A full-scale Israeli ground invasion of Gaza was imminent Friday after the Israel Defense Force confirmed for the first time its troops and tanks had started carrying out raids inside the Palestinian enclave.
Israel has amassed a significant arsenal at the edge of Gaza as its war with terror group Hamas escalates including 35 battalions containing 300,000 troops who will be led into battle by 100 D9R fortified Bulldozers, 300 tanks and scores of Armored Personnel Carriers [APCs].
The IDF said on Friday troops have already carried out “localized raids” in Gaza to hunt terrorists and to attempt to find some of the approximately 150 Israeli hostages captured by Hamas during last week’s ruthless attacks, which sparked the war and left over 1,300 Israelis dead.
Since then Israel has launched nightly bombing raids on Gaza with some 6,000 airstrikes on strategic targets, reducing many to rubble. The territory’s health ministry said 1,900 people have been killed in the air raids.
On Thursday the IDF dropped flyers in northern Gaza waning its estimated 1.1m residents to head south of the Wadi Gaza bridge within 24 hours, including evacuating 11 hospitals, three UN compounds, and two refugee camps, which most took as a sign a ground invasion would follow. Hamas told its citizens to ignore the warning and stay where they are.
Multiple military authorities warned fighting in such a densely populated urban setting is an extremely difficult and painstaking proposition.
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“There are going to be dismounted IDF soldiers, not just in the streets, but trying to go house to house … blowing holes through walls,” Seth G. Jones, the director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told CBS News.
“They will have to move through armored personnel carriers to protect them. They’re going to have main battle tanks and bulldozers to go with them as well. They’ll be supported by F15 and F16 fixed wing Israeli Aircraft, probably helicopters, and then Israeli drones.”
Although the Israeli military will have air support, including AH64 Apache attack helicopters, they are unlikely to be able to help against Hamas’ labyrinth 300-mile system of underground tunnels, constructed at a cost estimated at $90m, which only the terrorists are believed to know the full intricacies of.
“Some of them are likely to be booby-trapped,” Colin P. Clarke, a conflict and terrorism specialist at the Soufan Group, told iNews this week of the tunnels.
“Preparing to fight in such terrain is incredibly difficult and would require extensive intelligence on what the network of tunnels looks like — which the Israelis may not have.”
The clock is also ticking and pressure mounting to rescue the hostages seized on Oct. 7 who are currently being held somewhere in Gaza, most likely in the tunnel system.
Estimates of Hamas’ troop numbers range from 15,000 to 30,000. They also have a series of weapons to deploy such as mines, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank weapons, civilian vehicles modified to carry heavy machine guns or explosives and snipers.
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Military experts have also pointed out that fighting amidst the wreckage of airstrikes is troublesome as bombs create wide open spaces surrounded by rubble — which offer plenty of hiding places for the enemy.
Israel’s first line of defense against that will be to send in the D9R Bulldozers, which are heavily fortified against gunfire and can clear mines and esaily destroy infrastructure such as walls. They are likely to be followed by the army’s Merkava IV tanks and Namer APCs.
The Israeli military has invested tremendous resources in launching its ground invasion — even constructing a training base in its southern desert, dubbed “mini Gaza”, that was meant to replicate the region’s urban landscape.
The hardest threat of all will be distinguishing who is a terrorist and who is a civilian as the battle unfolds.
“I think the initial challenge the Israelis face is an intelligence one: Who is a friend and who is an enemy?”Jones said, adding the terrorists would likely use “civilians as shields.”
“It’s going to be virtually impossible to distinguish between civilians and Hamas,” he added.
That also raises the question of how a humanitarian corridor to let civilians out of Gaza could be implemented.
The United Nations issued a statement saying Israel’s 24 hour evacuation order cannot be achieved. The country’s ambassador to the UN responded saying it is doing “all that we can to minimize civilian casualties”.
Israeli officials have already made clear it will not be a swift or easy campaign.
Former US Defense Secretary Mark Esper told CNBC the war will last “at a minimum for weeks … but it depends on what the goals are and whether it escalates.”
The war is already expected to last longer than the 2008 Gaza war which lasted just over three weeks and 2014’s Operation Protective Edge which was six weeks long, in order for the IDF to achieve their stated aim of wiping Hamas “off the face of the earth”.
Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu vowed in a speech on Friday night in Israel: “We will destroy Hamas… This is only the beginning.”
“The purpose is to defeat the entire military capabilities and military apparatus of Hamas and that will demand a long operation,” one Israeli security source said.
“Most of the targets, people, equipment, logistics are located underground and it’s possible the hostages are located underground,” the source continued. “The purpose will be to flatten the ground to then be able to get to the underground bunkers.”
With Post wires