The IDF has regained the upper hand against Hamas, but what will the endgame be?
Part of what is dizzying about the war with Hamas is how quickly Israel is moving from possibly the greatest military blunder in its history to being almost entirely in the driver’s seat.
Put differently, Hamas clobbered Israel in the first quarter of a four-quarter basketball game, but by the end of the game, or maybe even the third quarter, the IDF will have run up the score on Hamas into a rout.
How is this happening?
First, Hamas had an initial “success,” at least in a military terror sense, beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.
IDF intelligence personnel used to talk about all kinds of worst-case scenarios, and they always included Hamas possibly taking over one village in the Gaza corridor for a few hours or Hezbollah taking over around five villages in the North for a short time. Casualties on the Israeli side were usually estimated in double digits.
And this would only be if Israeli security failed miserably, which most thought was unlikely after billions being invested in a variety of technological border and aerial defenses.
No one in their worst nightmare thought Hamas could take over 22 villages, kill 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, take over the IDF’s Gaza front headquarters, and hold on to portions of those villages for 12-48 hours.
Making the mistake that a superior military generally can always prevent an inferior adversary from victory anywhere, Israel could have learned from the Battle of Thermopylae around 2,500 years ago, or once again from basketball.
In the famous US college national basketball tournament known as “March Madness,” on any given day, a team from a town that no one has ever heard of which is highly motivated and perfectly coordinated, but which is very inferior in terms of raw talent and basketball power, can upset a team that is full of million-dollar talents destined for the NBA.
The Cinderella team only has to win once against the “juggernaut” team to advance in the tournament, and it happens more often than what should make sense statistically – and mostly because the famous team is overconfident, lets its guard down, and the upstart team takes advantage.
This is most of the story of Hamas’s horrifying “victory” on Saturday.
How did Hamas manage to cause this much terror?
The IDF underestimated Hamas, viewed it as static, as cowardly and deterred for not jumping into multiple rounds of conflict between Israel and Islamic Jihad, and as quiet and satisfied with short-term incentives.
In sum, the terrorist group lured Israel into complacency by playing the long game.
It also used a wide mix of new tactics all at once, surprising and confusing Israel, by using an unprecedented huge volume of rockets simultaneously with a massive invasion by land, sea, and air.
The motorized gliders that took out the IDF’s lookout position was an example of utterly blindsiding the IDF with retro technology customized to exploit IDF weaknesses.
But the “March Madness” tournament then starts to differ fundamentally from war in that it is a one-off battle.
Returning to the basketball analogy of the power team and the tiny weaker team, if those same two basketball teams met 10 times, let alone 100 times, the true power team would probably win nine out of 10 or 90 out of 100.
That is where Hamas and the IDF are now and will be even more once the ground invasion commences, as early as the coming days according to Jerusalem Post sources, and probably not later than another week or so.
Motorized hang gliders can blind lookout spots in a very small area for a couple of hours, but they are not an air force. Hamas has no air force.
The IDF has the most powerful air force in the Middle East – by a lot – and one of the most powerful in the world.
In the first hours of the war, Hamas might have suffered losing only a couple hundred of its forces when possibly around 1,000 Israelis were already killed. But there is no question that the number of killed Hamas terrorists, which already exceeded the Israeli number by midweek, will by the end far exceed Israeli casualties.
The air force is killing somewhere between dozens to sometimes many more Hamas terrorists daily, and the IDF is currently losing almost no one as Hamas has almost no one to shoot at. Of course, it has its rockets, but these cause far more terror and disruption of schools and businesses than actual large volumes of death in Israel.
Once the IDF launches its ground invasion of between tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of better trained, better armed soldiers, with tanks, artillery, air support, and an incredible artificial intelligence machine that unites all of the efforts, IDF casualties will go up, but Hamas losses will go up far more.
Right now, Hamas terrorists still have places to hide from the air force. There will be far fewer places to hide once the ground invasion starts.
Undoubtedly, Hamas will achieve some more tactical victories through ambushes and booby traps – it had time to plan for the counter-invasion. But large numbers of its commanders have been killed by air force bombings, so whatever strategy it had in place will only function at best on a block-to-block basis, with little central coordination.
As problematic as it is that Hamas has smuggled a variety of weapons into Gaza during its more than 15-year rule there, it has nothing that can compete with the IDF’s heavy weapons, armor, and air power.
So any tactical gains it achieves will be fleeting.
Someone may ambush a dozen soldiers, but then their hideout will be flattened shortly after by an aircraft, drone strike, or tank or artillery shell, or maybe all at once.
Nothing about the fight will be “fair,” and Hamas will not have a chance – militarily speaking.
All of that explains how Hamas could start so far ahead and finish too far down.
THE REASON, then, that this piece only describes the IDF as moving into the driver’s seat, but not having full control, is that Hamas is not the only player in deciding the fate of Gaza.
Criticism of Israel has already started to grow incrementally as the shock of the barbaric videos and pictures of Hamas’s murderous slaughter of civilians on Saturday gets older, and more pictures and videos continue to emerge of collateral harm to Palestinian civilians from IDF airstrikes.
As in past rounds, much of the world will start to shift pressure on Israel to end its invasion, as soon as the wave of media featuring Palestinian suffering becomes the only ongoing and current story, and the IDF will be given little credit for its trying to avoid harming civilians, at the same time that Hamas deliberately targets civilians.
Maybe because of the magnitude of Hamas’s terror on Saturday, the pressure will come more gradually, but it will come.
And Israel also is still clueless about how it wants Gaza managed afterward.
“There will be no more Hamas” is a great slogan, but the government has not put forward any plan for who will run Gaza in its place, and none of the options are good or stable – part of why Israel avoided toppling the terrorist group until now.
All of this means that the IDF’s airstrikes and ground invasion will harm Hamas tremendously and possibly even end its control of Gaza, but there may be an “overtime” period where Hamas and other terrorist groups use guerrilla warfare to make a comeback in some shape or form.
All of these dynamics mean that no matter how certain the IDF’s military win is, whether it can “win the peace” and how long it will really fight Hamas remain open questions.•