
SOLDIERS GATHER at a lookout near the border with Gaza this week. (photo credit: AMIR COHEN/REUTERS)
THE JERUSALEM POST | Published January 24, 2025
Middle Israel | The military war was between the IDF and the jihadist armies that attacked the Jewish state, one from its south, one from its north, and two from afar.
The 15-month war that ended Sunday had three tiers: the military, the geopolitical, and the ideological.
The military war was between the IDF and the jihadist armies that attacked the Jewish state, one from its south, one from its north, and two from afar. The geopolitical war pitted Israel against the jihadist axis and its two supporting superpowers. And the ideological war was about the jihadist idea that drove this war’s engineers.
The ideological war is far from over, but that war isn’t against Israel alone, and it isn’t Israel’s to win. It’s mankind’s. In the two other wars, the result is unambiguous: Israel won.
THE WAR’S military outcome was hinted already on its first day. Yes, Hamas’s motorcycles, zodiacs, pickup trucks, and hang gliders successfully crossed the border, and their 6,000 riders did a lot of killing and pillaging, but it took hardly 48 hours to kill, wound, capture, and chase away the entire invading force, to the last man.
Palestinian Hamas terrorists parade as they prepare to hand over hostages kidnapped during the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, to the Red Cross as part of a ceasefire and a hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Gaza City, January 19, 2025. (credit: Dawoud Abu Alkas/Reuters)
The invaders’ plan, to reach the West Bank and join hands with its own militants, was thwarted, despite the IDF’s woeful unpreparedness. The Gazan fighter, once in combat, proved militarily undertrained and logistically naked. To accomplish the deeper invasion Hamas had in mind, it had to supply its troops with food, gas, and ammunition. If it had such capabilities, it never displayed them.
This tactical flaw was compounded by fateful strategic misjudgments.
Hamas’s assumption, that Hezbollah would invade the Galilee while it invaded the Negev, was dashed, but that was the smaller miscalculation. Hamas failed to predict that Hezbollah would be floored, as it was in multiple ways: its leadership was annihilated, its troops were decimated, its hardware was incinerated, and its outposts were razed.
Hamas certainly failed to predict Hezbollah’s political crash, as its Lebanese rivals installed a president whom Hezbollah opposed, and thus broke Hezbollah’s stranglehold on Lebanese politics.
Hamas’s miscalculations concerning Israel were even worse. Its invasion’s overarching assumptions, that the IDF would not dare enter Gaza’s dense urbanity, and that Israelis had lost the will to fight, proved unfounded.
Gaza was invaded big time; Israel’s soldiers fought tooth and nail; Hamas’s troops were killed by the thousands; and Gaza’s houses, roads, plazas, and pavements became piles of rubble, cement, and dust.
Yes, Hama’s offensive – as noted here the week it was launched – will be counted among military history’s most successful surprise attacks. However, by the same token, its planners’ strategic dilettantism will be counted alongside Hitler’s when he stormed Stalingrad and Japan’s when it bombarded Pearl Harbor. They had no idea what they were provoking.
Much has been said about the Israeli intelligence failures that enabled the October 7 fiasco. Yet the massacre’s planners, all of whom are no longer with us, had their own intelligence failures: the ignorance of the IDF’s abilities and the underestimation of its esprit de corps.
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SOURCE: www.m.jpost.com
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