The Author is John Spencer, who according to his bio is an expert on Urban Warfare and the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern Warfare Institute at West Point. Sounds like a man with the credentials to speak with authority on the subject.
One of the biggest mistakes of critics of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza is attempting to compare the war to a past modern war (post WWII) or battle that is not what Israel is conducting in Gaza.
Israel is not conducting a counterinsurgency, counter-terror campaign (it may later) in a semi-permissive environment with host nation support, or fighting a single battle against a small terror force that has temporarily seized an urban area.
Initially I too tried to explain that the closest comparison of Israel’s initial attack of Gaza City was the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul. As in a city attack of an enemy held city where the defenders were using human shields & had prepared a complex defense. But, even Mosul fails on multiple levels to compare in context to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. None of the battles of Raqqa, Aleppo, Marawi, Mosul, or Fallujah are comparable to Israel’s operations for many reasons.
Again, Israel is not trying to find a few terrorists embedded in an urban environment where they have host-nation support and 90% of the civilians are not combatants or are not present such as 2004 Fallujah with 3,000 enemy fighters in a single city or the 2016-2017 Mosul with 5,000 ISIS fighters in a single city.
The IDF is fighting a full-scale war against a terrorist military of over 30,000 fighters with a massive arsenal of rockets, who has spent decades & millions of dollars digging an underground world of hundreds of miles of tunnels woven into the civilian society & with the design to reverse engineer the current laws of war (lawfare) to achieve their strategic goals.
Unlike other battles, the Hamas strategic goals are not to hold terrain or defeat Israel’s military but to sacrifice their civilians (so not human shields, but human sacrifices) to cause the international community to force Israel to stop their counter-attack.
No modern military has faced 13,000 plus rockets being launched over their heads at their homes while conducting their war/battle/operation.
Nor since World War II has a military fought in a situation where hundreds (now 136) of their own citizens (to include babies, women, elderly) are being illegally held hostage inside the combat area and a strategic factor in their timeline of the war.
Israel is not fighting in one city. It is fighting in five major cities. It is fighting a real and definable existential threat to the survival of their citizens and nation.
IMO, the fact is that Israel has followed the laws of war, has implemented civilian harm mitigation steps that no military has implemented in modern urban battles and people still attempt a moral equivalence with out of context battles.
