Can Israel wipe out Hamas from Gaza?

Though the emergency government of Israel headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to wipe out the Palestinian militant outfit Hamas from the face of the earth, many challenges await the Israeli forces, writes ETV Bharat’s Aroonim Bhuyan.

New Delhi: Following the outbreak of the war between Israel and Hamas on October 7 that has claimed over 4,000 lives so far, the emergency government formed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to wipe the Palestinian militant outfit off the face of the earth.

“Every Hamas terrorist is a dead man,” Netanyahu had said last week after the formation of the emergency government. On his part, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said: “We will wipe this thing called Hamas, ISIS-Gaza, off the face of the earth. It will cease to exist.” Adding to this, centrist opposition party leader Benny Gantz, a former Israeli defence chief and general, said it was a time of war, and to join together.

But is it really possible to wipe out Hamas from Gaza? “It will be difficult for the Israeli forces to carry out urban warfare in a densely populated area,” Abhinav Pandya, director, founder and CEO of Usanas Foundation, a geopolitics and security affairs think tank, told ETV Bharat. “The Israelis also don’t have much knowledge about the complex underground tunnels in Gaza that the Hamas uses.”

But first, one needs to understand the geography of Gaza. The Gaza Strip, or simply Gaza, is a narrow piece of land on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, bordered by Israel to the east and north, and Egypt to the southwest. With a population of two million, on some 365 sq km, Gaza, if considered a top-level political unit, ranks as the third most densely populated in the world. It is one of the two Palestinian territories, together with the West Bank. Since 2007, the Gaza Strip has been under the rule of the political and militant Islamist group Hamas.

It is under this highly densely populated area that Hamas has built a subterranean network of tunnels popular called the ‘Gaza Metro’. For over a decade now, the tunnels in Gaza have proved a crucial tool in the Hamas arsenal, enabling the militants to frustrate the powerful Israeli military and live to fight another day.

The tunnels dug in Gaza were originally used for smuggling goods in and out of Egypt to circumvent an Israeli blockade. But militants belonging to Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad built up the tunnels to move rockets and rocket launchers, shield militants from detection by Israeli satellites and aircraft and stage attacks into Israeli territory. The vast underground system includes storage rooms, electrical generators, command centres and supplies for Hamas’ fighters. Known also as “economic tunnels”, these have been dug beneath the border between Egypt and Gaza under the authority mainly of Hamas, who took over the small sliver of territory from its Palestinian political rival Fatah in 2007.

In 2021, Hamas claimed to have built tunnels 500 km long. According to Robinder Sachdev, president of the New Delhi-based independent think tank ImagIndia, the known tunnels of Hamas are at an average of 50 feet under Gaza land. “At this point, the military advantage for Hamas will be in the north,” Sachdev said. “The Israeli military action will be in the north.”

Israel, it is worth mentioning, has ordered all civilians in north Gaza to evacuate to the south warning them that they will be on the firing line once the ground offensive starts. This has led to a huge humanitarian crisis.

According to another source familiar with the issues of the region, Hamas utilises its human resources optimally. It maintains a high level of secrecy as was evident from the October 7 attacks that caught Israel completely by surprise. Apart from firing over 5,000 rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel, around 2,500 Palestinian militants infiltrated Israel from Gaza using trucks, pickup trucks, motorcycles, bulldozers, speedboats and para-gliders. Only a high level of secrecy and electronic silence could have enabled something like this that even Israel’s famed Iron Dome defence system could not detect.

According to the source, the tunnels will actually help Hamas to start an asymmetric war with a far more conventionally powerful Israel. It will be difficult to locate where the Hamas leaders are hiding. Given the knowledge of the existence of the previous Hamas tunnels 50 feet deep under Gaza land, the US administration, in May this year, had approved the sale of $735 million in precision-guided weapons to Israel. The Israeli military also had the option to use US-made “bunker buster” GBU-28 bombs that it had previously acquired. Those munitions are designed to penetrate hardened targets deep underground.

However, unlike the tunnels built by Al Qaeda in the mountains of Afghanistan and those built by the Viet Cong in the jungles of Southeast Asia, the Hamas tunnels are in densely populated areas. Using US-supplied weapons and bombs will lead to civilian casualties in large numbers. “Civilian casualties will tarnish the image of the Israeli army,” the source said. “Israel is also trying to avoid deaths of hostages taken by Hamas in Gaza.”

Netanyahu has vowed to wipe out Hamas because he knows that he would lose face in view of the colossal Israeli intelligence failure. But at the end of the day, the Israeli army will face many challenges if and when it launches a ground offensive in Gaza.