by Lorenzo Cremonesi
All the dangers, strategies (and nightmares) of the army. And the first goal will be to find the entrances to the tunnels
FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
ASHKELON – Kadima, Forward: At some point – tonight, tomorrow, in a week, we don’t know – the order will arrive. And it will be a completely new war. Not the artillery bombs, not the surgical strikes of the drones or the air strikes, but the advance of the infantry, the advance of the patrols armed with rifles and hand grenades, which must find the pockets of resistance, identify the entrance to the tunnels, eliminate snipers, if possible after the Searching for hostages (or their bodies), breaking into Hamas command centers. The nightmare of every army, the terror of the officers, the fear of the soldiers. Because at this point, Hamas will use all the guerrilla techniques that it has carefully studied in recent years, relying heavily on the experience of the Lebanese Hezbollah, to inflict maximum casualties. Its strength lies not only in its control of territory, but also in the system of fortifications and tunnels it has dug since 2006 in the narrow streets between the overpopulated urban areas of the Strip of Despair, in which it has accumulated reserves of ammunition and food Water, but above all it reveals the willingness of his militia members to die.
The terrorists’ arsenal
Let’s face it: the weapons Hamas has are inferior to those of Israel. Two days ago, military spokesmen invited us to visit a base on the edge of the Gaza Strip, where they had collected the materials they had found about the commandos who entered the areas near the Gaza Strip on October 7 and carried out the massacre of civilians. There were homemade mines, explosives to throw into houses, Soviet RPGs from the 1970s, old Kalashnikovs and Israeli machine guns bought on the black market. In short: nothing amazing.
Consequently, the human element remains fundamental, especially in urban warfare. All experts today compare the challenge facing Gaza to the fighting against Isis in Mosul and Raqqa in recent years. We can add those for Sirte in 2016 or the clash between Kurds and Isis in Kobane in 2014. In March 2022, Putin ordered the withdrawal of his tank columns from the Kiev region when he realized that hundreds of thousands of citizens were ready to resist in the Ukrainian capital: they armed themselves, set up barricades and used Molotov cocktails. Military strategy schools teach that to be successful in built-up areas, the ratio of invaders to ambushed must be 7 to 1, and that the cost in dead and injured will always be very high in any case. Today, the number of Hamas fighters is estimated to be between 30,000 and 40,000, and the number of Islamic Jihad fighters is estimated at 15,000. All the young people who know these streets like the back of their hand: they were born and raised there, they were never able to go out because of the Israeli and Egyptian bans.
Jihadists want to become martyrs. For them it is a shame not to die in battle. Fighting against such enemies becomes a nightmare. When wounded, they stick a hand grenade under their uniform and wait for us to get close so they can blow themselves up, the soldiers on these battlefields always told us. The same applies to Gaza.
The territory, the landscape
However, it should be added that the Israelis here have extensive knowledge of the territory, they controlled it with ground troops until 2005 and then were forced into continuous surveillance by the presence of almost 15,000 Jewish settlers. The most disturbing news is the tunnels. Some even appear to be kilometers long and most have been excavated in recent years. According to the Israeli residents of Kfar Aza, one of the kibbutzim massacred, two tunnels over three kilometers long even ended in their gardens. The Israelis will spray them with gas, but the Palestinians have masks with filters.
If the Hamas commanders then decide that it is better to stop fighting in order not to kill everyone, their men have prepared escape routes: they are civilians, they can mix with their families and hide in refugee camps. Mao’s famous saying that guerrillas are as elusive as fish to water is truer than ever in Gaza.
October 22, 2023 (modified October 22, 2023 | 07:10)
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