The battle for Gaza City: Israel strikes at Hamas’s ‘centre of gravity’

First came a month-long aerial bombardment. Then Israeli armour and infantry moved in behind a rolling barrage of air and artillery strikes that cut besieged Gaza in half and isolated Hamas’s military stronghold in the north of the territory.

The encirclement this week of Gaza City by Israeli forces is the latest step in their mission to destroy the militant group – striking at what one official called Hamas’s “centre of gravity”. The campaign will stretch Israel’s military resources and expose its troops to the perils of close combat, while placing Palestinians directly in the crossfire between Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces.

The IDF will be dragged into “urban fighting in a packed-in dense city, and below that you have these tunnel systems that proffer every advantage to the defence”, said Joe Buccino, a former official at US Central Command, which includes Israel.

“They’re going to encounter layers upon layers of complexity... It’s obviously very tough and they haven’t even started.”

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Israel, the region’s most advanced fighting force, has evolved over the decades to focus on distant threats, from targeted raids in Syria to preparing for conflict with Iran and its Middle East proxies.

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But its war with Hamas, which was responsible for the October 7th killing of at least 1,400 Israelis, according to Israeli officials, has meant adapting to the complexities of battle in an urban environment an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv, against militants who have spent years preparing for just this clash. This week, an Israeli F-35 fighter designed to fly 2,000km was tasked with hitting a target 200m ahead of Israeli soldiers.

As Israeli troops moved into Gaza, Hamas fighters have harried the logistics lines supplying them. The militant operatives are adept at popping out of hidden tunnels and half-destroyed buildings to fire anti-tank missiles and rocket-propelled grenades, with one attack on an armoured vehicle killing 10 Israeli soldiers.

“It’s back to Guerrilla 101,” said a former Israeli soldier with combat experience in Gaza. “On top of that you’ve got hostages,” Buccino added, referring to the more than 240 people taken by Hamas and held in Gaza.

More than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s month-long aerial bombardment of Gaza, according to officials in the Hamas-run territory. The scale of the destruction is such that the UN and other aid agencies say that a humanitarian disaster is unfolding.

Communication blackouts make it hard to assess the IDF’s progress. But satellite imagery, combined with interviews with current and former Israeli soldiers and military experts, give a sense of the coming battle for Gaza City, which had a prewar population of about 600,000.

Israel’s aim, military officials and analysts say, will not be to fight street by street, as US-led forces did in Fallujah during the second Iraq war. Instead, its plan is to clear out pockets of territory and use them as bases for urban raids. The result will be a series of small battles and skirmishes for sections of the territory.

Itamar Yaar, a former deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council, said Israeli forces did not need to take control of “every square inch of Gaza City ... to achieve their main objectives. Step by step they’ll take control of every part they see as important”.

The aim is for each raid is to gather fresh intelligence on Hamas and its military infrastructure. Israeli forces will then withdraw and call in air strikes, leading to more raids, in an iterative process.

The Israeli military has also shifted the focus away from targeting the high-ranking Hamas planners behind October 7th to include mid-level field lieutenants leading the fight against Israeli troops. This would “significantly undermine Hamas’s capabilities to carry out counter attacks”, said a spokesman.

Complex operations lie ahead. The Israeli military has already indicated it plans to take control of al-Shifa hospital, the largest in the strip, in the heart of Gaza City. Israel says Hamas has built a vast underground headquarters beneath the medical facility. Taking over Shifa would also be “symbolic”, according to Yaar.

But to take control of a site such as Shifa “you have to become a static force from a moving force”, said the Israeli soldier with experience in the field.

Infantry will be required to leave their armoured vehicles and maintain roadblocks, while protecting themselves from Hamas. The Financial Times last week reported that dozens of buildings around Shifa had already been destroyed by air strikes.

Hamas has denied using Shifa for military purposes, saying Israel’s “false allegations are criminal and dangerous, and pave the way for targeting of the entire headquarters of the hospital”.

Israeli forces have also been able to move armour right across the strip, roughly along the newly built Number 10 Road to the Mediterranean Sea, completing their encirclement of Gaza City.

It is unclear how many people remain in northern Gaza, where Israel’s military last month ordered residents to evacuate to the territory’s south. The IDF has estimated a figure in the low hundreds of thousands, while Gaza’s interior ministry said at least 900,000 people were still north of the evacuation line.

This week, the Israeli military published images of hundreds of Palestinians walking along one of the evacuation routes, with their hands in the air and some waving white flags.

Two densely populated refugee camps, Jabaliya and Al-Shati, have also been targeted by Israeli air strikes. It is not known whether the Israeli military will do more than strike the camps. If troops moved in, they would be easy targets, while images of them among dense crowds of refugees would provide rich propaganda imagery for Hamas to broadcast through the Arab world.

Alongside the ground offensive, there is an information war. Advancing Israeli forces claimed to have found rocket launchers in a children’s scout clubhouse and a mosque, buttressing claims that Hamas uses civilians as shields.

Hamas has also produced its own videos. In one, a fighter aims an RPG at an Israeli armoured personnel carrier rumbling down the street. After he pulls the trigger, his headcam jolts upwards with the recoil, and there is a flash as the grenade explodes against the vehicle, followed by an exultant cry of victory – although there was no evidence that the carrier was destroyed.

“It’s part of the overall information battle where every tactical engagement becomes strategically important,” said Samuel Cranny Evans, associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank in London. “But in this case, getting hit by an RPG doesn’t guarantee anything. Although the Hamas videos give the impression that Hamas is dominating, modern Israeli armour can soak up multiple hits.”

Yet Israel’s sophisticated armour has its limits. With new, windowless Eitan armoured personnel carriers in short supply, older Namer infantry fighting vehicles are being used. Last week one was pierced by back-to-back anti-tank missiles fired by a Hamas crew, killing all 10 Israeli soldiers inside.

The pace of combat has also changed as the IDF has moved to encircle Gaza City, according to an account by Eado Hecht, a military analyst at the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies, with “the intensity of the fighting escalated considerably” since October 31st.

One IDF tactic is to use its battlefield earth movers, the D9R bulldozers, to dig out large berms to protect troops from incoming fire while combat engineers close off tunnels. Tanks have also been fitted with newly designed metal cones to bounce off grenades dropped from drones.

Unmanned aerial vehicles have spread out over the territory, feeding signals back through algorithms that compare each image with those that came before. Any changes are analysed to see whether they represent a potential threat.

But just as Gaza is not impregnable, neither is the IDF’s cutting-edge technology. Hamas released a video last week of a drone dropping what appeared to be a grenade on a group of Israeli soldiers sitting in a circle.

In the last frame, at least half a dozen soldiers lie prone on the ground, casualties of an enemy determined to exploit any crack in Israel’s armour. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023