A STRANGE sense of trepidation lingers in the air as the crisis over Gaza intensifies. So far – at the time of writing this – an Israeli ground…
A STRANGE sense of trepidation lingers in the air as the crisis over Gaza intensifies. So far – at the time of writing this – an Israeli ground assault has yet to materialise, but coming it almost certainly is.
Both developments, however, are playing out against the ominous backdrop of Israel’s threatened ground offensive. In what is now expected to be its biggest military operation since the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the Israel Defence Forces have mustered a formidable ground assault capacity. High-rise apartment buildings have been toppled and entire neighbourhoods have been laid waste to, in the course of which more than 3793 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have already been killed, according to the GazaIsrael says the goal of the airstrikes is to undermine Hamas fighters’ ability to defend the Gaza Strip when Israeli troops and tanks move in.
Many are equipped with lights and have stockpiles of weapons and living facilities that would allow Hamas fighters to remain hidden below ground for days, if not weeks. In such an environment, even the most sophisticated drones cannot provide much information about what is happening underground. Israeli troops entering the tunnels would be unable to navigate by GPS or communicate by radio.
“Israel has a lot of experience in urban warfare, but the scale in Gaza is much bigger,” a former Israeli company commander who fought in Gaza in 2014 told The Wall Street Journal in a recent Israel could also march in and “eliminate” Hamas and march out again, but most analysts believe this would only result in a re-galvanised resistance in Gaza that could arguably be even worse than Hamas.
Whether Israeli strategists are paying much attention to such concerns, however, is questionable. For the moment there are other much more immediate challenges they must contend with. For now, Israel is taking no chances and on Friday ordered the evacuation of residents from Kiryat Shmona, a city of some 22,000 people close to the Lebanese border after three residents were injured by a rocket strike on a home in what appeared to be the most serious attack on the city since 2006.
“But if the US and the West keep giving a free hand to Netanyahu, we are heading toward disaster ... It’s beyond our capacity to control if Hezbollah decides it has to intervene, what would we do? Send our army to stop them and cause a civil war?” Lebanon and the substantial threat posed by Hezbollah aside, Israeli strategists will also be looking carefully at the increasingly volatile situation in the West Bank which could make for further potential disruption to Israel’s preparations for war in Gaza.
According to the UN’s humanitarian office, the week that followed Hamas’s attack was the deadliest for Palestinians in the West Bank since it began reporting fatalities in 2005, with at least 75 Palestinians killed by the Israeli military or settlers, and incidents of settler violence up from an average of three a day to eight.
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