The Israel-Hamas war took a totally expected turn over the weekend as Israel Air Force (IAF) jets, helicopters, and drones pounded terrorist outposts hidden in the darnedest places.
I’ll also give you a preview of what might be coming next in this war, but first, today’s big story.
While the heaviest fighting continues in Gaza, on Sunday IAF warplanes struck a headquarters compound hidden beneath a mosque in the West Bank city of Jenin. At least two are known to have been killed in the airstrike. Israeli officials said those killed belonged to Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and were involved in planning an “imminent terror attack” from the compound.
The strike was also notable because while Jerusalem rarely uses air power in the West Bank, this was the second time IAF planes have hit the Palestinian-controlled region in recent days.
Hiding military or terrorist assets under a mosque is the act of a coward. Maybe not as cowardly as sending terrorists — which the BBC’s moral freakshow helpfully described as mere “gunmen” — to murder partygoers and toddlers, but it’s along the same general lines.
I’m certain we’ll see many more examples of such cowardice as the ground phase of the war begins in earnest over the next few days or weeks.
“In Gaza,” historian and strategist Edward Luttwak warned on Friday, “there are no visible military facilities, while Hamas fighters can shed their fashionable black outfits and dress like civilians.” Nevertheless, Israel does know where to find Hamas soldiers, hidden in their “fixed, immovable targets.”
“These are the deep tunnels,” Luttwak wrote, that are “too deep for aerial bombing. Hamas has been lining them in “concrete for more than 10 years, using construction equipment and vast quantities of cement donated by different governments and international organisations” to build apartments for refugees. Hamas diverted many of those resources to protect, house, and arm their own terrorists.
Inside those tunnels are the assembly lines for Hamas’s rockets, command posts, weapons and ammunition depots, and “even deeper tunnels [that] house its leaders’ lodgings and headquarters.”
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Hamas did a lot of digging, certain that Israel lacked the guts to send in the tanks and infantry necessary to root it out. But now, according to Luttwak, tanks and heavily armored infantry fighting vehicles will “escort combat engineers to their job sites” in Gaza where they will descend into the Hamas tunnel network, plant demolition charges, and end the terror campaign once and for all. “While Israel’s aerostats with cameras, satellite photography, and the pictures generated by radar returns cannot reveal tunnels, they have been used to monitor where cement-mixer trucks have stopped over the years. They cannot pinpoint tunnel entrances by doing so, but they can at least identify places worth exploring.”
They’ll do so while taking fire from hidden snipers, mortars, and rocket attacks.
Retired Australian general Mick Ryan, now a military analyst, wrote last week of a difficult, long, and intense campaign. “The pending Gaza operation will tax the Israeli Defence Force, and pose profound physical, moral and intellectual challenges” and that the fight will be “very bloody, uncertain and full of tactical and strategic surprises.”
In addition to all these complications is a limitation that applies only to Israel and other decent countries: the ticking clock. Israel has a brief window of opportunity to destroy Hamas before global opinion turns against it again. That window is already closing, an action that began the moment the media regurgitated Hamas’s lies that the IAF had bombed a hospital last week, killing 500.
Rushing an urban campaign will result in more dead Israeli army soldiers. But when most of a world of eight billion is arrayed against a tiny nation of nine million, Jerusalem might be forced to act in deadly haste.
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