Down through history there have been a number of notorious urban battles that left a butcher's bill of casualties in their wake. These blood-soaked cities include Stalingrad, Konigsberg, Manila, Hue, Grozny, Mosul, Ramadi, and Falluja- to name but a few. And although glorified by many of the successful attacking forces, these urban meat grinders represented a type of military mentality that preferred to sacrifice manpower instead of using creative thinking about how to defeat an entrenched enemy. And now, we can add to this list of horror and grief the name of Gaza City.
We've known for years that if push came to shove, Hamas was more than happy to draw the IDF into a costly house-to-house battle for control of Gaza City. Moreover, the extensive tunnel system the terrorist group constructed was designed specifically to make our progress through the city as bloody as possible. And counting on the world's cynical "concern" for civilian casualties, Hamas also factored into their plans both the use of human shields and hospitals as ways of slowing and complicating the IDF's passage through their urban fortress complex. Given what we've seen so far since our army crossed into Gaza, Hamas' game plan has worked rather well.
For an army that supposedly values the lives of its troops, and is acutely sensitive to the need to win quickly so as to return the mobilized reservists back into the economy, I was appalled by the IDF's rather cavalier decision to accommodate Hamas' playbook. Indeed, at this time, nobody seems to know exactly when Gaza City will be cleared of its Hamas defenders or what the IDF's price for this accomplishment will come to. And with the situation up north ready to blow into a full scale war at any time, we simply can't afford to waste either the time or our soldiers' lives fighting block by block through the urban Hellscape that Gaza City represents. This is why before the IDF advanced into Gaza I warned everyone I could about the need to avoid what I characterized as a probable "Stalingrad on the Mediterranean" scenario. Did anyone listen? Judging by our mounting losses, apparently not.
What I had proposed instead was a one week pre-invasion bombardment of Gaza City employing a number of non-nuclear weapons that would decisively degrade Hamas' surface defenses without requiring weeks of bombardment. Perhaps more importantly, Hamas' tunnel complex and rocket arsenal would also be neutralized during this time without the need for lengthy ground operations by our combat engineers or rocket suppression missions by the IAF. Although intrigued by some of the weapons I'd suggested, the army, unfortunately, seemed more concerned about world opinion than the lives of our soldiers, and the rest is history.
At this point in time, it's worth asking whether there is anything we could do to reduce our escalating casualties in Gaza while, at the same time, shorten the time necessary to destroy Hamas. I think we still have the option of building and utilizing special munitions. Assuming this were to be done, it would allow us to reduce the size of the force we've committed to handle the Gaza front. The forces saved could then be redeployed to the north, allowing the IDF the option of launching a preventive strike against Hezbollah. Use of these special weapons would also encourage the Palestinian evacuees in southern Gaza to crash the Egyptian border before we employed them against Khan Yunis and Rafah. Granted, Egypt might not appreciate this development, but our need to clear Gaza of it's radicalized residents is of supreme importance if we are going to annex the Strip and successfully rebuild our destroyed Gaza envelope communities. The international community could complain all it wants about our actions, but we simply have to go forward with this plan if our southern region is to have any chance of enjoying peace and security.
