Israel's offensive in Gaza, is effectivey being carried out in a news blackout. Most of the time reporters are having to make intelligent assumptions about what the Israeli Defence Forces are doing. Apart from the briefest of updates from IDF spokesmen and the occasional thundering speech by Benyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, the most detail is coming from Hamas and that, for obvious reasons, cannot be relied on. We know there are now scores of Israeli tanks inside Gaza, aiming to encircle Gaza City where Hamas has its command headquarters buried under a hospital but very little else has been revealed apart from the relentless daily and nightly airstrikes. Now we are told there have been exchanges of gunfire between IDF troops and Hamas in the tunnels, the so-called Gaza Metro. But are these just minor skirmishes or is the IDF really going to go full ahead with flooding the tunnels with special forces and combat engineering units? Some of the tunnels have low ceilings and are narrow, making it difficult to pass through quickly, let alone safely. If this was in the Iraq War there would by now have been breathless reports from TV, radio and newspaper war correspondents about the underground firefights. But this is a war carried out in secrecy.

Should tunnel warfare in Gaza be avoided?

Operation Swords of Iron, Israel’s codename for the retaliatory military strikes against Hamas in Gaza, underscores the tactics used so far to meet the stated objective which is the total elimination of the terrorist-designated organisation. This is not a shock-and-awe, full-scale invasion ending in regime-change, like the US-led coalition high-intensity offensive against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003. It’s a phased, focused, tactical battle to remove an enemy skilled, experienced and armed for urban warfare. The current night raids by infantry and special forces units, backed by land, sea and air bombardment, described as the second phase of the operation, is likely to be followed by the deployment of a significantly larger number of troops and tanks to try and seal off northern Gaza. The element of surprise, normally crucial for successful warfare, was not available for the Israeli defence forces at the start of the operation, because Hamas expected and had planned for retaliation. So, the key to success for Israel’s military commanders will be to adopt tactics which Hamas is not anticipating. This might rule out sending thousands of Israeli soldiers down the 300-mile stretch of layered tunnels to seek and destroy the Hamas strongholds which are buried up to 80 metres deep beneath the concrete foundations of many of Gaza’s largest buildings, including hospitals, schools and mosques. Hamas will have planned for tunnel warfare and will have built up the capabilities to counter an infusion of Israeli troops armed with all the latest weaponry and special forces combat skills. Israel in recent days has received advice from some of the most experienced urban warfare specialists in the world, one of whom, Lieutenant-General James “Jim” Glynn of the US Marine Corps, spent four days providing unique insights into the challenges of finding and killing the enemy in a packed urban environment, below and above ground. Before the Israeli action began, there were 9,000 Palestinian residents n Gaza City for every square kilometre, similar in density to places such as Fallujah in Iraq where Glynn fought as a combat commander in 2004. Glynn has now returned to the US, but the lessons he learned in Fallujah will have been invaluable to the Israelis. This is not a war where bunker-busting bombs dropped by Israeli aircraft will clear Gaza of its tunnel complex. Israel claims to have destroyed 150 tunnels with such bombs but most of the underground “Gaza Metro” is not reachable or targetable from the air because of where they are concealed. The Hamas tunnels also house the 200 or so hostages, so Israeli special forces will be inhibited from using explosive devices to clear tunnels unless they have specific intelligence of the location of the kidnapped civilians. “Hamas is counting on us entering every bunker and every tunnel with tweezers in order to exact a heavy bloody price from us,” Naphtali Bennett, former Israeli prime minister, has said. He has proposed imposing a siege on northern Gaza, “to dry up and suffocate the Hamas terrorists in the tunnels until they are forced out”. While this might make practical, casualty-avoiding sense, it’s likely that Hamas will have taken this possibility into account and may have moved some of their leadership and weaponry to southern Gaza, to hide beneath the more than one million Palestinians urged by Israel to evacuate from the north.

How will the Israel/Hamas war end?

This war has been building up for so long it is difficult to see how or when it will come to an end. In Israel's view it will end only when Hamas has been totally eliminated. It took the mighty US-led coalition five years to defeat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq but the Isis ideology lives to this day with several franchises existing and operating in different parts of the world. The territory Israel has to contend with is much smaller. The Gaza Strip from end to end is only 25 miles long by just over six miles wide. But Gaza city and the north are densely packed urban areas while the south is more agricultural. But the challenge to defeat and eliminate Hamas is almost as complex as it was for the US coalition to eradicate Isis. However, for geopolitical and humanitarian reasons, the defeat of Hamas cannot take five years. Benjamin Netanyahu talks of it being a long war ahead, but I doubt the world at large will allow five years of war in a place as tiny as Gaza. There will be growing pressures for a ceasefire and for an accommodation. But the reality is, Israel will not and cannot agree to any deal with Hamas that allows them to survive as rulers of Gaza, able to reconstitute its weaponry and threaten Israel again in the future. So as of now, there is no end solution in sight.

The war in Gaza could last for months

So mighty are the challenges facing the Israeli Defence Forces in defeating and eliminating Hamas in Gaza, the war is likely to last for months or longer. It also means that Israeli troops will have to occupy Gaza, even if they manage to destroy the whole Hamas network, because the Strip cannot be left ungoverned and ungovernable. A replacement administration will have to be found and who will want to take over a destroyed country and an angry population? Destroying all the hundreds if not thousands of tunnels will take for ever. So this is a longlasting war, and the longer it goes on the more difficult it will be for Israel to extract itself from Gaza. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu knows this which is why it has begun the retaliatory fightback with such hesitation. Not from the air because there have been non-stop bombing raids, but on the ground. No war can be won from the air, so if Hamas is going to be defeated and destroyed as an organisation, Israeli troops are going to have to take on the job which means there will be multiple casualties. It's going to be a huge tragedy with massively dangerous and unpredictable consequences for the region and for the world.

Israel and its sponge bomb method of blocking tunnels

The Israeli military has devised a way of blocking off some of the multiple tunnels dug by Hamas under Gaza by firing “sponge bombs”, consisting of a chemical compound which forms a rapidly hardening foam. While the Israeli defence forces will need to engage in close combat in the tunnel network, the sponge-bomb foam will seal off the smaller entrances along the way, preventing ambushes by Hamas. Sponge bombs were not designed to destroy tunnels but to reduce the odds for the Israeli soldiers by filling up at least some of them with the hardened foam to ease their path down the so-called Gaza Metro. “The threat of Hamas tunnels will be one of the most significant challenges to contend with,” John Spencer of the Modern War Institute at the US West Point Military Academy, said during a discussion on the issue this month. “Many miles of these tunnels crisscross below the surface of Gaza, some as deep as 230ft underground, and collectively they offer Hamas fighters the means to protect themselves against the Israeli offensive, manoeuvre undetected below the surface and launch attacks before returning to the security of the tunnels,” he said. “Is it feasible to seal them? Can they be destroyed with bunker-buster munitions or other explosives? Are there other ways to render them unusable?” he asked. The sponge-bomb concept is one of the devices expected to be used to seal gaps where Hamas members might be hiding and to help flush them out while attempting to rescue the 200 or so hostages still being held in the tunnel complex that stretches for hundreds of miles. The innovative form of defensive warfare will only play a small part in meeting the threats posed by the layers of tunnels. But IDF soldiers have tried out the sponge-bomb technique at the Tze’Elim army base near the border with Gaza where there is a mock tunnel system for training exercises. The use of sponge bombs is not without risk. The chemical-based foam can be hazardous to work with , and some Israeli soldiers have lost their sight through mishandling during training, The Telegraph reported.

How Hamas rule in Gaza has been disastrous for Palestinians

One can ony feel desperately sorry for the 2.2 million Paestininans living in Gaza. They made the mistake of voting in Hamas to rule the Strip but now have every reason to blame them for the appalling disaster that has befallen them. One thing that has become clear is that instead of spending money to improve the lives and livelihoods of the Palestinian people, Hamas has diverted all the funds they could muster into building weapons laboratories, constructing tunnels to hide in, and spending their time and energy into plotting a terrorist strike against Israel. Never mind the Palestinian people who needed food and jobs and social care. Gaza, as all commentators are saying, is now hell on earth. It is being steadily destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in the hunt for Hamas hideouts and the people are all cooped up in southern Gaza in the hope of saving their lives. One woman on TV the other night said she was living with more than 40 people in one house. The so-called two-state solution under which Israel and Palestine would exist as two separate nations has been a dream for decades but now seems further away than ever. The future for the Palestinian people is grim.

Nothing is going to stop a massive Israeli invasion of Gaza

There is no question the invasion of Gaza has been delayed, even nearly called off possibly, but the remark by the secretary-general of the United Nations, which effectively said that Hamas's action in slaughtering more than 1,000 Israelis in cold blood, including women and children, was not carried out "in a vacuum" but was brought on by years of Israel's blockading of Gaza, will surely finally give Benjamin Netanyahu the extra incentive and motivation to go ahead with a massive ground offensive. The words of Antonio Guterres will put fire in the bellies of every Israeli soldier lining up on the Gaza border. Neither the US nor Britain has called for a ceasefire because they recognise that Israel has the right to defend itself and take revenge on Hamas. So it's going to happen, partly thanks to the UN chief's unwise selection of words. Whether a ground invasion will then lead to a much wider regional conflict we have no way of knowing. But the UN chief's statement has underlined the divisions around the world about Israel and the manner in which it has had to protect itself over the years and act against its enemies living all round its borders. Antonio Guterres needs a lesson in history.