FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
"Kadima", ahead: at a certain moment - tonight, tomorrow, after a week, we don't know - the order will come.
And it will be a whole new war.
Not with artillery bombs, not with surgical drone strikes or airstrikes, but the advance of infantry.
Advancing patrols armed with rifles and hand grenades will have to find nests of resistance, identify entrances to tunnels, eliminate snipers, search if possible for hostages (or their corpses) and infiltrate Hamas command centers.
The nightmare of every army, the terror of officers, the fear of soldiers.
Because at this point Hamas will use all the guerilla techniques it has carefully studied in recent years, drawing heavily on the experience of the Lebanese Hezbollah, to inflict maximum losses.
Its strong point is not only the control of the territory, the system of fortifications and tunnels that it has opened since 2006 in the narrow labyrinths of roads between the overpopulated urban areas of the "Belt of Despair" in which it has accumulated reserves of ammunition, food and water, but above all the willingness to die of his militias is revealed.
Arsenal of terrorists
Let's be honest: the weapons that Hamas has at its disposal are inferior to those of the Israelis.
Two days ago, military spokesmen invited us to visit a base on the outskirts of Gaza, where they had collected the materials found on the commandos who invaded areas near the Strip on October 7 and massacred civilians.
There were homemade mines, homemade explosives, Soviet-made RPGs from the 1970s, old Kalashnikovs and Israeli machine guns bought on the black market. In short: nothing amazing.
Consequently, the human element remains fundamental, especially in urban guerrilla warfare.
All experts today compare the challenge to Gaza with the battles against ISIS in Mosul and Raqqa in recent years.
We can add those for Sirte in 2016, or the clash in Kobane between the Kurds and ISIS in 2014.
In March 2022, Putin ordered the withdrawal of his armored columns from the Kiev region, when he realized that there were hundreds of thousands of citizens ready for resistance in the Ukrainian capital: they armed themselves, built barricades and threw Molotov cocktails.
In schools of military strategy it is taught that the ratio of invaders to conquered must be 7 to 1 to hope for any success in built-up areas and in any case the cost in terms of deaths and injuries will always be too high. .
Today, it is estimated that Hamas fighters number between 30,000 and 40,000, as well as 15,000 Islamic Jihad fighters. All the young people who know those alleys like the back of their hand: they were born and raised there, they could never go out because of the Israeli and Egyptian bans.
"Jihadists want to become martyrs. To them it is a shame not to die in battle. Fighting such enemies becomes a nightmare. When they get wounded, they put a hand grenade under their uniform and wait for us to get close to blow themselves up," soldiers on those battlefields have always told us.
The same goes for Gaza.
Territory, landscape
However, it should be added that the Israelis here have a deep knowledge of the territory, they controlled it with "boots on the ground" until 2005, and then the presence of almost 15 thousand Jewish settlers forced them to carry out constant surveillance.
The most disturbing news is the tunnels. Some appear to be miles long and most have been excavated in recent years.
According to Israeli residents of Kfar Aza, one of the massacred kibbutzim, two tunnels over 3 kilometers long even ended in their gardens. The Israelis will gas them, but the Palestinians have filter masks.
If Hamas commanders then decide it is better to stop fighting to avoid all casualties, their people have prepared escape routes: they are civilians, they can mix with their families, hide in refugee camps.
Mao's famous saying about the elusive guerrillas being like "fish in water" applies more than ever in Gaza./ Corriere della Sera
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