The Israeli army is in a “moment” with Hamas militants just outside Gaza City, a violent confrontation that points to a period of high-risk urban fighting for both camps, according to the Israeli army and experts.
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According to Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari, “face-to-face fighting” has actually begun in the northern part of the surrounded Gaza City.
“We’re talking about fights where we see each other from one building to another,” he told the press.
According to the first Israeli images, in the north of Gaza City there are only piles of concrete on the ground, most of the tall buildings have collapsed and the earth has been turned over by the passing armored bulldozers that have leveled everything.
A first line of armored vehicles was formed, behind which the Israeli positions were protected and from which infantry attacks systematically began at shallow depths, and this is a novelty, supported by artillery and air force as well as intelligence services.
This combined arms battle appears to be at the heart of the tactics Israel has chosen for this offensive, its fifth against Hamas since 2005.
Each ground unit took an air force officer with it to “speak the same language” with the air commandos and maximize the effectiveness of operational support, AFP learned from an Israeli Air Force army officer.
“Beige harmonizes perfectly with green,” he says, referring to the colors of the air force and army uniforms.
“The most extreme”
On the scene, Roy Sharon, an Israeli public television journalist authorized to accompany the troops, described a “360-degree sense of threat” and also noted a “very slow and very aggressive advance with a lot of control over the environment.” in contrast to the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006.
“This is the most extreme combat situation, the threat can come from any window, door, tunnel and anywhere,” confirms AFP Avi Issacharoff, Israeli journalist and security analyst and former soldier in the elite Issacharoff unit in Douvdevan.
All soldiers of the special and infantry units train regularly in Tseelim, a base in the Negev where several neighborhoods of Gaza, from houses to minarets, have been recreated under the name “Baladia”.
In terms of infantry, on the Israeli side, the soldiers of the Givati unit are at the forefront and the command of the divisions formed for the battle comes from this brigade, which “knows Gaza like no other,” confirms the military correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aharonot.
The Israeli army’s rules of engagement regarding civilians, who still number between 300,000 and 400,000 in this northern part of the Gaza Strip, according to the United Nations, have not been made public.
And the hard work of urban combat, including direct combat with automatic weapons, has not yet begun, as all analysts are already warning about the lethality of the terrain in the overpopulated Gaza Strip with its extremely dense buildings.
“In detail”
Israel has experience with a last ground attack in 2014, which lasted two weeks and was limited to fighting on the outskirts of Gaza City.
“Hamas has had 15 years to prepare a defense in depth that includes underground fortifications… communications tunnels, combat sites and positions, as well as potential minefields, improvised explosive devices, anti-tank explosive devices and booby-trapped buildings,” said military strategy specialist Michael Knights of the Washington Institute.
On the Hamas side, two approaches stand out: First, the repeated use of a new type of anti-tank missile, the “Yassine 105,” and the appearance of home-made attack drones, as in Ukraine, according to videos released by Hamas’ military wing of the movement.
In one of these videos we can see how a Palestinian fighter in jeans and a T-shirt comes out of a hole in the ground, sneaks into the bushes, pulls up the rocket launcher on his shoulder and fires a Yassine 105 at a few dozen meters Merkava tank of the Israeli army.
“We can be fairly confident about the Israelis’ urban combat capabilities,” noted John Spencer, a retired American major and leading author on urban combat, in an interview with AFP.
“We see these Hamas guerrilla techniques here and there, but I would be more worried about the tunnel network,” explains John Spencer, who speaks of 1,300 galleries over 500 km.
The war, sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israeli soil on October 7, has claimed at least 1,400 lives, according to authorities in Israel, most of them civilians killed on the day of the attack. According to the Hamas Ministry of Health, more than 10,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have since been killed in Israeli retaliatory attacks in the Gaza Strip.
At least 30 Israeli soldiers have died since ground operations began on October 27. Hamas does not publish reports about its fighters.