If you were an Israeli military commander facing the current battlefield situation, how would you advance? If you were a Hamas commander facing present realities, how would you set your defenses? The professional questions involved here fall into a blind spot for many people. Publishing this openly would invite endless abuse from the ignorant, so the following two pieces will be discussed within a limited circle. For field commanders, there are far fewer emotional elements mixed into decision-making — it is mostly a calculation of real-world trade-offs, choosing the lesser of two evils. Such choices may seem cold-hearted, even morally compromising.
The Israeli military has currently massed 200,000 troops around Gaza in preparation for urban warfare. Israel’s standing army is normally around 100,000, and scraping together 350,000 by adding 250,000 reservists is already a significant strain. If every eligible man and woman of every age were squeezed dry, the maximum mobilization capacity would be around 500,000. Clearly, that kind of total-war mobilization only happens when national survival is at stake. Mobilizing 300,000 at this point is already the upper limit for keeping society functioning normally. Of those 300,000, 200,000 are concentrated around the Gaza area.
To prevent Lebanon from reclaiming occupied territory, the 300th Territorial Defense Brigade under the 91st Territorial Defense Division has been deployed along the border. The 91st also commands the 8th Reserve Armored Brigade, the 3rd Reserve Infantry Brigade, and the 769th Territorial Defense Brigade — though the reserve units are empty shells with no personnel, weapons, or equipment. To prevent Syria from reclaiming the Golan Heights, the 7th and 188th Armored Brigades of the 36th Armored Division — Israel’s northern main force — have been deployed, along with the 1st Infantry Brigade stationed at the port of Haifa, 30 kilometers from the Lebanese border. The 36th Armored Division also commands the 282nd Artillery Brigade and the 6th Reserve Infantry Brigade. The 282nd Artillery Brigade provides fire support in the Golan Heights direction, but the 6th Reserve Infantry Brigade is also an empty shell. The 188th and 7th Armored Brigades of the 36th Armored Division are equipped with Merkava Mk.3 and Merkava Mk.4 tanks respectively, and together with long-range fire support from the 282nd Artillery Brigade, this constitutes the full extent of deployable Israeli force available to resist any joint Lebanese-Syrian effort to reclaim their occupied territories. Those reserve and territorial defense units that exist only on paper still need civilian conscripts to fill their ranks.
On the southern end, the 252nd Reserve Division and the 406th Territorial Defense Brigade under the 80th Territorial Defense Division have been deployed to guard against Egypt approaching from the Sinai Peninsula. All other units of the 80th Territorial Defense Division are empty. The 252nd Reserve Division is also a hollow shell — reserve units are even less combat-ready than territorial defense units. It should be noted that across the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt has deployed the 1st and 2nd Armies in the Suez Canal zone, totaling more than 220,000 troops.
The 89th Special Forces Brigade is responsible for monitoring Palestinians in the West Bank and watching Jordan. The same 89th Special Forces Brigade carried out arrests in the West Bank in recent days. All other forces have been redeployed to the Gaza area, currently besieging the Gaza enclave from three sides.
Gaza is a narrow strip of land — sea to the west, with reinforced concrete walls eight meters high on the north, east, and south sides. The northern side has one exit with a 3,500-square-meter inspection hall, which Israel has already retaken. The southern side also has an exit leading to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, currently under Israeli control. The southern wall runs 13 kilometers, the northern wall 10 kilometers, and the entire eastern wall 22 kilometers. Route 10 through the middle once had an entrance point that Israel has now sealed. Entering from the eastern wall, there is 3 to 5 kilometers of open ground, beyond which every inch is covered by densely packed buildings — no trees, no green spaces, no parks. Overlapping rows of buildings and narrow, winding streets create the layout of one enormous slum. Near the beach on the western side there are some stretches of sand, and extending 4 kilometers out to sea from the beach is Israel’s naval blockade line.
Water, electricity, and food supply are entirely controlled through the two gates on the north and south, which connect to a main north-south road running through Gaza. There is also an east-west Route 10 in the middle of Gaza, about 6 kilometers long, intersecting the north-south road in a cross. At present, the northern part of Gaza above Route 10 has been almost entirely leveled by continuous bombing at a rate of 6,000 tons of munitions per day. The southern buildings are also being progressively demolished by sustained bombing. Despite causing massive civilian casualties, targets have included schools, mosques, hospitals — all high-density gathering places — as well as UNRWA warehouses, resulting in the deaths of 29 UN workers.
If the surrounding Israeli forces were to push in for urban combat, they would face densely packed structures and extremely complex narrow streets — an interlocking crossfire network. The personnel losses from urban warfare in such an environment are more than Israel can bear. In these conditions, tanks and armored vehicles cannot project their full power, and instead become easy prey for Javelin anti-tank missiles fired from some building corner — and you read that right: Hamas has just displayed their Javelin and Stinger man-portable anti-tank and anti-helicopter weapons, all original American-made equipment, supplied by NATO to Ukraine and then resold to them through backchannels. Moreover, in such an environment, you wouldn’t even need Javelins — RPGs or even improvised explosive charges can execute short, sharp attacks on tanks and armored vehicles at close range. Just a few days ago, Hamas destroyed 6 Israeli tanks and armored vehicles using exactly this method.
If you were an Israeli commander, you would certainly have no desire to fight this kind of urban battle: 2.23 million people live here, with the world’s highest building density, and some of the alleys between buildings are barely wide enough for one person. No matter how skilled Israeli special forces are in Close-Quarters Battle (CQB) tactics, they cannot dominate people who have spent their entire lives in this environment. A single sniper hiding in any corner could inflict catastrophic casualties on Israeli soldiers bottlenecked in the alleyways.
Of the 300,000 Israeli troops, 200,000 are temporary reserve conscripts — never mind the image built by media footage of Israeli soldiers carrying rifles while buying coffee on the street; that’s just image-building. When the command post of the 143rd (Gaza) Division was stormed by Hamas, a group of female soldiers who normally walked the streets with rifles hanging off them hid in their rooms and cried. Not a single Israeli soldier in the video picked up a weapon and returned fire — they simply locked their doors and cowered in fear. Temporary reserve conscripts are essentially adult civilians. If they were actually sent into urban combat in Gaza — without intelligence and in unfamiliar terrain — their performance would be even worse than those soldiers at the Gaza Division headquarters.
The Gaza Division commands two mechanized brigades, one mechanized reconnaissance battalion, and one divisional signals battalion. Yet in the raid, the commander of one mechanized brigade, the commander of the divisional signals battalion, one battalion commander of a mechanized brigade, five company commanders, and three platoon commanders were all killed. The former division commander — currently the major general commanding the IDF’s elite 888 Ghost Division special forces — was taken alive. The division headquarters is located 6.6 kilometers from the Gaza perimeter wall, a fortified compound whose overall layout resembles a butterfly: tanks and armored vehicles parked at the southern “wing,” a radar station and auto-defense fire towers at the northern “wing,” with the headquarters buildings in the center connected to both wings by roads and corridors. When the central headquarters complex was stormed by Hamas light infantry, all it would have taken was a few people running out to drive a couple of tanks from the southern wing over — and those Hamas fighters armed only with AKs would have been helpless. Yet most Gaza Division personnel instinctively locked themselves in, rather than going to man the tanks and armored vehicles or picking up their weapons to fight back.
Can an army grown soft in peacetime truly fight brutal urban warfare? If you cannot shatter the enemy’s will to resist in the first wave of attack through your own overwhelming advantages, the fight turns into a war of attrition — and a war of attrition requires soldiers to fight tooth and nail with genuine combat will and tactical competence, with massive casualties as the price. The Russia-Ukraine battlefield has already proven this. Back in the day, 10,000 US troops plus 15,000 US-trained Iraqi government forces — 25,000 troops total equipped with American weapons — attacked the Iraqi city of Fallujah from four directions. Inside were only 2,000 Iraqi militiamen armed with nothing but RPGs, AK-47s, and a few 60mm mortars. The US-Iraq coalition still suffered enormous casualties.
Two days ago an Israeli F-16C was shot down by a surface-to-air missile of Iranian origin fired from within Syrian territory. Reportedly, Iran had integrated an Eastern navigation system into the missile, eliminating dependence on GPS and improving accuracy. And just recently, Lebanese armed forces destroyed an Israeli electronic warfare base on the northern border that had been under construction for 30 years. Aside from the loss of several hundred billion dollars, the primary damage is the loss of intelligence, awareness, and surveillance capability over Lebanese and Syrian troop deployments and movements to the north.
Once the bulk of Israel’s combat strength becomes bogged down in Gaza with no end in sight and no way to disengage — even requiring personnel redeployments from other fronts to fill gaps — neither the 36th Division deployed in the north nor the two territorial defense divisions deployed in the south will be able to withstand neighboring countries seizing the opportunity to reclaim their occupied territories.
The Israeli military leadership is surely well aware of this. That is precisely why, regardless of worldwide condemnation, they would rather carry out indiscriminate demolition of all structures in Gaza by force. No matter how many civilians and children die, no matter how many ordinary people’s cameras bring scenes of hell before the eyes of the world — the Israeli military must completely destroy every building that could be used for urban warfare. Rubble can still conceal fighters, but it cannot function as the labyrinthine urban forest that a dense cityscape creates. In addition, the Israeli military has been requesting bunker-buster bombs from the United States, hoping to demolish surface structures while simultaneously destroying Gaza’s complex underground tunnel network — maximizing the degradation of the enemy’s ability to conceal, move, and launch surprise attacks using the terrain.
Using Route 10, which runs from the center of Gaza out to the sea, as a dividing line: the Israeli Air Force will continue its systematic demolition of Gaza — which has no meaningful means of retaliation — first completely destroying the northern sector, then moving on to demolish the southern buildings. Under sustained blockade and continuous bombing, many of the 2.2-plus million people here will slowly die. While this will draw condemnation from the entire world, as long as no one dares to directly intervene, the Israeli military will continue this approach — maximally degrading the enemy’s resistance capacity and minimizing the risks of urban combat.
Going forward, under sustained bombing conditions, once most of Gaza’s structures have been demolished, the Israeli military still will not attack from three directions simultaneously. Instead, the main assault will focus on the area north of Route 10: one force pressing down from the northern gate along the north-south road, while another force pushes in from the center along the east-west Route 10, first splitting the people and forces in Gaza along this axis. The central thrust will be the primary attack force, tasked with severing north-south communications within Gaza and blocking any reinforcement from southern Gaza to the north. Then armored forces will conduct sweep operations through the rubble to eliminate remaining resistance. When encountering enemy ambush fire, they will withdraw and call in air strikes first. In other words, the Israeli military will concentrate these 300,000 troops to attack an area where all structures have been demolished and the enemy has been divided by overwhelming force — rather than throwing themselves into urban combat across the entirety of Gaza. Because it must achieve a swift conclusion — it cannot afford a prolonged fight.
Given this real-world situation, if you were a Hamas commander, how would you respond? The next piece will elaborate in detail on how Hamas will respond and what tactics they might employ.