A week into the Gulf War of 1991, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell laid out the basic strategy of Operation Desert Storm. “Our strategy to go after [the Iraqi] army is very, very simple. First, we’re going to cut it off, and then we're going to kill it.” The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) seem to be following the same script in the battle for Gaza City, which is now isolated from the rest of the Gaza Strip. The IDF spent the first three weeks pounding Gaza from the air before committing ground forces into the fight. Having surrounded the Hamas fighters in their stronghold, the IDF is now confronted with a long, slow grind to destroy Hamas and its extensive system of tunnels dubbed the “Gaza metro.”
Urban warfare is never easy. The Wehrmacht’s 1942 offensive into southern Russia faltered when Hitler demanded his legions seize Stalingrad, an urban center named after his arch-nemesis, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. The German Sixth Army reached the outskirts of Stalingrad on August 23 and for three months ground its way through the urban jungle building-by-building and block-by-block until it occupied about 90 percent of the city. By then the Sixth Army had sustained sixty thousand casualties, leaving it vulnerable to a Soviet counteroffensive, Operation Uranus, that began on November 19 and culminated on February 2, 1943, with the surrender of the Sixth Army. Germany never recovered from the defeat.
Hamas, of course, lacks the resources of the Soviet Union, and so an Israeli defeat in the battle of Gaza City is unlikely. But the fighting will still likely be intense. Hamas militants have had fifteen years to prepare the ground for defense, including building the extensive tunnel network that runs underneath the city. The IDF has specially trained units to fight underground, but meeting Hamas on its own terrain in the Gaza metro is not the ideal method for dealing with tunnels. In the battle for Manila in February 1945, U.S. soldiers dealt with underground Japanese emplacements by pouring hundreds of gallons of oil down into them and igniting the fuel with white phosphorus grenades or demolition charges. Japanese soldiers died a grisly death, burned alive or suffocating as the conflagration consumed all the available oxygen. Dealing with tunnel systems in the mountains or on various Pacific islands, U.S. soldiers and Marines would often use explosives to destroy the entrances and exits, entombing whoever was inside.
Compounding the problem for the IDF are the 240 hostages held by Hamas, undoubtedly in the very tunnels the IDF wishes to destroy. The alternative to destroying the tunnels is to fight in them in a slow, terrifying, and claustrophobic battle. The U.S. Army faced extensive tunnel systems in the Vietnam War, one of them so large that American forces built a base on top of a tunnel system it failed to detect. U.S. forces in South Vietnam developed specialized units to explore and fight in tunnels, euphemistically called “tunnel rats.” These highly trained forces took the battle to the Viet Cong underground, killing upwards of twelve thousand guerrillas over the course of the conflict.
It remains to be seen what approach the IDF will take in the battle of Gaza City. But one thing is certain; the battle will not be over until the IDF controls all three dimensions of the urban terrain: Above, on, and beneath the ground of the Gaza Strip.
