The urban fighting in Gaza is not like in the movies: You don’t kick in doors. Instead, you blow them up.
“We shoot rockets against the walls of the houses or blow up the door,” said Benzie Sanders, a former soldier, speaking from his experience of the last war in the enclave. “You walk in, guns are firing. Everyone’s supposed to be gone. All we’re supposed to be waiting for is mini-traps and fighters.”
For Sanders, 32, there was no time to be afraid as he made his way into the unknown.
“You try to stay alert. You’re in survival mode, but there’s no fear because there’s no time to think. If you feel fear rising, you say, ‘Not now.’
Not everyone feels that way.
“It was absolutely terrifying, to be very honest with you,” says Ben, a gunner in the Parachute Regiment in the same war, speaking with fond hindsight from the London office where he now works.
“We entered Gaza and we did so under fire from Israeli artillery, tanks, helicopters. It was the most dangerous period. There are traps, Hamas knows you are coming, they can have a very good idea of the routes you are coming. We were crossing in the open.” .
Israel has almost certainly decided that it will soon attempt its third full-scale ground invasion of Gaza in 15 years. Yesterday, the troops underwent last-minute training on the battle plans that the leadership of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has already prepared and presented to the military cabinet.
These plans are secret. But as veterans of previous wars admit, there aren’t many ways to invade a strip of territory 25 miles long and less than seven miles wide.
This means that the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who have been called up can have some idea of what to expect. Some do it a second time.
Aviv Haimson, 33, also a paratrooper, spoke via video link from a field somewhere near the Gaza border where he was preparing for battle. He spent 16 days in 2014 sitting on a roof with a machine gun.
His squad was tasked with destroying the Hamas tunnels, the primary mission of this incursion. He defended the unit’s work from above, using all the sophisticated equipment – including night vision goggles – available to the Israeli army.
It’s a job that requires good judgement: any movement could be an enemy, but it could also be one of your own colleagues.
Yet a moment’s hesitation can spell disaster as buildings cover both sides. Sam Gosling’s comrades died instantly when he was in a position similar to Heimson’s – looking over Gaza from a roof.
“Hamas fired three anti-tank rockets at our building,” Gosling, 31, recalled to The Times. “The first one hit my commanding officer directly, killing him instantly. Unbeknownst to me, I was also wounded. Two rockets hit the floor below us where there were other soldiers. So I ran out, started giving first aid to some of the others, and my friends from my unit carried them to the evacuation point. And it was only then that I realized that I myself had also been wounded.”
The other great fear of Israeli troops is being kidnapped. In 2014, this was a particular tactic used by Hamas from hidden entrances to the tunnels. Ben says that his unit found an entrance to a tunnel under a chicken coop. But they missed the second entrance, from which a group of Hamas fighters came out and tried to kidnap part of the Israelis. A shootout ensued.
Not far from where Ben served at Khan Younis, a tunnel attack led to one of the most controversial incidents of that war, when a section of Hamas attacked an Israeli unit, killing two of its members and capturing a third, Lieutenant Hadar Goldin.
Israeli authorities began a ferocious bombardment of the area, allegedly in accordance with the so-called “Hannibal Doctrine”, which states that any means may be used to prevent Israeli hostage-taking.
At the time, it was claimed that the bombs killed both Goldin and Palestinian civilians, although it was later said that he was already dead when they started falling from the sky. His body was never returned.
“The fear of being kidnapped is extreme,” admits Ben. “Everyone is very cautious.”
The soldiers now have to live with the knowledge that if they are captured, they will join more than 200 others, mostly civilians, but dozens of them military.
The conflict in Ukraine reintroduced us to the idea of old-fashioned warfare: tanks rolling down highways, full-frontal attacks by companies in the open. Michael Milstein, a former IDF intelligence officer and adviser to the unit that manages Palestinian civilian affairs, said the upcoming assault should rather be compared to the battle for Mosul in the war against Isis.
That hides the prospect of a battle many times bigger and bloodier than the 2014 invasion. Israeli leaders say it will drag on for months.
In some ways, Milstein explains, it will be even more difficult than Mosul, where the Islamic State is the outsider. Hamas has a section of the local civilian population that would offer support to its fighters.
The devastation in Mosul was total, and this is also something that, in the case of Gaza, Israeli leaders will have to take into account as they face political opposition from around the world.
Even the more limited war in 2014 changed minds, including those who participated. Sanders had moved to Israel from New York because of a Zionist passion. He is now a peace activist who has joined Breaking the Silence, a group of veterans campaigning to end the occupation of the Palestinian territories.
His moment of truth came during a particularly bloody moment in the war in 2014. His squad had helped clear an area of Beit Hanoun, in the northern Gaza Strip, but was surprised to find a Palestinian family of eight still living there in the middle of the battle.
After a squad member was hit by a grenade from elsewhere, the air force came and bombed the neighborhood, destroying it and killing the family hiding there.
War has many outcomes, perhaps most of all for the participants. Heimson survived without a scratch or even serious danger, he said. Sanders has lost at least some of his faith in the cause he serves. Gosling was injured and lost his commanding officer, but he believed it was all worth it.
“I don’t think it was a waste of time,” he says. “We’ve had almost nine years where Hamas hasn’t been able to cross the borders and attack civilians, and a lot of that is because we went into Gaza and destroyed the tunnels. It didn’t happen for no reason.”
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2023-10-25 18:58:00
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