What Israel Will Face in Gaza

Israel is on the verge of launching a major invasion. Over the last three days, the government has called up over 300,000 military reservists. It is massing forces near the Gaza Strip, and it has started bombarding the territory. In the early morning of October 13, it asked the United Nations to evacuate 1.1 million people from the north of Gaza, and later that day, it dropped leaflets in the territory telling people to move south. The question is no longer whether Israel will send its military into Gaza but rather how deep Israeli forces will go into the enclave and how long they will stay there.

On one level, an Israeli attack on Gaza is not entirely unprecedented. Israel and Hamas have clashed repeatedly in the strip since the militant group seized power there in 2007. But these battles were fairly limited. Israel hit Hamas hard with airstrikes on personnel and key infrastructure in Gaza, but it only ventured sporadic raids on the ground. The reason for this restraint was straightforward: Israeli ground offensives in Gaza are exceedingly bloody and difficult. During the last major one in 2014, approximately 66 Israeli soldiers, six Israeli civilians, and well over 2,000 Palestinians died, even though the military penetrated only a few miles deep into the enclave. Most of the Palestinian deaths were civilians; a quarter were children. To the Israelis, then, it has never seemed worth trying to retake the territory, especially because the Israeli government believed it could control and deter Hamas without ordering major assaults.

Today, however, the calculus is vastly different. The 2014 operation, which seemed massive at the time, was responding to Hamas rocket attacks. Those strikes posed a threat to Israel, but they were largely intercepted by the country’s Iron Dome missile system and resulted in minimal damage. Hamas’s recent attack on Israel, by contrast, was much more deadly. The toll—more than 1,300 Israelis killed in one day—may represent the single worst loss of life in the country’s history. The brutal, indiscriminate nature of the killings (whose victims included many children and elderly people) shocked Israel and the wider world. Israelis are out for blood, and no credible Israeli leader will be able to call for a return to the status quo ante or just marginal gains against Hamas. A return to the status quo ante would leave Hamas fully in charge of Gaza, again able to build up its strength.

As a result, Israel’s immediate military objective will now be to destroy Hamas or at least cripple it severely. Israel will look to kill, capture, or drive underground Hamas’s political and military leadership, and it will try to demolish Hamas’s infrastructure and caches of weapons. These aims, in turn, will likely require at least a temporary occupation of all or part of Gaza. Hamas is simply too entrenched, in too many places, to be rooted out with bombs and raids alone.

But seizing Gaza will prove very costly to Israel. Israeli forces will need to engage in house-to-house urban combat against an enemy that is well prepared and committed to making invaders pay for each inch. Progress will be slow, and the fighting will be brutal. Israel will need to use overwhelming firepower to make serious gains and achieve its objectives. In the process, it may kill enormous numbers of civilians.

And the battle will not end when Israel has reoccupied the territory. There is no Palestinian entity that Israel trusts to govern Gaza in Hamas’s stead. As a result, a military victory could mean Israel has to administer the territory for the foreseeable future. Israeli officials, in other words, will have to govern an immiserated people who see them as their enemy and who may wage a guerrilla war. The prospect of such resistance makes a new occupation of Gaza rather unpalatable for Israeli planners. The best scenario for Israel might be to hit Hamas hard and significantly strengthen Israel’s border with Gaza but not stay too long.

DOOR TO DOOR

To take Gaza, Israel will have to fight in deeply inhospitable terrain. The enclave has over 20,000 people per square mile, one of the highest population densities in the world, and these residents are no friends of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Much of the strip is built up, with narrow alleys, warrens, and concrete buildings of various heights—a landscape that Hamas and other Gazan groups know intimately. They will use this geography and knowledge to entrap and slow down Israeli forces.

Relative to most militaries, the IDF is extremely competent in urban combat, thanks to years of operations in the West Bank. But urban warfare is difficult even for the very best militaries. Defenders almost always have the tactical advantage in cities, at least initially, and IDF soldiers will face threats from snipers, improvised explosive devices, suicide bombers, antitank missiles, rocket-propelled grenades, and drones. Operating openly in Gaza’s streets will expose soldiers to direct and indirect fire, so they will instead move house to house wherever possible by creating “mouse holes”—a cumbersome process in which soldiers blow holes in walls to advance.

Israel’s urban struggles will be compounded by Hamas’s proficiency in tunnel warfare. The group has successfully used tunnels to smuggle goods and fighters into, out of, and around Gaza for years. The IDF has destroyed some of Hamas’s tunnel infrastructure, but never all of it, and it has typically focused on destroying tunnels near its border. This time, Israel will have to worry more about vast networks of tunnels within Gaza itself. If past is prelude, Hamas fighters will use these tunnels to hide leaders and to emerge suddenly behind IDF forces, possibly allowing Hamas to ambush, kidnap, and kill Israeli troops.

When conducting operations in difficult terrain, Israeli forces typically rely on tactical surprise to gain an advantage, attacking from unexpected directions, trying to deceive adversaries, and otherwise seeking to catch its foes unaware. Hamas, however, has the initiative in this war: it surprised Israel with its attack, and it is surely expecting a devastating response. Its forces are mobilized and almost certainly well prepared. Hamas will also be supplemented by fighters from other groups, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and civilians who join the fight.

Israel’s usual tactics will be further complicated by the large numbers of hostages Hamas has taken. Israel is highly sensitive to the capture of its soldiers and civilians. In 2011, for example, it swapped over 1,000 prisoners in exchange for one Israeli soldier captured by Hamas. The country also freed a Palestinian terrorist and four others in exchange for Hezbollah releasing the bodies of two Israeli soldiers. But these exchanges are impossible templates for today. Hamas captured approximately 150 hostages in its last operation, including U.S. and Thai citizens. It will be extremely difficult for Israeli officials to save them.

Destroying or crippling Hamas will require the temporary occupation of much of Gaza.

Tactically, Israel will worry that its forces could accidentally kill hostages when they shoot at or bomb suspected Hamas targets (something that Hamas claims has already happened). Strategically, however, the country is worried that Hamas will kill these hostages no matter what. The group has warned that it will execute hostages in response to Israeli military operations. No one thinks Hamas is kidding, and the more successful Israel is in its offensive, the more likely Hamas is to carry out executions.

The hostages are far from the only innocent people at risk of dying in Israel’s offensive. The war will likely kill thousands of Palestinian civilians. Although Israeli military planners will try to limit these deaths, Hamas has a history of turning humans into shields. It also likes to place its strategic locations, such as command-and-control buildings, weapons depots, and fighting positions, near or within civilian residential areas. It has smuggled fighters and weapons in ambulances and has used mosques and schools as locations for military operations. It will likely engage in these practices again.

Even if Hamas were not using civilians as protection, it would be difficult for the IDF to limit civilian deaths. Gaza’s dense urban environment makes it extremely hard to exclusively hit militants. The environment also makes it difficult to distinguish terrorists and their support network from civilians. IDF soldiers, taking fire from Hamas, will be under extraordinary stress and will have to make quick decisions with imperfect information about where to attack. Israel has great human, signals, and other intelligence capabilities, along with an ability to quickly move intelligence collected from sensors and spies to operators, and it will use these tools for targeting. But Israel’s failure to anticipate the October 7 attack suggests that its intelligence capabilities in the Gaza Strip may not be as strong as they seemed, raising the odds of deadly errors.

In past operations, Israel has helped deliver humanitarian assistance to Palestinian citizens, even as it conducted military offensives. During fighting in 2008 and 2009, for example, the IDF set up a “humanitarian operation room” to manage the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza and to respond to Palestinian needs. It may again try to bring in assistance as it moves forward.

But given the scale and scope of the forthcoming operation, such deliveries will be much more difficult. Israel is no longer simply trying to degrade Hamas’s capabilities. It is seeking to restore deterrence, and given the losses Israel has taken, this process will require inflicting a very high price. Such a price will inevitably result in widespread destruction, including of civilian infrastructure. Strikes and ground combat will likely damage health-care, food-distribution, and other basic systems in the long term. Gaza is in a crisis that will only become far worse.

STEP BY STEP

So how will Israel attempt to take Gaza? It will begin, as it already has, by blanketing the strip with intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets, including drones and surveillance aircraft with advanced sensor capabilities. These assets, Israel hopes, can provide the IDF with an inside look at the houses and floors soldiers will need to cross as they advance. The IDF will supplement this information with intelligence from human assets, satellites, and other sources, giving the military overall guidance as it goes in on the ground and helping it identify Hamas positions and avoid ambushes.

Israeli forces are already striking Hamas with artillery and fixed-wing aircraft, such as F-15s and F-16s. The IDF will make similar attacks with military drones, such as the Hermes 450 and Heron 900. Israel has sent some special operations forces deeper into Gaza, where they are likely conducting raids to kill Hamas leaders and rescue prisoners. Israeli special operations are highly skilled, but Hamas has likely prepared for such attacks, so these raids are risky.

Eventually, after Hamas’s military assets are weakened, Israeli forces will slowly move into Gaza using infantry transported by armored personnel carriers and supported by Merkava main battle tanks and bulldozers. IDF forces will travel carefully to avoid casualties on their own side. They will try not to fire indiscriminately, but their primary purpose will be to weaken Hamas, an objective that will require substantial firepower. And ultimately, the IDF’s goal will be to minimize its own casualties, and its forces will not hesitate to shoot first when they perceive a threat.

Reoccupying Gaza will allow Israel to root out and arrest or kill the Hamas leadership.

Making this attack all the more difficult to predict is the uncertainty regarding Hamas’s capabilities. Past assessments of Hamas suggested that the group had only limited strength and skill. But the well-planned attack on Israel, which involved secrecy, operational deception, and tactical innovation, suggests that the organization is far more talented than it is often thought to be. And even as Israeli forces face off with Hamas in Gaza, they may be in for additional surprises outside the territory. Hamas, for example, tried to foment civil strife inside Israel and the West Bank during a flare-up of fighting in 2021. It could do so again, particularly in towns home to many Arab Israelis and in mixed Jewish-Arab cities.

Fortunately for Israel, Hamas is trapped. Gaza is surrounded by Egypt, Israel, and the Mediterranean Sea; there is nowhere for Hamas fighters to go. Some of them might hide, but many of its fighters and members of its political network will be killed or captured. If Israel reoccupies all of Gaza, it can slowly find, isolate, and arrest or kill the Hamas leadership, although weeding them out from the civilian population will be a difficult task even with control of the territory.

But even then, Israel will have to contend with the challenge of who will establish law and order in Gaza. Israel cannot hand control back to Hamas or other terrorist groups, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but there are no easy alternatives. The Palestinian Authority, evicted from Gaza in 2007, has little legitimacy there, and it has demonstrated little competence as a governing agency in the West Bank. Israel’s only solution may be to occupy Gaza for the foreseeable future by setting up checkpoints to monitor population movement, conducting occasional raids, and building a more robust and heavily mined border between Gaza and Israel.

Yet a protracted Israeli military occupation of Gaza is not ideal for Israel or for people in Gaza. As difficult as the military campaign will be for Israel, finding even a temporary political and governance solution for Gaza will be the most challenging part of the conflict. As a result, Israel may find its best option is to hit Hamas hard but eventually withdraw to avoid an indefinite and grinding occupation.