John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a founding member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare, spoke to a January 24 Middle East Forum Podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
On October 7, 2023, the Hamas terror group in Gaza, a “political apparatus with a military wing,” launched thousands of rockets into Israel, invaded its southern communities, committed atrocities and war crimes against the population, and took more than 250 hostages back to Gaza as captives. On October 8, Israel declared a war of self-defense with its multiple stated goals to “return the illegally taken hostages, destroy Hamas’s military capabilities, remove Hamas as the governing authority of Gaza and secure Israel’s borders, and prevent Hamas or any other group from Gaza from being able to do another attack against Israel and into Israel territory.”
Hamas’s urban warfare strategy is “not to fight the IDF, but to cause … the international community to halt Israel before achieving a victory even after the horrific crimes of October 7.”
In 2007, after Hamas seized power in the “very dense piece of terrain” of Gaza, it spent over a billion dollars building over 350 miles of “military-only purposed tunnels underneath the urban areas of Gaza, ranging from just underneath buildings to over 200 feet underground.” Israel entered Gaza, where “every step you take, there’s a tunnel underneath you.” Recovering the captives “became one of the greatest military challenges of the modern era” for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
The fact that Hamas “is in the urban terrain and has prepared it for defense” over two decades “is very unique and hard to compare in history” to other enemies in the urban terrain which typically had little time to prepare to defend. In most urban battles in history, the more amount of time [the enemy] has had to prepare their defense, “the greater the battle, the more protracted, the more destructive it is.” In comparison, the battle to retake the city of Mosul from 5,000 ISIS fighters took 100,000 Iraqi security forces nine months. ISIS had only two months to prepare its defense, in contrast to the 20 years that Hamas had to militarize most Gazan houses with “caches or house-borne IEDs or sniper positions.”
Hamas’s urban warfare strategy is “not to fight the IDF, but to cause … the international community to halt Israel before achieving a victory even after the horrific crimes of October 7.” In violation of the rules of war, Hamas uses a “human shield strategy” that puts civilians “in front of you so the enemy can’t attack you.” Using civilians and protected sites for military purposes “complicates the operations.” Hamas goes even further by using “a human sacrifice strategy,” stating it “needs civilians to die” and denying the population’s access to the protective tunnels that are for Hamas’s exclusive use.
The international community, with its anti-Israel/anti-Western/anti-war cohort, aided the enemy by pressuring Israel “to stop before achieving its goals.” They were assisted by “a whole host of United Nations-affiliated organizations” that barely condemned Hamas for employing its human shield and human sacrifice strategies. None of these organizations demanded that Hamas “surrender to unilaterally, unconditionally give up the hostages.” The pressure on Israel was additionally driven by social media. Unlike in other past wars, “this is the first war of this scale and intensity where you have cell phone-driven, social media-driven, algorithm-driven condemnation or footage” wielding global influence.
The international community, with its anti-Israel/anti-Western/anti-war cohort, aided the enemy by pressuring Israel “to stop before achieving its goals.”
Ultimately, this war is a “contest of will” between Hamas, which believed it could launch its October 7 war against Israel and still maintain power and survive, and Israel, which adheres to the mores of “a democratic society.” Israel’s adversaries cited false metrics regarding casualties and proportionality to “justify their opinions about the war.” Essentially, Hamas manufactured numbers to produce “effects-based condemnation” against Israel, which the media accused of “intentionally causing civilian harm and intentionally destroying civilian infrastructure.”
Detractors disregarded the law of war and ignored the “precaution” the IDF took to limit “potential collateral damage” in conducting its defensive war in Gaza. Without access to information, the world unquestionably accepted the numbers provided by Hamas, “the designated terrorist organization.” Hamas’s Gaza Health Ministry did not “distinguish between civilians and combatants, or non-combatants [a protected person who is not partaking in the hostilities in any way] and combatants.”
In any comparable context, “Israel’s civilian-to-combatant ratio is still historically low,” given the precautionary measures it took. “Israel has done more and implemented more measures to prevent civilian harm than any military in the history of urban warfare.” Israel’s evacuation of Gazan cities, its limited use of force, and its distribution of maps “to communicate with the civilians” were all actions taken to minimize civilian casualties. Despite these measures, media and Hamas advocates “try to portray some type of illegality” by taking the numbers out of context to malign Israel. “It’s really essential that people understand that these are just forms of lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
Global pressure on Israel increasingly mounted with “the questioning of the goals, the questioning of the ability to achieve the goals, and now the criticism of the military.”
Hamas has launched some “13-plus thousand rockets” against the Jewish state, and “every one of those 13,000-plus rockets are a violation of the law of war.” Had Israel not invested so heavily in “rocket diplomacy” by developing its defensive anti-rocket capabilities, especially the Iron Dome and David’s Sling, rockets launched against its cities would have killed “tens of thousands.” In the many wars Israel has fought against Hamas and Gaza, the goals of those wars were to stop the rockets. “But in a war where the goal is to remove the enemy[‘s] military capabilities, you can’t do that strictly through bombing. You have to enter the enemy’s territory and take those capabilities away. In the dense urban environment, we call it the great equalizer for a reason.”
Global pressure on Israel increasingly mounted with “the questioning of the goals, the questioning of the ability to achieve the goals, and now the criticism of the military.” Greater force would have made Hamas realize it did not have a chance, but “unfortunately, within the political context of this war, many nations have sent Hamas messages, [including] the United Nations, [to] just hold out. You can win and we will stop Israel.”
Due to the reality that “all warfare is asymmetric,” there has been an “increase in urban warfare around the globe,” when weaker forces know they can extract an advantage by luring “an advanced military into urban terrain.” The U.S. would have prosecuted the Gaza war differently by using “more combat power to try to end it quicker. Because that’s what you want to do.”
The IDF’s performance in Gaza, its capabilities and actions, “absolutely is a moral, ethical, disciplined force achieving unique things in the most complex urban scenario that any military has faced in modern history.”
