Gaza ground invasion will be hellish for Israel too

If Israel is to achieve its war objective – to dismantle Hamas – its troops will have to go into the streets and into the tunnels. Both will be hellish.

Whether a full-scale invasion involving upwards of 100,000 troops going in, or a more limited force in the low tens of thousands, they will face the same obstacles. After advancing across a couple of miles of open ground they must then enter urban areas and, if they wish to reach the coastline, fight their way through about five miles of streets. 

Waiting for them will be Hamas snipers hiding among the ruins of streets hit by Israeli air strikes. There will be squads of trained Hamas men many of whom will have combat experience. Some will defend strong fighting positions which could take hours to neutralise. Airstrikes will be of limited use to the Israelis if the positions are within collapsed buildings as their missiles will not penetrate multiple layers of concrete. If the Hamas units fear being overrun, they can retreat through the alleyways of Gaza City and down into the tens of miles of tunnels beneath the surface to either wait for the Israeli forces to come down, or to resurface into different defensive positions.  Some of the tunnel entrances and exits are thought to be in, or next to, schools and mosques. The IDF believes that Hamas HQ in Gaza is under the Shifa hospital. Why do they believe this?  Because in 1983 when Israel still occupied Gaza they built the hospital, including the bunker deep under its Building 2 where the international media are never allowed to film.

Israel knows Hamas now has access to much higher-grade explosives than in previous conflicts. What they are less sure of is how many drones Hamas may have which are capable of dropping those explosives onto tanks as they did on October 7. They also don’t know if Hamas has surface to air missiles such as the SA-7 capable of taking down helicopters, or a stockpile of anti-tank weapons such as the Kornet. What they are capable of is firing volleys of rocket-propelled grenades which, while they rarely destroy a tank, can stop it in its tracks. 

The Israelis will deploy their Merkava tanks complete with ‘cope cages’ welded to their roofs to add partial protection against drone attacks. The IDF high command has studied the Ukraine/Russia war in detail and knows that hundreds of tanks have been disabled by drones. The IDF also has what is the most heavily protected infantry combat vehicle ever produced – the Namer. This has state of the art electronics to warn of incoming fire and, crucially for urban combat, machine guns capable of being fired by gunners inside the Namer using TV screens to see their targets. This is far safer than the vulnerabilities of firing from the turret of a vehicle. 

The army’s elite special forces units such as the Sayeret Matkal and Duvdevan will have gone in ahead, as possibly, will the navy’s Shayetet 13 who, if deployed, may enter Gaza from the sea.  The Namers and Merkavas will escort the ground troops including some of the specialist units tasked with dealing with the tunnel network. 

By using earth penetrating radar, the IDF knows where many of the tunnels are, but not the exact locations of all the exit and entry points. However, through their network of spies, and years, of studying satellite imagery of where cement mixer trucks have stopped, they can make educated guesses. The entrances lead to underground warehouses of weapons including rockets, there are manufacturing areas for manufacturing the munitions, command posts, and living quarters for senior Hamas officials who are on the Israeli ‘most wanted’ lists. Top of that list is Mohammed Deif, leader of Hamas’ military wing. 

But, also underground, there are also almost 200 hostages dragged into Gaza from Israel during the Oct 7 attacks. So the Yahalom Unit, a Combat Engineering corps specialising in tunnel warfare, cannot simply rig all the tunnels with explosives and blow them. There will be occasions they will have to go down and fight. Accompanying them may be the Oketz – the IDF’s specialist canine unit whose dogs are trained in detecting explosives, search and rescue, and attack. 

All these specialists have trained for this moment. The IDF has an Urban Warfare Training Centre in the Negev desert. This comprises 600 buildings, some eight storeys high, in what is called ‘Mini Gaza’. Some of the specialists will have been in the real Gaza. During the limited ‘Protective Edge’ incursion in 2014, the IDF destroyed several miles of tunnels and many of the reservists now called up will have taken part in the operation. 

‘Protective Edge’ lasted 50 days during which the IDF suffered 66 fatalities. If Israel wants to achieve its aims, it is probable that this time the losses will be far greater. So will be those of Hamas, and of the Palestinian civilians still in the northern urban areas. 

There is a maxim: ‘War is hell’. Urban and tunnel warfare are among its deepest pits.

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