Hamas To Spring Street Warfare Trap?

Is Hamas About To Spring The Street Warfare Trap?

By Riad Kahwaji and Theodore Karasik
Last Updated: January 07. 2009 9:30AM UAE / January 7. 2009 5:30AM GMT
Courtesy Of The National

The lesson of urban warfare is that block-by-block combat weakens the stronger, more robust force and favours a more nimble opponent. Now that the ground offensive by the Israelis is dissecting Gaza, a critical question must be asked: to what degree has Israel handed Hamas the ability to fight them on a level field?

Israel’s use of airpower at the beginning of its operation sought to behead Hamas. The Israeli air force dropped 100 tonnes of bombs on Gaza while the navy shelled targets in the city and imposed a blockade. The decapitation was on and hundreds were killed.

In the next phase of the air campaign, Hamas’s wider leadership became the main objective: more than 20 individual targets. Civilian facilities such as mosques always get caught up in warfare because all sides try to use them as safety zones: but there are no safety zones in the battlefield.

Overall, the early days of the Israeli operation exposed major errors by Hamas, who seem to be imitating Hizbollah’s military and defensive tactics. But the Israelis learnt important lessons from the 2006 war in southern Lebanon that they are using against Hamas, and there are five important differences between the two conflicts that the Hamas leadership does not seem to have grasped or appreciated.

1. Gaza, only 360 square kilometres in size, lacks the strategic depth that Hizbollah had in Lebanon. So Hamas guerrillas have much smaller and narrower areas of operations than Hizbollah guerrillas had in Lebanon, which gives Israel an advantage.

2. Hizbollah fighters are not members of government, civilian and military institutions such as the police and ministries, so Israeli jets had a limited list of targets. In Gaza they have a large number of easy targets that were hit in the first minutes of the attack, killing at least 200 Hamas members in public buildings.

3. Israel besieged Lebanon from air and sea but could never seal off land routes in and out of the country, so Hizbollah had a good supply of arms and supplies. Gaza was completely sealed off from all sides with the exception of a few tunnels that were mostly destroyed in the first two days of the attack. Now Israeli tanks have cut off Gaza City and the northern part of the Strip from its southern part and completely sealed off all entry points, so Hamas has no access to military supplies.

4. Hamas is much less able than Hizbollah to threaten the Israeli rear. While Hizbollah missile strikes hit dozens of Israeli settlements, towns and cities all over northern and central Israel and can now reach southern Israel, Hamas’s missiles can reach only up to 45km and are mostly ineffective. Missiles fired from Gaza in 2008 killed ten Israelis, while Hizbollah missile attacks on Israel in the 33-day war killed more than 100 and inflicted serious damage to property. So Hamas missile strikes will not be enough to force Israel into new ceasefire talks. Moreover, Hamas’s anti-armour capabilities seem to be ineffective against Israeli tanks and armoured personnel carriers.

5. Hizbollah had much better information, intelligence and counter-intelligence than Hamas. This has been made clear by Israel’s ability to hit many sensitive targets and to dominate the battlespace from the air. Hamas has failed to spring any surprises on the battlefield in the way that Hizbollah did in 2006, confusing the Israeli military command.

However: now that the campaign has moved to the ground, the playing field may be more even. Hamas is beginning to kill Israeli soldiers and trying to kidnap others, which will have a profound effect on the Israeli psyche. They are used to short wars, not conflicts such as the 33-day one with Hizbollah. It remains to be seen how resilient the Israeli home front would be to casualties among IDF troops and Israeli civilians: so long as there is no strong internal pressure, the Israeli government can continue the military operation to try to crush Hamas, which would improve their chances at the general elections on February 10.

From the Hamas point of view, a week of aerial bombing killed more than 550 Palestinians and wounded many more, and the images are to some extent effective in the information campaign. But it is the second phase of the military operation, the ground incursion including troops from the elite Golani and Givati infantry brigades, that may prove more decisive in achieving Israel’s stated war aims: to stop the rocket attacks and to halt the smuggling of weapons into the Strip via hidden tunnels.

With Hamas’s continued ability to fire rockets from the heart of the densely populated camps and towns of the Gaza Strip, the Israeli troops will find themselves compelled to penetrate deeper and deeper into a concrete jungle full of booby traps and ambushes, leading to higher casualty tolls on both sides, especially civilians.

Currently the IDF is conducting a conventional military strategy in Gaza with the hope of short-term gains against Hamas. But this may eventually set the Israelis up for the continued long-term struggle that has been the hallmark of their relationship with the Palestinians. Hamas knows this, and will push hard to draw the Israelis into an urban impasse.

Riad Kahwaji and Theodore Karasik are senior analysts at the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis (INEGMA) in Dubai.

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