The Israeli offensive engulfing Gaza City has hurled Hamas into panic mode. The IDF is conducting the most intensive operations of this two-year campaign, building intensity by the day, with another combat division just committed to the fight. In the past couple of days they have killed dozens of Hamas terrorists, seized and destroyed munitions dumps and located and attacked numerous tunnel shafts. From ground and air, military facilities including fighting positions, command centres and observation posts located in civilian buildings, including tower blocks, have been struck and destroyed.
In line with their obligations under the laws of war, the IDF have repeatedly dropped leaflets warning Gazan civilians to leave the city and opened up corridors to allow them to move safely to the south. Current estimates suggest around 550,000 have departed so far and more are on the way out. Fearful of losing their human shields, Hamas have continued to threaten civilians against leaving and tried to block exit routes for vehicles. Meanwhile terrorist leaders have been trying to save their own skins, some by attempting not just to escape from Gaza City but right out of the Strip. Doing everything they can to halt the IDF onslaught, Hamas released photo-montages of Israeli hostages on Telegram, threatening to kill them all and to force them into the front lines directly under the guns of the advancing troops.
In an attempt to show strength but in fact demonstrating only weakness, terrorists fired two rockets from northern Gaza towards the city of Ashdod, neither of which got near its target. Another measure of Hamas’s desperation came to light at the weekend when they attacked UN teams working to establish a new aid corridor in the south to allow supplies to reach an Israeli-designated humanitarian zone where those getting out of Gaza City could take refuge. The attackers seized UN vehicles to try to create a barrier preventing the movement of aid trucks.
All of this shows just how unnerved Hamas has become as Israel’s advance on Gaza City unfolds. Already reeling from the assault on their sponsors in Iran, they had been hoping for at least a pause in hostilities with the latest stalling tactics from their negotiating team in Qatar. But that evaporated with the IDF strike on Doha which demonstrated that from now on the Hamas leadership were safe nowhere. This does not necessarily mean that Hamas’s collapse in Gaza is imminent, but even the most hardened jihadists are susceptible to the psychological as well as the physical effects of battle. As Napoleon himself said, in war “the moral is to the physical as three is to one”.
The Israeli offensive engulfing Gaza City has hurled Hamas into panic mode. The IDF is conducting the most intensive operations of this two-year campaign, building intensity by the day, with another combat division just committed to the fight. In the past couple of days they have killed dozens of Hamas terrorists, seized and destroyed munitions dumps and located and attacked numerous tunnel shafts. From ground and air, military facilities including fighting positions, command centres and observation posts located in civilian buildings, including tower blocks, have been struck and destroyed.
In line with their obligations under the laws of war, the IDF have repeatedly dropped leaflets warning Gazan civilians to leave the city and opened up corridors to allow them to move safely to the south. Current estimates suggest around 550,000 have departed so far and more are on the way out. Fearful of losing their human shields, Hamas have continued to threaten civilians against leaving and tried to block exit routes for vehicles. Meanwhile terrorist leaders have been trying to save their own skins, some by attempting not just to escape from Gaza City but right out of the Strip. Doing everything they can to halt the IDF onslaught, Hamas released photo-montages of Israeli hostages on Telegram, threatening to kill them all and to force them into the front lines directly under the guns of the advancing troops.
In an attempt to show strength but in fact demonstrating only weakness, terrorists fired two rockets from northern Gaza towards the city of Ashdod, neither of which got near its target. Another measure of Hamas’s desperation came to light at the weekend when they attacked UN teams working to establish a new aid corridor in the south to allow supplies to reach an Israeli-designated humanitarian zone where those getting out of Gaza City could take refuge. The attackers seized UN vehicles to try to create a barrier preventing the movement of aid trucks.
All of this shows just how unnerved Hamas has become as Israel’s advance on Gaza City unfolds. Already reeling from the assault on their sponsors in Iran, they had been hoping for at least a pause in hostilities with the latest stalling tactics from their negotiating team in Qatar. But that evaporated with the IDF strike on Doha which demonstrated that from now on the Hamas leadership were safe nowhere. This does not necessarily mean that Hamas’s collapse in Gaza is imminent, but even the most hardened jihadists are susceptible to the psychological as well as the physical effects of battle. As Napoleon himself said, in war “the moral is to the physical as three is to one”.