Cautionary Advice on Ground/Tunnel Invasion in Gaza

"How  you orchestrate this campaign really matters. And they have to do this in a way that reflects values and the concern for innocent Palestinians who themselves are being held hostage by Hamas."

"There is a difference between being dug in, going to ground and what we are seeing in Gaza, which is an underground architecture that connects different parts of Gaza and allows people to move supplies, people and other things, and enhance critical functions underground." 

Retired Army General Joseph Votel, 2016 U.S.Central Command

"In countering ISIS I felt as if we were staring evil in the eye."

"It was truly evil. And what we've seen from Hamas, it takes that evil to another level."

"And so that's the first thing that we need to remember and consider."
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin

"In our conversations with the Israelis, and as we've made very clear, we're continuing to highlight the importance of mitigating civilian casualties and ensuring that ... things like safety corridors are thought through."

Brig.Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon spokesman

Israel conducting raids and precision airstrikes in parts of Gaza   CNN

 

American Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin along with CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Eric Kurilla, head, U.S. Central Command, along with additional senior American military commanders travelled to the Middle East recently, witness to unfolding conflict, aware of humanitarian corridor efforts and decisions to pause operations as they communicate with their Israeli counterparts.

In doing so they try to assess the current situation but at the same time, share hard-earned experience through advice to Israelis on the challenges before them of urban warfare, the threats of booby traps and roadside bombs and the drive to protect the innocent while rooting out terrorists that hide in schools, mosques and homes. They feel they have much to share, that the situations they faced in Iraq and Syria were uniquely precedent-setting. Setting aside for the moment that in earlier regional conflicts Israel too experienced similar conditions and drew similar conclusions that led their decision-making.

The Americans draw on their experience of intense combat where thousands of civilians were killed in airstrikes and gunfights in Mosul and Raqqa. They consider these experiences practically useful, to be communicated and shared with Israel as the state prepares for a promised ground invasion to extirpate Hamas terrorists completely, to finish a responsibility to themselves and those whose security they must provide for in face of the history of previous such incursions, none of which afforded but a temporary relief from violence.

 

Hamas killed families in their homes in the kibbutz of Kfar Aza  Photo: Oren Rosenfeld

 

This time the violence perpetrated on Israeli villages, towns and kibbutzim on the border between Gaza and Israel surmounted in the sheer scale of its savage horror any atrocities previously committed by the Palestinian terror group committed to Israel's destruction. And this time the scale and the depth of the inhumanity that Hamas operatives themselves recorded in pride of their psychotic malfunction as humans must spell the end of their reign of terror.

The American military's experience in its battle against Islamic State where the liberation of Mosul took eight months to complete, the scale of their reckoning is that up to ten thousand people were killed, among whom 3,200 were held to be civilians struck by airstrikes, artillery fire or mortar rounds, October 2016 to July 2017 when the Islamic State ambitions for its Caliphate finally experienced its death-stroke. The team of military advisers that the U.S. dispatched to Israel included Marine Corps Lt.Gen. James Glynn who helped lead special operations forces against ISIL.

Their mission was to discuss issues that share what was learned on how to mitigate civilian casualties during urban warfare. General Austin himself spoke of heading U.S. Central Command in the first two years of the campaign. Army General Joseph Votel spoke to the similarities and the differences between the ISIL-destroying missions and the preparations for a ground assault by Israel into Gaza. Hamas, he stressed, is better armed, has more sophisticated explosives, along with other Iran-supplied weapons.

The labyrinthine tunnels spread out under Gaza are more far-reaching and developed than any encountered in Raqqa. Israel will be meeting a more sophisticated, superior armed, more battle-armed Hamas than in comparison with the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. All of the advice speaks to the brutality and the need to stop the terrorists even while they embed themselves deeply into urban civilian areas. Exploiting the Palestinian population as protective shields, a classic strategy of Islamist terrorists.

 

Israeli soldiers in Be'eri near the border with Gaza  New York Times