Israel's Tunnel Strategy

Israel is facing a daunting challenge in defeating and eliminating Hamas in Gaza. In addition to the terrorists' use of hospitals and schools as cover for their operations they have over the years constructed hundreds of underground tunnels with the financial support that Western nations have sent to be used for humanitarian relief of the Gazan people.

A piece at Strategy Page discusses the difficulty the tunnels pose and the strategy the Israelis will probably employ to neutralize them:

Urban fighting is bad enough, especially in Gaza with scores of thousands of booby traps in buildings and tunnels, but the tunnels particularly will make it far worse than any urban combat in history.

Israel casualties could easily exceed the 11,000 of the Yom Kippur War but for one particular innovation – the “sponge bomb”, a variety of rapidly expanding foam plastic that hardens to concrete consistency, and is delivered by anything from a man-portable grenade or an engineering-type large foam sprayer.

The grenade-type device would create a temporary tunnel barrier a meter thick while the engineering devices could form 5-10 meters thick semi-permanent barriers.

These almost instantly effective sprayable tunnel barriers, if they work, will be crucial because they allow the Israelis to use standard urban combat tactics of slow, methodical advances to isolate small chunks of areas, clear those, and do this repeatedly.

Gaza’s network of tunnels (people can probably move underground from any 3+ story Gaza building to any other 3+ story building) would allow Hamas to constantly infiltrate more fighters behind the Israelis. Sprayable tunnel barriers will prevent that. Israel can take small bites above and below ground simultaneously.

While Hamas does have engineers who can clear such barriers, they simply don’t have anywhere near enough, while the required explosives would be so noisy that the Israelis would know when and where the clearing was being done, and kill the Hamas engineers.

With that in mind, and the fact that Israel has obviously prepared years for such an offensive, the conquest of northern Gaza, including its tunnels, might take 9 Israeli infantry brigades, with lots of engineers, as little as 10-14 days @ 300 casualties a day. Assuming 1500 infantry in the rifle companies of each brigade totaling 13,500, that would be 3000-4200 casualties or about 22-31% of the force involved. That’s enough to put them out of action for months.

Nine more, fresh infantry brigades would be required to conquer Gaza’s second half, so Israel is looking at 6-8 thousand casualties total.

When Israel is ready to conquer Gaza’s southern half, they will order civilians there to move to tent cities in adjacent areas of southern Israel. An Israeli general announced this several weeks ago.

Hamas is unlikely to allow this, which will be tough for the civilians but some will probably survive and be cared for by Israeli medics and civil affairs personnel. The US did the same concerning stay-behind German civilians in the 1945 Battle of Aachen, and stay-behind Sunni Arab civilians in the 2004 second battle of Fallujah.

All of the bloodshed and destruction that is, and will be, taking place in Gaza has been brought on the Palestinian Arabs by Hamas whose sole reason for being is to kill Israelis. They're a death cult and their own deaths are condign punishment for their murderous savagery over the last fifteen years.

No one except American leftists will miss them.