The debate in Israel about a ground incursion into the Gaza Strip occupies all the political and media attention, while hundreds of thousands of reservists wait at the borders for the moment of truth.
Day 15 of fighting: Documentation of IDF forces' deployment for the ground incursion // IDF Spokesperson
Questions are thrown into the air about the need for aerial softening, about tunnel warfare and about defining the objectives of the operation, and many find it difficult to imagine what a large IDF ground operation in the Gaza Strip would look like.
In recent days, the US media has echoed a series of statements by senior American officials, who provided their Israeli counterparts with points of comparison from another well-known conflict in Washington. The New York Times reported that in a conversation with Defense Minister Yoav Galant, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin mentioned the battle that took place in the city of Fallujah.
"In fact, the United States fought two battles in Fallujah, in April 2004 and November of that year, and both are relevant to Israel's action in the Gaza Strip," says Prof. Danny Orbach, a military historian from the Hebrew University's departments of history and Asian studies. In Fallujah, a city in the Sunni Triangle in central Iraq, a revolt by Sunni Islamist militants broke out. The clumsy American attempt to enter the city and suppress the rebellion ended in disaster, both military and political.
Prof. Orbach, Photo: Joshua Yosef
"From the first battle of Fallujah we have a lot to learn," says Orbach. "What happened is that the U.S. was dragged into the response without preparing for it, just got swept up in the action. The political echelon pressured the Marines to launch the operation unprepared, without intelligence and outnumbered by the rebels. The rebels have also blocked roads and denied the Americans reinforcements, while enjoying an influx of militants from all over Iraq. The two battalions of Marines sent to the city were forced to retreat after suffering heavy losses, and the U.S. Army recorded one of its most significant defeats of the 21st century.
"The fighting also turned into a media disaster, with the US Air Force bombing targets without intelligence and hundreds of civilians killed. The Bush administration acted in a politically sensitive situation and sought to end the story quickly. Instead, he got a long and painful story."
Invest in preparedness
Fallujah's second battle took place a few months later, and the Americans were already ready. "They succeeded in enlisting the Iraqi government to take a greater part in the operation and even responded to the government's request to give it a name in Arabic. They came in the right order of forces, with a lot of equipment and also with political breathing space, which is no less important." The recapture of Fallujah took a month and a half and cost many lives, but the rebel organizations were expelled from the city and control was transferred to the Iraqis.
Hamas terrorists in Gaza, 2017, photo: GettyImages
Iraq provided another example of fierce urban warfare, one that is hard to ignore ahead of the Gaza campaign: the battle for Mosul (2017-2016), which was controlled by ISIS. Iraq's second-largest city has a population of two million, close to that of the Gaza Strip, and ISIS, which ruled the city at the time and is often compared to Hamas, had plenty of time to dig in and organize for defense.
July, 2017. Mosul was destroyed at the end of the fighting, Photo: AFP
Although the attack was carried out by a coalition of the United States, the Kurdish militia and other countries, the Iraqi army took on most of the fighting burden. ISIS fights for every single building, booby-trapping the streets and using an extensive network of tunnels in the city's suburbs. "What the Iraqis did was take over one neighborhood at a time, take it over with special forces, cut off access to it and advance to the next neighborhood," Orbach explains. It took the Iraqis, with US air support, nine months and thousands of deaths for the city, which was completely destroyed, to finally be cleansed of ISIS.
Auerbach: "The most important thing to learn from the Mosul story is that patience is required here, both before and during the entrance, and a willingness to understand that there will be isolated failures and there will be losses. However, the final victory is certainly possible."
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