Israeli soldiers fight to reach Hamas’s headquarters

ISRAEL’S GROUND offensive is entering a dangerous new stage, ten days after it began. On November 5th the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) unleashed a series of devastating air strikes in and around Gaza city. The goal was to damage Hamas’s tunnel networks; now Israeli troops are advancing into the city centre where they believe Hamas’s underground headquarters is located. Israel has simultaneously been blocking Gaza’s telephone networks and imposing a communications blackout on the enclave. Armoured columns, operating to the north and south of the city, have cut it off from the rest of the Gaza Strip.

Having isolated it, Israel’s forces are now penetrating deep into Gaza city, far farther than in the ground campaigns of 2009 and 2014. Back then their objectives were more limited: to destroy a number of Hamas’s tunnels and its rocket-launchers. This time the stated goal is the destruction of Hamas, in particular its leadership which Israeli intelligence believes to be holed up under the al-Shifa hospital (Israel claims it has evidence that Hamas is using other hospitals in the city as cover too; Hamas says this is a “false narrative”). But to get to these headquarters, the IDF must first get through Hamas’s defensive lines.

For the generals preparing the battle plans, the diplomatic clock is ticking. In horrific scenes more than 10,000 Palestinians have already been killed, according to the Gaza health ministry, which is controlled by Hamas. America is still supporting Israel, for now. On October 18th it vetoed a UN resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. But on November 4th Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, called for “humanitarian pauses” to allow more civilians to leave the war zone and aid to be brought in from Egypt. International pressure will only increase as the fighting intensifies around locations inside Gaza city where those civilians who have not fled are sheltering, particularly the hospitals. On November 6th the heads of several UN bodies made a united call for a humanitarian ceasefire, according to Reuters.

As the number of civilian casualties soars, Israel’s “window of legitimacy”, as Israeli officials typically describe it, is fast closing in the eyes of the rest of the world. It is impossible to predict how many more Palestinians will die. Most of the parts of Gaza city that Israel’s forces are now going through are largely empty, but large numbers of people are still sheltering in the centre of the city, mainly around hospitals and UNRWA relief centres which Israel also says are the locations of Hamas’s headquarters.

In the time it believes it has left, the IDF is focusing on Hamas’s main headquarters in Gaza city. If that objective is met, they hope Hamas’s military chain of command will be broken. Some military leaders may escape, either through tunnels or disguised among the evacuees, to the southern part of the strip. But Israel believes that driving them out of the city and having them on the run will weaken Hamas. “Then we can change tactics, have fewer forces inside Gaza, and attack Hamas strongholds in a series of smaller raids,” says one general.

On November 4th The Economist was invited by the IDF to accompany troops to the front line. Over the course of several hours no civilians were seen. Officers and soldiers said they had sighted only a handful since entering Gaza city on October 27th. Around three-quarters of the 1m-strong civilian population is estimated to have heeded the IDF’s warnings and fled south, away from the part of the city which Israeli troops are now encircling.

Nearly 30 Israeli soldiers were killed in the first eight days of the ground offensive, over a third of them in a single incident when an armoured vehicle was hit by two anti-tank missiles, killing all those inside. “Even the best armour has vulnerabilities,” says Lieutenant-Colonel Iddo, a commander in the 401st armoured brigade, which is leading the assault on the city from the north-west. For an urban-warfare campaign on this scale, the IDF’s casualty numbers are not considered to be high. But as the brigade prepares to enter the densely built-up centre of Gaza city, the fighting will get more difficult and dangerous as soldiers have to leave their tanks and fight in the open.

Even the veteran Israeli field commanders who fought in the previous rounds of warfare in Gaza are unfamiliar with some of the areas they reached by the end of the first week of this ground operation. At an advanced brigade command-post beside a ruined villa in the northern part of Gaza city, one lieutenant-colonel had to consult his hand-held digital tactical map to remind himself which neighbourhood his tanks were in. His chief concern was being ambushed from concealed tunnel exits.

After three weeks of aerial bombardment following the attack on October 7th, Israel sent in its mechanised divisions: battalions of Merkava tanks together with infantry and combat-engineers on fighting vehicles which are as heavy as tanks but are designed to carry soldiers instead of cannons. Learning from the casualties it suffered in its previous wars in Gaza, the IDF has invested heavily in advanced armour. This includes not only “active” protection systems, capable of detecting and destroying anti-tank missiles before impact, but cameras which enable the crew inside to scour their surroundings and direct fire at any sign of an ambush. The commanders’ screens also display tactical maps with the locations of both friendly forces and the enemy and real-time surveillance footage from drones flying above.

One soldier, the webbing on his flak jacket stuffed with magazines, said that “so far we’ve just been driving around; there’s been very little infantry work.” Tucked inside a tank, the screens and remote-control machine-gun joystick gives the battle a somewhat detached, almost sterile feeling. But at some point the squad must always leave their vehicle to look more closely for the exits of Hamas’s tunnels and secure the tanks from attacks. Once outside, exposed and away from the screens, the sense of being on a battlefield is overpowering. A pall of dust from hundreds of destroyed buildings, churned up by tank tracks, mingles with a cool breeze blowing from the nearby Mediterranean.

Across the whole of the Gaza Strip, 11% of buildings have been damaged, according to The Economist’s tracker. Large parts of the small towns in northern Gaza have been flattened by Israeli air strikes. But in Gaza city itself, most of the buildings were still standing, though many have been severely damaged. Either through the tank’s thermal cameras or through rifle-sights on concealed positions in the villa’s walls, the soldiers remained on constant look-out for any sign of Hamas snipers or missile-teams. Farther away, a concealed mortar was firing on them, getting closer every few minutes.

Both sides have reached this war after many years of training and preparations. Compared with the previous ground offensives in the past two significant wars in Gaza, in 2009 and 2014, Israel is using more tanks and other armour and occupying more territory. It has better integrated its field units with one another, adopting a combined-arms structure in which tank and infantry brigades have been reorganised into merged brigade combat groups. “We’ve been training and operating together for three or four years now,” says Lieutenant-Colonel Iddo.

But Hamas has learned its lessons as well, making greater use of its tunnels to move its men between different locations and training them to emerge overground for just a few seconds to launch anti-tank missiles or mortars. “They won’t engage us in open fire,” says Lieutenant-Colonel Iddo. Hamas has been watching the war between Russia and Ukraine. It has adapted small, commercial drones to drop anti-tank grenades onto the tank turrets. The vehicles’ “active” protection systems were not designed to deal with such attacks; instead the IDF has hastily welded metal “cope cages” on top of the turrets which mean the grenades explode without damaging the tank or hurting its crew.

Hamas has had over 16 years, since it took control of Gaza in a coup against the Palestinian Authority in 2007, to build a subterranean city. Israel destroyed parts of it in 2014 and more in the war in May 2021 (when Israel launched air strikes but stopped short of sending in ground troops). Since then Hamas has rebuilt and expanded its infrastructure, stockpiling food, fuel and ammunition too. It is set for a lengthy battle.

Israel’s bunker-busting bombs on the evening of November 5th could be heard in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 80km away. They were the IDF’s last attempts to destroy Hamas’s tunnels from the air before its soldiers go in to try to do it on the ground.■