Member Newsletter
I wanted to give a quick update on American and Israeli wrestling over the pace and duration of the Israeli offensive in Gaza. The U.S. has been pushing the Israelis with increasing vigor to end the campaign in Gaza in early January. It has also been demanding greater consultation and coordination between the U.S. and Israeli militaries. We want to know exactly what your plan is, basically. Publicly the Israeli government has been saying that its campaign will take as long as it takes. As much as it appreciates U.S. support it won’t agree to any arbitrary timetable.
In practice, however, something else appears to be happening on the ground and in the air.
The Israelis are sending senior delegations of top generals and diplomats to the Pentagon and State Department. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Charles Brown Jr. is about to make his fist visit to Israel since the October 7th massacres. The plan seems to be for the Israelis to shift over the next couple weeks from the massive aerial bombardment of the last two months, which has resulted in so much civilian loss of life. That will be followed and replaced by more targeted, low intensity commando raids focused on killing or capturing Hamas militants and destroying the Hamas tunnel network.
The U.S. can say we told them to stop and they stopped. And the shift should dramatically decrease the number of Palestinian civilian casualties. But the war won’t actually stop. It will shift from saturation aerial bombardment to commando raids and urban warfare, which will likely go on for some time. Whether this is the Israelis giving way to U.S. pressure, being convinced of a revised approach, or making a transition they always had in mind isn’t clear to me.
Up until a week or so ago, the number of Israeli soldiers killed in the campaign in Gaza was quite low, fewer than 100 fatalities. Urban combat causes a lot of casualties even for a conventional force that is vastly more powerful than its adversary. Those low numbers suggest that Israel was putting troops into Gaza only after heavy bombing and in relatively low-risk operations. Hamas’ strategy from October 7th onward has been to hunker down and try to wait out the onslaught, hoping for international pressure to grow to a point where the Israelis had to end their attack. That’s given both sides incentives to avoid major armed confrontations on the ground up to this point.
But now the fighting has moved toward the southern portion of the Gaza Strip. Most reports now suggest that the bulk of Hamas’ fighters and its leadership are hunkered down in the tunnels in the south. Israel now appears to be pushing into the tunnels and moving more aggressively to seek out confrontations with Hamas fighters. So the casualty numbers have started to climb.
There have been reports of large numbers of Hamas fighters surrendering to the Israeli military. And the Israeli military has pointed to this as a sign that Hamas morale is starting to break. But I’ve found it hard to make sense of how much that is real versus psy-ops and propaganda.
I’ve mentioned before that one plan for destroying the tunnel system in Gaza is to flood it with seawater. The Israeli military has now started pumping water into parts of the tunnel network. But it will likely be a weeks- or months-long process. There’s also a chance it could damage the water table in the area. And it’s uncertain how well it will work. The Egyptians did this in 2015 but on a vastly smaller scale with tunnels that weren’t nearly as deep or complex.
Hamas’ military power in Gaza is underpinned by the tunnel network as opposed to the popular support for its rule and its resistance ideology. It’s the tunnels that make Hamas close to invulnerable to all but the most overwhelming Israeli firepower. It also creates the storage and mobility for Hamas’ arsenal of rockets. Without the tunnels, Hamas doesn’t disappear. But it’s ability to get into fights with the Israeli military drops precipitously.