The Gaza tunnel dilemma.

  

“As Israeli troops push deeper into Gaza in retaliation for the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, the ground attack won’t look quite like the door-to-door skirmishes seen in Fallujah, Mosul and other past urban clashes,” predicted Rick Jervis in a piece he wrote for USA Today.

“Instead, it will happen largely out of sight and underground, deep in a warren of connecting tunnels that Hamas has been digging and lining with concrete for more than a decade. The battle to control and destroy this subterranean labyrinth, estimated at more than 480 kilometres, will be a key strategy for the IDF, according to military analysts and experts – and will make the incursion into Gaza unlike any past urban conflict.

For these ‘de-tunnelling’ operations, specialised units code-named Samur – Hebrew for ‘weasel’ – expect to squeeze through the narrow passages and find rocket assembly lines, stores of small arms and mortars and, deeper still, Hamas’ leaders’ lodging and headquarters – much of it probably booby-trapped with homemade bombs. They may also be searching for some of the more than 230 hostages taken from Israel who may be hidden in those same tunnels.”

“It’s going to be an undertaking like nothing the IDF has ever done,” said retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Mark Schwartz, who ran U.S. security coordination with both Israel and the Palestinian Authority from 2019 to 2021. “And frankly unlike anything we’ve ever done.” 

“The response by Israeli ground troops, now underway by degrees, will bring the next phase of the fight – including the fight for the tunnels.

The fight in Gaza may bear some similarities to operations in Fallujah, or in Mosul, where U.S.-backed Iraqi forces flushed Islamic state fighters out of a tunnel network in 2014. 

But in Gaza, Israeli forces face more formidable infrastructure and more challenging geography.  

Hamas’ tunnel system is more advanced, and its fighters are better trained, more disciplined and better equipped than the Islamic state fighters, “said Eitan Shamir, director of the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv. 

“In Gaza – hemmed in by Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, which gives civilians nowhere to flee – a ground war is uniquely challenging,” said Seth Jones, a military analyst at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies. 

"The intricate nature of the tunnel complex in a densely packed urban environment that is entirely fenced in, makes this a fundamentally different – and in many ways a more difficult environment than what U.S. forces had to face in cities like Fallujah or Mosul," he said. “The possibility of civilian casualties is much greater in Gaza.”

 “Since the 2014 Israeli-Hamas conflict, Israel has been gathering intelligence and training troops on how to find and destroy the subterranean labyrinth, “said Eitan Shamir. “At the centre of the effort is a clandestine laboratory – known simply as ‘the lab’ – where scientists from various disciplines meet to try to discover tunnel locations and devise technologies that could penetrate them.” 

Remote-controlled robots have been developed to enter and search the tunnels. Israeli engineers have developed technology that uses acoustic or seismic sensors and software to detect digging, similar to the science used by oil and gas companies to detect oil reserves, according to the Congressional Research Service.

“Because some tunnels are so deep and are concrete-lined, they can survive heavy bombing. Hamas terrorists are thought to have enough provisions to live several months underground.

As the IDF rumbles into the dense urban quarters of Gaza City, Hamas fighters will use the tunnels to launch surprise attacks on Israeli troops, then melt away underground again and pop up in another location. They’ll also use snipers, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) – and bomb-dropping drones.”

Shamir said he believed Israel’s initial incursion into Gaza is more of a tactic to try to pressure Hamas into a negotiated release of the prisoners. As the IDF moves into denser urban areas and begins destroying tunnels, it becomes exponentially harder to rescue them,” Shamir said. 

The task of neutralising the tunnel advantage will fall to’ Yahalom,’ the special forces unit of the Combat Engineering Corps, who have been training for tunnel combat. A subunit of the Yahalom will enter the tunnels and try to disarm or destroy the intersecting passages and look for hostages.

In an essay he wrote recently, Edward Luttwak, an Israeli strategist and historian said, “Though Israeli forces may not know the precise entrance of every tunnel, they’ve been monitoring for years where cement-mixing trucks in Gaza have been deployed to give them an idea,”. 

Israeli tunnel specialists will be ferried by 70-ton Namer infantry combat vehicles, considered some of the most heavily armoured vehicles in the world, he wrote. As they reach suspected tunnel sites, several Namers will form a perimeter – “an improvised fortress” – protecting the combat engineers.

“In 2014, the last time Israeli troops fought in Gaza, most were riding thinly armoured M113s, which were easily penetrated by RPG anti-tank rockets, with some 60 soldiers killed and hundreds wounded,” Luttwak wrote. “Not this time.”

Margin note: The veteran U.S manufactured M113 armoured personnel carrier (APC) was intended to serve as battlefield ‘taxi’ shuttling troops into battle, before returning to take on more infantrymen. More advanced APCs have been fitted with better protective plating and carry a variety of heavy and light machine-guns. They are still nevertheless, battlefield ‘taxis’ , but with a dual role. The Military Today website describing the Israeli APC, said -The latest design of the Namer is based on the Merkava Mk.4 main battle tank chassis. Currently it is one of the most protected APCs in the world. It provides infantry with the level of protection and mobility matching those of the latest main battle tanks. The ‘Namer’ heavy APC is fitted with modular armour and was planned to be equipped with the ‘Trophy’ active protection system; regrettably budgetary restrictions have postponed the planned addition.  Earlier this week eight IDF infantrymen were killed when a Hamas terrorist fired an anti-tank missile at a ‘Namer ‘APC.

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Mark Schwartz, who coordinated training with Israeli and Palestinian Authority security forces, witnessed some of the tunnel training in Israel. The Israeli military re-created what they believe the Gazan tunnels look like and sent soldiers through the maze to test weaponry and tactics, as well as unmanned vehicles and robotics.

“They know what they’re going to experience,” Schwartz said. “But the magnitude of what they’re going to deal with compared with what they’ve done in the past is very different.”

Anna Mulrine Grobe, staff writer at the Christian Science Monitor wrote, “Among military professionals, urban combat is widely considered to be the most gruelling, intricate, and deadly of operations.

As Israel launches a new phase of its war effort with ground-troop incursions into Gaza, its stated goal of destroying Hamas runs up against near-impossible conditions: battling enemies and rescuing hostages while navigating walled-in dead ends, concrete high-rises, and a network of deep and booby-trapped tunnels that its adversary has been preparing for years.

Add Gaza’s civilians to the mix, half of whom are children, and it can seem like a series of no-win trade-offs, even for commanders of well-trained and exquisitely equipped troops. If military leaders prioritise military objectives, then they accept harm to innocent people. If they prioritise civilians, then they accept more casualties among their own forces – and certainty that Hamas will use humanitarian ethical constraints to its advantage.

Cities and their residents don’t fare well in urban warfare. As Israel launches its incursion into Gaza, the question is whether experience, new equipment, and American input will make a difference.

In short, cities and the people in them don’t fare well during urban warfare, and Gaza has been no exception.

 Here’s another opinion, it too reads like Murphy’s law – ‘If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.’

“The potential fighting facing Israeli soldiers also will be claustrophobic and terrifying. Many of the Israeli military’s technological advantages will collapse, giving Hamas the edge,” warned Daphné Richemond-Barak, a professor at Israel’s Reichman University who wrote a book on underground warfare.

“When you enter a tunnel, it’s very narrow, and it’s dark and it’s moist, and you very quickly lose a sense of space and time,” Richemond-Barak told Associated Press. “You have this fear of the unknown, who’s coming around the corner? … Is this going to be an ambush? Nobody can come and rescue you. You can barely communicate with the outside world, with your unit.”

The battlefield could force the IDF into firefights in which hostages may be accidentally killed. Explosive traps also could detonate, burying alive both soldiers and the hostages,” Richemond-Barak said.

Even with those risks, she said the tunnels must be destroyed for Israel to achieve its military objectives.

“There’s a job that needs to get done and it will be done now, ″ she said.

 A report in Haaretz last week said the families of people held hostage in Gaza have appealed to Prime Minister Netanyahu telling him that they support a deal releasing Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons in exchange for hostages held captive by the Gaza terrorist groups. In effect, an all-for-all deal.

Former IDF Chief of Staff and former Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz clarified in a special interview with Channel 12 News that he supports the release of all terrorists from Israeli prisons in exchange for the release of the hostages being held by Hamas.

"Let them take all 6,000 prisoners - and return all our hostages," Mofaz said, adding, "I would return all of them to the Gaza Strip but, first of all release our hostages and captives.”

Seemingly following suit, Hamas is ‘ready to conduct’ an immediate release of all Israeli hostages in the Gaza Strip in exchange for all Palestinian security prisoners in Israeli prisons, the terror group said in a statement attributed to Yahya Sinwar on Saturday.

The IDF spokesperson, who was giving a daily briefing at the time of the statement, responded by suggesting that the timing of the statement was "psychological warfare."

"We will continue to exhaust all options to bring them home." He added.

IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Richard Hecht recently called  Yahya Sinwar a ‘dead man walking’ after accusing him of playing a pivotal role in organising the October 7 attacks. 

"I do believe that Deif committed the plan but the real mind, the brain of this attack was mainly Yahya Sinwar," Michael Milshtein, a former intelligence officer in the Israel Defence Forces, told The Wall Street Journal.

"He really understands how Israelis will behave, and how they think, and how they will respond," he added.

The Times of Israel reported that security sources outside Gaza believe Mohammed Deif and Yahya Sinwar were hiding in one of a network of tunnels in the Gaza enclave.

At this juncture it’s appropriate to recycle something I wrote last year about Yahya Sinwar. Maybe you remember it.

“Yahya Ibrahim Hassan Sinwar was born in 1962 in a refugee camp in Khan Yunis and attended the Khan Yunis Secondary School for Boys. After high school, he attended the Islamic University of Gaza, where he graduated with a BA in Arabic studies.  

While attending university in 1982, Sinwar was arrested for the first time. In prison he became friendly with Palestinian activists, and decided to dedicate himself to the Palestinian cause.  

In 1985, Sinwar founded Hamas’s security branch, whose job included punishing ‘morality’ offenders and killing Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel. His enthusiasm for executing collaborators led Israeli interrogators to refer to him as ‘the Butcher from Khan Younis.’

In 1988, Sinwar was arrested again and sentenced to four life terms in an Israeli prison for attempted murder and causing grievous bodily harm through sabotage. During his confinement, Sinwar complained of severe headaches and following medical examination he was diagnosed to be suffering from a brain tumour. The tumour was removed successfully by a team of Israeli surgeons, thus saving his life.

Sinwar was released in 2011, one of 1,000 Palestinian prisoners exchanged for a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was captured in 2006 and held hostage in Gaza for five years by Hamas. Sinwar was the most senior prisoner released in the prisoner exchange.”

 

Paging down through what I have written, I’m tempted to hazard a guess and say that the IDF, military intelligence, Mossad etc., have an operative plan for the Gaza incursion. Admittedly, they all fouled up on October 7, but this time I don’t think they are ‘playing it by ear.’

 

“Stay tuned,” and hope for the best.

 

Beni,

 

2^nd of November, 2023