You won’t believe what’s waiting for the Israeli army in Gaza – it’s beyond imagination and worse!

Eyal was 26 when the army engineer first entered Gaza, sent by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to help dismantle the extensive tunnels that Hamas had dug to hide its fighters and sneak into Israeli territory.

Nine years later, he is preparing for Netanyahu to send him back, to take down the same militant group. This time, Eyal knows what awaits him and his companions.

“A nightmare, except it’s real,” he said of entering Palestinian territory controlled by Hamas since 2007. “Everything you touch could be a bomb, anyone you see could be a terrorist. You have to move slowly, deliberately. Sometimes they move faster than you can respond. The only thing keeping you alive is your training.”

Israel’s planned invasion of the densely populated enclave is aimed at rooting out Hamas, whose fighters killed at least 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers in their assault on the Jewish state on Saturday, according to the Israeli government, and took back dozens of hostages. Palestinian authorities say more than 1,200 people in Gaza have been killed by Israeli shelling triggered by the incursion.

What awaits Israeli soldiers is “everything you can imagine and worse,” said Ehud Olmert, who as prime minister in 2008 sent ground troops into the 40km-long territory for the three-week Operation Cast Lead.

“It won’t be easy and it won’t be pleasant, either for us or for them,” he said. Given the clear intelligence failures that preceded Saturday’s attack, Israeli troops may encounter “new launchers or new types of more powerful rockets [and] larger or newer anti-tank rockets that we don’t know about.”

And unlike in the past, when the Israel Defense Forces were sent to achieve limited objectives, Netanyahu promises complete victory Hamas. It is a mission so complex and demanding that it is unclear how long it will take or how many lives – Israeli and Palestinian – it will cost.

Hamas has amassed a formidable arsenal of rockets since Israeli soldiers last entered Gaza in 2014. It has also built hundreds of kilometers of tunnels, dubbed the “Gaza Metro,” to move fighters and weapons without detection , and trained in urban combat.

Until Saturday’s shock attack, the IDF believed it was keeping pace with Hamas’s ruthless inventiveness, spending billions on sensors to detect underground movements and building a barrier to prevent tunnels from reaching Israel.

Now, with 300,000 soldiers massed at the Gaza border and IsraelWhile the Hamas air force is bombing Hamas targets, the IDF appears to be on the verge of a ground invasion unlike any since it moved into Lebanon in 1982 in an effort to root out Palestinian militants and set up a friendly government in Beirut.

“Hamas is very well prepared, but we know it too. And we have improved our tools and our methods,” said IDF spokesman Major Nir Dinar. “It’s a double psychology. I know they know it and they know I know it.

At least 66 Israeli soldiers and six civilians died in the 2014 conflict. Among Palestinians, 2,133 people were killed, including 1,489 civilians, according to the United Nations. Another 500,000 people have been displaced, as parts of Gaza have been reduced to rubble.

The destruction and loss of life caused by Israel’s bombing and ground offensive on Gaza, with Palestinian civilians trapped inside the impoverished strip, triggered an international uproar that helped Hamas project an image of victory and remain in power.

The new war against Hamas, which Netanyahu called “protracted and painful,” will pit two competing methods of warfare against each other. This time the inhabitants of Gaza are preparing for an even more devastating assault; Israel has already laid siege to the Strip, cutting off water and electricity.

The Israeli army, the most powerful in the Middle East, will fight an enemy that will seek to exploit all the advantages of urban defense – from booby traps and sniper positions to hardened strongholds – as well as a variety of low-tech tactics to weaken the Israel’s technological capacity. superiority.

According to Shimon Arad, a retired IDF colonel, the tunnel network had also deterred Israel from carrying out extensive ground operations inside Gaza.

The Israeli military will deploy its so-called “victory doctrine,” which requires the air force to rapidly destroy a series of pre-controlled targets. It’s already in play, with fighter jets intensely bombing large swaths of Gaza, stopping only to refuel, often in mid-air.

The campaign is intended to overcome Hamas’s ability to regroup and, according to a person familiar with the discussions that created the 2020 doctrine, to “achieve maximum goals before the international community exerts political pressure to slow down.”

“It will be very bloody,” said John Spencer, a former American major who chairs urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute of the United States Military Academy, better known as West Point. “You cannot change the nature of urban warfare. There will be a lot of collateral damage.”

Israel has developed some of the most advanced urban warfare training in the world in preparation for such conflicts. The exercises take place in Baladia, a 5,000-acre facility in southern Israel built in 2005 to resemble a typical Middle Eastern city, with 600 buildings, including mosques and a kasbah, arranged around narrow streets.

A military technique involves entering buildings by breaking through side walls to avoid booby-trapped doors. Once inside, soldiers blow up interior walls to avoid sniper fire on stairwells or open spaces on the street.

Another tactic is the use of three-story-tall armored bulldozers to clear the way for units fighting on the ground.

Anthony King, professor of war studies at the University of Exeter and author of Urban warfare in the 21st centuryhe said Israel’s likely first step would involve building what he described as “a layered airpower cylinder rising 60,000 feet above the fighting.”

“Micro-drones and attack helicopters will be at the lowest level, surveillance and kamikaze drones above them, then fighter planes and – at the top – strategic reconnaissance planes. Plus, they will all be connected,” King said.

“The next step will see armored vehicles taking to the roads and artillery making their way. It will be very destructive.”

Before Israeli forces can reach Hamas’s urban strongholds, they must breach a series of defensive lines that will include mines, ambush sites and mortar targets, according to a recent analysis by Nadav Morag, a former Israeli security adviser.

Heavy mortars, machine guns, anti-tank weapons, snipers and perhaps suicide bombers wait on the outskirts of Gaza’s cities. Penetrating the tunnels will require intense close-quarters combat and the use of “sponge bombs,” a chemical compound that seals small entrances.

“It doesn’t destroy the tunnels, but it allows troops to move around without having to flush enemy troops out of each tunnel,” Spencer said.

Urban warfare, by its nature, is devastating. The battles for the city of Fallujah following the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq saw some of the fiercest fighting faced by the Americans. Russian forces have annihilated Ukrainian cities, including Mariupol, with rocket and artillery attacks in the initial phase of the 2022 invasion.

Dismantling Hamas while rescuing Israeli hostages and minimizing civilian casualties will be an extremely complex – some would say impossible – mission for the IDF.

During the war between Israel and Hamas in 2021, civilians were warned via leaflets, loudspeakers and telephone to evacuate battle areas before attacks began. But it didn’t always work out as expected. Even when precision fire eliminated enemy positions in one building, defenders could move to another until it was destroyed.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Olmert warned that Netanyahu and the IDF face a moral dilemma: using air power to attack Hamas increases the risk of civilian casualties, while using ground troops is more accurate but increases the risk to Israeli soldiers.

“The question boils down to one thing: Are we ready to take an action that will pose a great risk to Israeli soldiers, or will we choose a strategy that will cause the tragic deaths of a greater number of uninvolved people,” he said. “From what I know of Israeli public opinion at the moment, the push will be to take fewer risks.”