Israeli analyst Yonah Jeremy Bob believes that the IDF should not delay its incursion into Gaza any longer. He argues that whatever advantages Israel derived from its earlier insistence on waiting, in order to degrade Hamas’ power, through more than two thousand airstrikes, hitting weapons warehouses, command-and-control centers, bunkers where Hamas commanders had hidden themselves, and also to use this time to persuade civilians, for their own safety, to move from northern to southern Gaza, there are now convincing reasons not to put off the entry into Gaza any further. More on his argument can be found here: “What is delaying Israel’s ground invasion into Gaza? – analysis,” by Yonah Jeremy Bob, Jerusalem Post, October 22, 2023:
There were strong arguments for Israel starting its counter-invasion of Gaza as early as a few days after Hamas’ October 7 invasion of the South as well as delaying it to around a week after that event, but those same reasons being cited now are quickly becoming obsolete.
Many IDF commanders would have liked to invade Gaza already in the early days of the war, but there were definitely top IDF commanders at the time who were with the government’s political echelon’s desire to delay….
An early invasion might have deprived Hamas of the time it needed to prepare to defend against the IDF — everything from spreading ever more widely its military assets, including weapons, command-and-control centers, and operatives, and in lining with IEDs all the roads leading from Israel into Gaza.
Because the IDF continues to bomb in the south, those who have remained in the north have concluded they would not be any safer if they moved south of Khan Yunis. They fail to understand that once the invasion begins, the IDF will focus its airstrikes much more on the north, even if there will still be bombing, much diminished in intensity, in the south. When the IDF urges the people in northern Gaza to move south for their own safety, it means it. But it looks like the 25% of the population that remains in the north are not going to move. It is not always their choice. They are also discouraged from leaving, and sometimes held against their will, by Hamas.
This is Yonah Jeremy Bob’s educated guess: the IDF will still be facing a war, next day or next week, or even in two weeks, against Hamas in northern Gaza with close to 250,000 civilians still in place. That’s a lot less than the original figure of one million civilians, but it’s still a lot of people whose safety the IDF cannot possibly guarantee. Thousands of civilians will likely die, just as Hamas wants and as Israel hopes to avoid; the civilians who remain have been repeatedly warned by the IDF to leave, but have refused, for a variety of reasons, to heed those warnings. Israel keeps repeating the warning, and hopes that the truckloads of aid that are now being allowed into Gaza through the Rafah Crossing could persuade more people to move south.
Basically, the IDF is saying that the more air force attacks there are, the fewer IDF soldiers will be lost once the ground invasion begins because the remaining Hamas forces will be degraded.
Once again, this was true for delaying from week one to week two, but it has been almost impossible to decode[sic] any new progress by the Air Force in the last several days, other than hitting a higher quantity of targets….
But of course there has been progress. Every bomb that hits its target is part of the “progress” the IAF seeks. In the last day, October 24, Israeli pilots hit 320 targets.
Yonah Jeremy Bob thinks that the IAF airstrikes are less and less effective in degrading Hamas’ war-fighting. I don’t know how he concludes this. The Israeli military doesn’t appear to agree. Just Monday night, the IAF conducted 320 attacks, all intended to degrade Hamas’ weapons stores, its rocket launchers, its command-and-control centers, and to kill its commanders. He’s right that it will take “troops on the ground” to finally kill “tens of thousands of fighters.” But I find it hard to believe that the hundreds of airstrikes every day are not doing a great deal, even now when, presumably, most of the high-value targets have already been hit, to steadily weaken Hamas’ ability to resist the IDF. Is it degrading Hamas’ power enough with its daily bombings to justify delaying the invasion, when it will be harder to launch airstrikes with hundreds of thousands of Israeli troops on the ground in Gaza? Only the Israeli commanders can make that calculation.
Aerial bombing absolutely can pave the way for an earlier invasion, but it does not eliminate risk or ground troops’ losses.
So whether we are talking here about political fear or authentic concerns of guilt about ordering a significant number of young troops to their deaths, the concern cannot justify a further delay of the invasion from a professional military perspective.
It just delays the inevitable, reduces morale, and reduces the amount of time the world will probably “allow” Israel to spend in Gaza to topple Hamas.
Israel is not merely “delaying the inevitable,” but using every moment to increase the readiness of its troops, in teaching some to use new weapons systems, in preparing them for urban warfare, in setting out what is known about both the warren of streets in Gaza City and Khan Yunis, the places Hamas weapons are still believed to be hidden or operatives, holding hostages are believed to be hiding, in that tunnel network that the IDF soldiers will have to enter and “clean out.” This is enough activity to keep the soldiers busy and their morale high; furthermore, the soldiers are reassured by the extreme care with which the inevitable assault is being planned.
Israel’s delay has so far allowed the following:
First, it gave the IDF enough time to call up 300,000 reservists and to prepare them for the tasks they will be called upon to fulfill inside Gaza. They are not sitting idly, but training, both relearning skills and for some, learning how to operate both newly-improved versions of older weapons, including the Merkava-5 tank, and brand-new ones, such as Elbit’s Iron Sting.
Second, during the last two weeks Israel has had time to conduct more than 2,000 airstrikes that have greatly degraded Hamas’ military power. Weapons warehouses, command-and-control centers, rocket launchers, and operatives’ bunkers have all been destroyed. More than a dozen top Hamas commanders have been killed.
Now, he says, the reservists have been called up. The airstrikes have destroyed most high-value targets but now are no longer needed as much, and should not continue as a substitute for the ground invasion that is essential, in order to kill tens of thousands of Hamas operatives. But there are other considerations – that Yonah Jeremy Bob does not mention — that do support his argument that the invasion be undertaken without further delay. The first is that a delay allows Iran to better prepare its proxy Hezbollah to open a second front, which would make things exceedingly difficult for the IDF. The second consideration is that Washington clearly wants Israel to further delay its invasion in order, it hopes, to make a deal, through Qatar, on freeing the 220 hostages who are held by Hamas. Israel will not want to ignore that desire; it can imagine the furor if it goes into Gaza before the hostages are freed, and in response, Hamas kills some or all of them, including some twenty Americans.
And there is one more reason for the Israeli invasion to take place soon, that is not mentioned by Yonah Jeremy Bob.– the economic impact. When you take 300,000 reservists out of their regular jobs, the economy greatly suffers. How long can Israeli enterprises, including the all-important high-tech companies, do without so much of its workforce? This must be weighing on the prime minister and his war cabinet: 300,000 Israelis have to get back to work soon. If the invasion were to take place tomorrow, the reservists would still have many weeks of warfare before they can return to civilian life, and to the jobs that keep the Israeli economy going. If the invasion is delayed another week or two, the economic consequences would be considerable.
Westman says
“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” – Gen George S. Patton
OLD GUY says
Lots of truth in those words. Delaying gives the enemy time to regroup or to disappear into the general population that works against Israel.
Gourdhead says
And to set up countless sniper nests in the rubble that is strewn about. Yonah Jeremy Bob is right. Israel should not let dipshit Biden stall them any longer.
deze MN bee says
And before another unthinking elderly woman thanks the nice Hamas men for her freedom while forgetting that her husband is still back there in the tunnels.
The hostages (including her husband) are doomed. They are just tokens in a political poker game. They must surely be resigned to their fate. Israel knows this. The Israelis are damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
dumbledoresarmy says
My take on this? I am wondering whether the Hamasniks who mass-murdered Jewish civilians were COUNTING on the IDF pursuing them in haste.. and running straight into a trap. The hostages – and the mass-murdered – were merely the ‘bait’, intended to drag the IDF down into the deadly labyrinth that lies beneath Gaza…
James Lincoln says
dumbledoresarmy,
I actually have been thinking the same thing…
dumbledoresarmy says
I wonder whether Hamas keeps their huge stash of fuel and explosives in one place, or several…? All it would take is one ‘own goal’ …