As Israeli Defense Forces resumed military operations to eradicate the Hamas terrorist threat last Friday, the Biden administration is inserting itself into Israel’s war planning process, teaching the Israelis – who’ve been fighting for their survival for decades – how to properly prosecute the conflict.
Washington warfare "experts" – who arguably haven’t secured a single clear military victory since 1945 – insist that Israeli military strategists alter their war plans to make their combat operations more targeted and their strikes more accurate, in order to minimize casualties, especially among civilians.
The Biden administration’s demands, while noble-sounding, are misguided and unreasonable. Implementing these requirements, at the expense of achieving the main mission of eliminating Hamas and its entire supporting infrastructure, will likely prolong the conflict, ultimately resulting in many more Israeli and Palestinian deaths. Here’s why.
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Hamas is no longer your grandfather’s terrorist gang, the way it used to be years ago. Like many other non-state terrorist groups, Hamas has benefited from the democratization of technology, which has made access to weapons, military-grade components, and the know-how necessary for indigenous production, much easier across the board than it used to be.
Consequently, Hamas is now in possession of more deadly, more advanced weaponry than it had did even a decade ago. Its much more diverse weapons arsenal makes the terrorists look and fight more like a regular military force rather than a non-state terrorist group. This levels the battlefield a lot more than it did during the 2014 Gaza War between Israeli forces and Hamas.
The employment of drone warfare enabled Hamas to catch the Israelis off guard. During the initial wave of attacks on October 7, the terror group used small tactical drones to strike multiple Israeli military targets, disrupting infrastructure and destroying surveillance towers, cameras, and communications, as the terrorists were infiltrating across the southern border, killing some 1,200 people. This element of surprise enabled Hamas to seize, at least temporarily, what’s called in modern warfare, strategic initiative, leaving Israelis stunned and scrambling to defend itself.
Hamas has modernized its drone arsenal, which now includes ‘Zouari’ suicide drone, named after Mohammed Zouari, the late Hamas engineer and drone pilot; Ababil-2 Iranian Tactical UAV; Misagh-1 with a high explosive-fragmentation warhead; AK-103-2 with aburst-fire setting, and RAAD-T, according to Army Recognition, OE Data Integration Network and DroneSec databases.
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Hamas has also significantly improved its indigenously manufactured rockets, called Qassam, having extended their range from 2-3 miles in its first iteration to 10 miles, with the Qassam 3. Today’s generation of missiles used by Hamas have a range of 150 miles, covering all of Israel.
Hamas also has been the beneficiary of Iranian weapons, technical assistance, and training. In 2020, the State Department assessed that Iran sends $100 million a year to Palestinian terrorist groups, arming and training them to attack Israel and murder its civilians as Hamas did on October 7.
According to the Wall Street Journal, 500 Hamas terrorists were trained by Iran Quds Force, the foreign-operations arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in special combat tactics, during the weeks leading up to the October 7th terrorist attacks. Hamas used combined arms tactics during the assault, synchronizing the attacks across air, land, and sea, a warfare style used by regular armies.
During the 2023 campaign, Israelis are dying at more than twice the rate as in 2014, according to the Wall Street Journal. The upgrades in weapons and tactics are the likely reasons why Hamas is a much more lethal force than it used to be, posing a much more formidable threat to the Israeli forces.
On a visit to Tel Aviv recently, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken warned the Israeli leadership, about "the imperative to the United States that the massive loss of civilian life and displacement of the scale we saw in northern Gaza not be repeated in the south." He demanded a "clear plan in place that puts a premium on protecting civilians as well as sustaining and building on the humanitarian assistance that’s getting into Gaza."
How in the world can the Israelis assure Washington that they will avert civilian deaths, given that Hamas is known for using civilians as human shields? How can the IDF avoid striking civilian targets if Hamas uses hospitals as operational command centers and storage facilities for weapons and combat gear?
Whether intentional or not, what the Biden administration is doing is restricting the IDF’s freedom of action and flexibility of maneuver, as Israel is striving to eliminate the existential threat to its survival.
It is bad enough that Israel has to deal with a much more lethal and bloodthirsty enemy that is armed to the teeth. Now its defenders have to fight with one arm tied behind their back because Washington, almost certainly driven by politics, is hell-bent on micromanaging someone else’s war.
