It's a trap

U.S. carrier group ordered to Mediterranean

Gaza is a trap.  That is just one reason Israeli Prime Minister “Bibi” Netanyahu has not made the difficult decision to launch a ground invasion.  I don’t know this for a fact, but I would place a good size bet that the Israel Defense Forces already have an estimate of the casualties they would suffer on the day they invade Gaza, and for every day thereafter.  Hundreds might be killed within hours.  It’s not out of the question that Israel’s military could suffer thousands killed and wounded.

The number of innocent Palestinian residents of Gaza killed would be far higher.  Hamas, which controls the Gaza Health Ministry, is already saying that more than 5,000 civilians have died as a result of Israeli airstrikes since October 7, when Hamas launched its invasion of Israel, killing 1,400 Israelis, the large majority of them civilians. Hamas claimed yesterday that 700 civilians were killed in airstrikes on Monday night alone and that at least 2,000 children have been killed since the war began.

Of course, Hamas also claimed that Israel struck the al-Ahli hospital last week in a rocket attack that killed 500.  Western media, including the New York Times, reported Hamas claims nearly word for word for days after.  Now the Times and other mainstream media have backed off their initial reports, concluding that it was a Palestinian rocket that exploded in the air above the hospital, causing debris to land in the hospital parking lot.  The Times has reported that estimates of the dead run from 100 to 300.

You see where this is going?  If Israel invades Gaza on the ground, Hamas will begin issuing “official” accounts of the dead from its “Health Ministry” that will be inflated even beyond what they claimed about the hospital bombing, which Israel wasn’t responsible for, and which did not kill the number of civilians Hamas initially claimed. 

There will be multiple nightmares if Israel goes into Gaza on the ground:  the number of Israeli soldiers killed in the thousands, the number of civilian dead in the tens of thousands, the utter destruction of Gazan infrastructure even beyond what has already been done.  Headlines will scream about schools and hospitals hit.  So far, Israel claims it has attacked only Hamas targets in Gaza.  If they invade on the ground, Israel will do exactly what U.S. forces did in Iraq and Afghanistan when units took fire from a building:  they didn’t send in an infantry patrol to take out the sniper or whoever was shooting at them, they called in an airstrike and took down the entire building.

It's beyond easy to see what the international reaction to those tactics would be.  And if Israel did what the U.S. did in Iraq and Afghanistan when we leveled whole buildings in Falluja and other Iraqi cities just to take out small units of the enemy, or even a single sniper, all they would be doing is carrying out a standard military operation in a war taking place in an urban environment. 

If Israel invades Gaza, they will face the same reality the U.S. has faced in the last three wars it has fought in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  The enemy won’t be wearing uniforms with insignia identifying themselves as Hamas.  They will be wearing civilian clothes, and they will be indistinguishable from the civilian population until they start shooting.  By the time the Israeli military identifies a person as a Hamas fighter, one of Israel’s tanks might have been taken out, or a squad of 10 or 11 infantry soldiers might have been hit by a Hamas RPG-7 rocket grenade and killed. 

An Israeli invasion of Gaza will be a mess militarily, politically, and in humanitarian terms.  Already, the U.N. has denounced Israel for its airstrikes on Gaza.  Yesterday, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said that the “appalling acts of Hamas cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people. The attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” Guterres continued. “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished.”

So, there you go.  On the one hand, Hamas committed “appalling acts” when its fighters slaughtered 1,400 Israelis and wounded countless others in a wanton sneak attack on civilian settlements around Gaza.  On the other hand, Guterres said, “Protecting civilians does not mean ordering more than one million people to evacuate to the south, where there is no shelter, no food, no water, no medicine and no fuel – and then continuing to bomb the south [of Gaza] itself.”

At the U.N., in capitals around the Arab world where street demonstrations against Israel are raging, in Putin’s Russia, in Oban’s Hungary, in Xi’s China, Israel is either being attacked for defending itself by bombing Gaza or told to “observe humanitarian rules” and stop its bombing of Gaza.

Today, it was announced that Israel has agreed to delay its ground invasion of Gaza so the U.S. has time to position Patriot air defense batteries around the Middle East to protect “troops serving in Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the United Arab Emirates,” the Wall Street Journal reported late today.  Other reports say that President Biden has asked Netanyahu to delay attacking Hamas on the ground in Gaza so there can be more time to negotiate the release of Hamas hostages and deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza.

But the real dilemma facing Netanyahu and the Israel Defense Forces is that Gaza is a trap set by Hamas.  That was the goal of Hamas on October 7:  to goad Israel into defending itself from further attacks by overreacting in its response.  Hamas is continuing to rocket Israel.  Its Palestinian ally in Lebanon and Syria, Hezbollah, is rocketing Israel’s north and threatening attacks on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem with long-range rockets supplied by Iran in their arsenal.

Now the U.S. is concerned enough about its military installations around the Middle East that the Pentagon is flying in anti-missile defense batteries on an emergency basis. One U.S. aircraft carrier group was ordered into the Mediterranean shortly after October 7, and a second aircraft carrier group has been re-directed from the Mediterranean into Middle East waters near the Red Sea to protect U.S. military and diplomatic facilities in the region.  Last week, the Pentagon ordered 2,000 U.S. troops to be on alert status, ready to deploy immediately.  The State Department hasn’t ordered evacuations of American embassies in the region, but they doubtlessly have plans and aircraft in place and are ready to do it on a moment’s notice. 

When it comes to Hamas and Gaza, Israel is damned if it does, and damned if it doesn’t, and so are we.