The United States and Israel: How to Plan a Ground Operation of Gaza, and What to Do About It, and Why to Do It
Senior administration officials said that the Biden administration is worried that the Israel Defense forces do not have a realistic plan for a ground invasion of Gaza.
In phone conversations with his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III has stressed the need for careful consideration of how Israeli forces might conduct a ground invasion of Gaza, where Hamas maintains intricate tunnel networks under densely populated areas.
Biden administration officials insisted that the United States had not told Israel what to do and still supported the ground invasion. But the Pentagon has sent a three-star Marine, Lt. Gen. James Glynn, along with other officers to help the Israelis with the challenges of fighting an urban war.
In conversations with Mr. Gallant, Mr. Austin has talked about the campaign to clear the Iraqi city of Mosul of Islamic State fighters. The head of the United States Central Command at that time was Mr. Austin and American troops were supporting Iraqi and Kurdish fighters in the fight.
“The first thing that everyone should know, and I think everyone does know, is that urban combat is extremely difficult,” Mr. Austin told ABC News’s “This Week” on Sunday.
He said that he encouraged Mr. Gallant to conduct their operations in accordance with the law of war. American officials have become increasingly concerned that a ground invasion in Gaza could lead to a huge loss of civilian lives.
Pentagon officials said that he was talking to Mr. Gallant on Monday, emphasizing the importance of civilian protection. In an email, the bristlies made a statement. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said that the two men also discussed American security assistance to Israel.
American officials said that Israel must decide whether, for instance, to try to take out Hamas by using surgical airstrikes combined with targeted raids by special operations troops — as American warplanes and Iraqi and Kurdish troops did in Mosul — or to roll into Gaza with tanks and infantry, as American Marines and soldiers, along with Iraqi and British forces, did in Falluja in 2004.
Both tactics will result in heavy losses, U.S. officials said, but a ground operation could be far bloodier, for troops and civilians. At the Pentagon, many officials believe that the Mosul and Raqqa clearing operations in Iraq more than a decade after Falluja are a better model for urban warfare.
State of the Art in the Battle of the Mosul-Raqqa Revolution: Senator Jack Reed’s Call for a Ground Invasion of Gaza
“One of the things we’ve learned is how to account for civilians in the battle space, and they are a part of the battle space, and we, in accordance of the law of war, we’ve got to do what’s necessary to protect those civilians,” Mr. Austin said on Sunday.
But both Mosul and Raqqa resulted in significant civilian casualties. The AP put the number of civilians killed in the effort to rid of Islamic State fighters at between 9000 and 11,000. And the Islamic State had only two years to prepare defenses in Mosul, argued Michael Knights, a fellow with The Washington Institute.
According to an analysis written by Mr. Knights, Hamas has had 15 years to prepare a dense defense in depth that integrates subterranean, ground level and aboveground fortifications, communication tunnels, emplacements and fighting positions.
Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who heads the Armed Services Committee, called on Israel on Monday to delay a ground invasion of Gaza to buy time for hostage negotiations, allow more humanitarian aid to reach Palestinian civilians and give Israeli commanders more opportunity to fine-tune their urban-combat planning.
Mr. Reed spoke from Cairo, where he and other senators were wrapping up a trip to Saudi Arabia, Israel and Egypt. “A little extra time might be helpful. There are so many things going on. Rushing into this probably isn’t the best approach.
The same advice was given to Israel by the Biden administration. Mr. Reed supports the ground invasion to destroy Hamas, just as U.S. officials do. But he warned that a block-by-block urban fight in Gaza would be “a long-term effort,” noting that it took the Iraqi army, assisted by the United States, nine months to rout the Islamic State from Mosul.
Israel and Palestine in the wake of the Sept. 7 attack on Israel: A New Perspective from Peter Beinart and Spencer Ackerman to the Jewish Left
If you want to listen to the whole conversation you have to subscribe to the NYT Audio app, Apple, or wherever you pick up your podcasts. There is a list of book recommendations from our guests.
We talk about the goals behind Hamas’s initial attack on Israelis and how this changed the psychology of Jews living in and out of Israel and what Israel is trying to achieve in its military response.
My approach is going to be to try to cover it from many different perspectives, but I wanted to start with the one I’m closest to, which has felt particularly tricky in recent weeks: that of the Jewish left. So I invited Spencer Ackerman and Peter Beinart on to the show.
The Nation Magazine has an award-winning columnist called, “Reign of terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and produced Trump” and he is the author of a newsletter called “forever wars”. Peter Beinart is an editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, the author of the Beinart Notebook newsletter and a professor of journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. They took up many different angles that are crucial to the future of the people of Israel and Palestine.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has vowed to “demolish Hamas.” Without sharply defining what that means, he pledged to remove the group from Gaza after its Oct. 7 attack on Israel killed 1,400 people and led to the kidnapping of more than 200 others.
With history as a guide, three factors would most likely shape a ground war in Gaza’s cities: the urban environment, the interaction between fighters and civilians, and political pressures.
The Gaza Strip is 140 square miles and has a cluster of urban population centers. Gaza City has around 700,000 people packed into 20 square miles, making it more dangerous than the battle to remove U.S.-led forces from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Residuals of a Rapid Advance in the First Year of the Ukrainian War: Mosul, Mariupol, and Hamas
When invaders start with a rapid advance, they end up in districts that favor defenders. Mosul is a prime example; another is last year’s siege of Mariupol. A few thousand Ukrainian soldiers held the city for three months against a much larger Russian force.
The first year of the Ukraine war has been described in a report by the chair of urban warfare studies with the U.S. Military Academy.
Cities can also be malleable. Israel has destroyed hundreds of Gaza buildings in airstrikes. Hamas built hundreds of miles of tunnels underneath Gaza City that can be used to move between attack positions and hide hostages in order to protect supplies.