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THE MIDDLE EAST has seen much bloody urban fighting in recent years, including in Lebanon, in Syria and in the West Bank and in Gaza.
The death toll from the Hamas-Israel conflict that began nine days ago, already in the thousands, will inevitably climb much further if an expected ground offensive in Gaza by the Israeli army goes ahead.
History recalls names such as the Russian city of Stalingrad and the Iraqi city of Fallujah where large militaries suffered devastating losses against defenders.
The Russian city saw the Nazi German army frozen and destroyed by well prepared and committed fighters – while Fallujah had the US Army lose huge amounts of troops in house to house fighting.
The difference with those conflicts is that much of the civilian population had fled. That will not be the case in Gaza and the death toll and slaughter of innocent unarmed civilians is predicted to be enormous.
Figures from 2017 put the civilian population at around 500,000 with more than two million people across the whole of Gaza.
The death toll from Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip has risen to around 2,750 since Hamas’s deadly attack on southern Israel last week, the Gaza health ministry said on Monday.
Some 9,700 people have also been injured as Israel continued its air campaign on targets in the Palestinian coastal enclave, the Hamas-controlled ministry added.
Over the border, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has said the Israeli death toll is more than 1,400.
Regardless of what happens next those figures will increase further: unarmed non-combatant civilians will be killed as the IDF begins its mission to fight Hamas inside Gaza.
But it will be an operation not without its challenges for Israeli soldiers and will see plenty of those troops killed also.
Objectives
Military sources said any plan would start with identifying the objective of the operation – the Israeli Minister for Defence Yoav Gallant has been clear on this one.
He has been quoted as saying: “Hamas wanted a change in Gaza; it will change 180 degrees from what it thought.”
In other words, the Israeli aim is to bring about the total eradication of Hamas.
Speaking not long after Gallant on Tuesday, the IDF’s spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said that killing senior Hamas members is a priority.
“We will not stop the effort to eliminate senior Hamas officials, this is a top priority,” Hagari said.
An incursion into Gaza is not a new departure – the IDF has done it before.
There were limited ground offensives in 2014 and 2009 which were designed to degrade Hamas, but the scope and scale of the recent atrocities is pushing the Israeli Government to act.
Declan Power, a former Irish Army officer and defence analyst, said that it will not be an easy operation for the IDF as they are going into a well prepared city in which Hamas have had a lot of time to train and equip their forces.
As with all western militaries, the Israelis, according to Power, are led by the strategy and concepts of Fighting in Built Up Areas (FIBUA) and Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT).
This is no longer the preserve of Special Forces units – this is now trained to all infantry including in the Irish Defence Forces.
“It is the most difficult of military operations – it is made additionally complicated because unlike fighting in rural areas there is a lot of cover for the opposing side and there are a lot more civilians which introduces the issue of trying to protect them.
“The Israelis are currently bombarding to degrade the capacity of Hamas and they are targeting locations with a view to depriving those places for Hamas fighters.
“But, critically, Hamas don’t need to be terribly well equipped, and their command and control structures and communications can be quite basic because the ground is in their favour,” he said.
The urban terrain, Power said, will have been prepared by Hamas and they will have built specific methods to move around.
He said they will also have laid booby traps and other explosives at key locations to be triggered by the Israeli attackers.
There is also a warren of tunnels built by Hamas under the city. The issue for Israeli forces is that a small team of fighters can stall the movement of the troops, bogging them down inside kill zones to be picked off.
In the last twenty years the Israeli Defence Forces have launched a major strategy to develop new methods and tactics.
They are guided by the Dahieh Doctrine, named after a neighbourhood in Beirut where Hezbollah was headquartered in the 2006 war with Israel.
At that time, Chief of General Staff Gadi Eizenkot outlined that it was a method of destroying civilian infrastructure with the claim that it will deny enemy combatants the use of that infrastructure.
Eizenkot’s concept also endorsed the use of “disproportionate force” to achieve the goal.
It is clear, watching the images of large-scale aerial bombardment of Gaza, that this is what Israel is doing.
The cutting off of water and electricity is also part of that Israeli plan – regardless of what it does to the civilian population.
All Israeli troops have been trained at a location dubbed “Little Gaza” – a one-kilometre-squared mock-up of a Palestinian city where they train their soldiers for urban fighting.
In the €45m, US-funded complex in Tze’Elim troops learn how to pass down streets without being targeted by snipers and how to take buildings, floor by floor, room by room.
The tactics of the ground advance, according to Power, will include mouse-holing – a strategy whereby the Israelis blow holes in the walls of civilian homes to move along a street without being exposed to fire from snipers.
“The doors will be booby trapped so to deal with that the Israelis will blow holes in walls.
“It is an old tactic – the British used it in the Troubles in Northern Ireland – known as Winthropping. It is a study of the topography where forces are most likely to manoeuvre and go the opposite way to that.
“But it slows everything down and they will not need the mouseholes as much because the current bombardment will have made the booby traps inert,” Power added.
Brigadier General Meir Finkel of the IDF told a recent podcast of the Modern War Institute of West Point in the US that it will not just be infantry – they will be backed up with various teams.
They will move in, he said, with tanks and Armoured Personnel Carriers along with bulldozers. Engineers in those teams will blow up buildings that have a stubborn resistance and there will also be teams specialising in clearing tunnel systems.
Drones will be used as well as other military assets like close air support from fighter jets.
That is the high-tech work of modern militaries but the basic methods of Hamas will keep the fight going, potentially for weeks.
There is a shelf life on an Israeli incursion – the 2006 Lebanon war lasted 34 days, a war in 2009 in Gaza lasted 22 days and the 2014 Gaza incursion last seven weeks.
Power said that it is without question that Hamas will have placed arms caches at strategic points and will have attackers popping up out of tunnels and other locations to take on the Israeli forces.
The former military officer believes that propaganda will play a crucial role.
“This is an asymmetric fight, and public opinion matters – the sides will be looking to manipulate propaganda.
“Hamas will see propaganda value in the images of the bodies of their own civilian population as part of that fight.
“That will be used to complicate things for Israeli ground forces as international focus is going to bring them under pressure. There will be a moral confusion and Hamas will be looking at escalating it to test the cohesiveness of the western response,” he said.
Power believes that the machinations of world leaders, including the European Union and the United States, may not be as they all appear.
He believes that the unbridled support for Israel may not be as fulsome behind closed doors, with Secretary Antony Blinken and others more likely to be advising caution.
“There’ll be a pragmatic acceptance by international leaders that Hamas needs to be degraded but not at the cost of civilian lives and this will be impressed upon Israeli officials,” he suggested.
Whatever cold strategic military considerations are made by the IDF or Hamas, the one sure outcome will be loss of more civilian non-combatant lives.
The definition of a war crime is enshrined in Article Eight of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and is based on the Geneva Conventions of 1949.
These crimes are defined as serious violations of humanitarian laws — generally violations against civilians — during a conflict.
It includes taking hostages during war time and targeting of civilian infrastructure but the critical word is “intentionally” and that will be the bar that the international community will use to judge Israel and Hamas when the bombs and bullets stop falling.
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