Hamas demonstrates new tactics and capabilities; Will Hezbollah follow suit?

Avi Issacharoff is an excellent, seasoned military analyst who writes for The Times of Israel and the Israeli media. The following are some very valuable insights he wrote as the war was winding down.

Almost every soldier I talked to spoke about the unbelievable, even impossible reality that Israeli forces are dealing with in battle zones — an extensive network of tunnels, bunkers and caches, which allow Hamas to fight the Israel Defense Forces and inflict heavy losses with minimal exposure. The Hamas operatives move from one tunnel to another, emerging each time from a different hole, they fire, and then they disappear again.

One of the officers told me about a network of defensive tunnels the IDF faced in Hiz’aa, one of the southern towns in the Strip. He said that Hamas dug three tunnels along three streets, with numerous entrances and exits.

Every time they fired at us from a different place. Small squads of two of three people. We decided to put smoke into one of the shafts, and suddenly saw smoke rising from dozens of places along these three streets.”

Hamas’s fighting style in Gaza, those unconventional Vietcong-style guerrilla tactics, raises many difficult questions about the ability of a conventional army to deal with this new battlefield. Some infantry soldiers undergo training in underground fighting, but not on this scale.

As always, the army trains for the last war — Operation Cast Lead in this case. But since then, Hamas has dramatically improved its capabilities, at least in terms of the array of defensive and offensive tunnels in Gaza: The organization spent 40% of its budget on this project. The best proof of this is the minimal harm that Hamas’s senior leadership has suffered. From within these channels and tunnels, the military and political leadership continues to function, controlling the rocket launches and attacks into Israel.

Issacharoff also notes that Hezbollah invariably learned from Hamas' tactical innovations. Although the ground in the area of Israel's northern border is harder to excavate compared to that of Gaza, he notes, it's always safe to assume that "what Hamas does well, Hezbollah does better."

So what is the IDF planning to do to confront this new set of Hamas and Hezbollah challenges? According to a report on Debka Files, the IDF is working on a buffer zone inside the Gaza Strip.

The IDF is carving out a cordon sanitaire from Beit Hanoun to Khan Younis, to be controlled from the outside using special forces and armored units on round-the-clock alert. IDF troops withdrawn from Gaza are redeploying in positions that would enable them to cross back into Gaza for rapid response operations. The no-nonsense plan appears capable of preventing future flare-ups and unchecked rocket attacks, but also brings with it the possibility of a prolonged war of attrition.