Israel has an absolute military superiority of 360,000 people, and the total number of Palestinian armed forces does not exceed 40,000, and the ground war in Gaza has been fought for more than 40 days, and the Israeli army is still unable to completely kill Hamas and occupy Gaza.
The Financial Times said that with continuous military assistance from the United States, Gaza City is comparable to Germany at the end of World War II. At least nearly two-thirds of the entire Gaza Strip has now been completely razed to the ground.
The current battlefield in Gaza can only be described as brutal, as it is for Israel, and for Hamas it is.
The Israeli army had already attacked Khan Younis, the largest city in southern Gaza, from the flank, trying to flank the north and south, implement the strategy of flooding, and wipe out Hamas in one fell swoop.
According to the IDF report on 13 December, 10 Israeli troops were killed in an ambush in northern Gaza on 12 December, including Colonel Yitzhak bin Bassat of the Golan Brigade, Lieutenant Colonel Tomer Greenberg, commander of the 13th Battalion of the Golan Brigade, Major Roy Meldasi, 23, a company commander of the 13th Battalion of the Golan Brigade, and Major Moses Afram Bar Aung, 23, a company commander of the 51st Battalion of the Golan Brigade.
Colonel Yitzhak bin Bassat was the supreme commander of the Golan Brigades, and the commander of the 13th Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Tomer Greenberg, was in the Shujaya neighborhood of eastern Gaza when he was killed by an ambushed Hamas member, killing seven people on the spot. Now the Israeli army is becoming more and more cautious in the Shujaya neighborhood in eastern Gaza, for fear of being ambushed by Hamas and losing their lives. Now, the Israeli army has chosen to carry out unrestricted air strikes first, and then send sappers to deploy explosives to completely blow up the ruins, and no longer use tanks to surprise them, which has already suffered from the after-effects of Hamas's frequent attacks.
Judging from the ** released by the Palestinian side, on December 11 alone, an assault group of the Hamas Al-Quds Force used Yasin-105 rockets to continuously blow up three Israeli female tiger infantry fighting vehicles and a D9 armored bulldozer at the same location on the street. Judging from the content, the attack was all at close range, and the farthest was not even 50 meters.
The Israeli female tiger infantry fighting vehicle has a built-in flat panel display, heavy modular composite armor components are installed to enhance ballistic protection, has a super anti-mine chassis, and the weight of the vehicle reaches an outrageous 60 tons, but the ** system is very simple, there is only one remote-controlled large-caliber machine gun, which is a large iron box, which is not suitable for attack at all. The D9 armored bulldozer is a building demolition artifact, and it is not suitable for attacking.
In addition to firing at close range with Yasin-105 rocket launchers, Hamas's death squads are also adept at hand-to-hand combat. In a section of **, the Hamas death squad first blew up 10 Israeli soldiers with a grenade, and then rushed to the vicinity, fired a burst of shots, and ran away after the fight, giving the Israeli army no time to react.
On 11 December, after a few days of fierce fighting in the Karara district of southern Gaza, the Israeli army had no choice but to retreat.
In modern warfare, street fighting can be said to be the most brutal form of warfare.
The most difficult military action in street fighting is the clearing of buildings, if the city is relatively intact, in fact, there are traces to follow, and the shanty towns without any planning are simply a disaster of street fighting.
The situation in Gaza that the Israeli army is now facing is that in an area of more than 300 square kilometers, there are 200,000 bombed houses on the ground, hundreds of high-rise buildings of administrative schools, 500 kilometers of densely intertwined tunnels 20 to 50 meters underground, thousands of tunnel exits, and 40,000 highly trained Hamas members lurking.
Therefore, the street fighting faced by the Israeli army can be called a hellish level of difficulty. Numerous mines, decoys, and ambush rings are hidden in the ruins of the entire city. More importantly, Hamas used tunnels to drag the generals into its three-dimensional combat space, greatly limiting the Israeli army's artillery superiority and playing the highest art of tunnel warfare.
In real urban street fighting, no matter how well prepared before the battle, the attacker cannot avoid Gao **. The ** rate of field battles is generally 30%, which is already very tragic, and the ** rate of 30% in street battles is just the beginning.
In the first battle of Gronitz in Russia, after the 1,000 soldiers of the 131 brigade rushed into the city, the Chechen troops relied on houses and sewers to kill and wound a large number of Russian troops, 780 people were killed in just two days, 100 people were captured, and only 10 people survived in the end, the ** rate was as high as 98%, and even the brigade commander Savin was killed by shells.
There were also relatively successful street fights in the Iraqi town of Fallujah during the Iraq War. Fallujah is located along the Euphrates River. The east and west sides of the castle are about 35 km, about 3 km wide from north to south. The Euphrates River flows through the southwest corner of the city, with a bridge over the river to the north and south.
The strategy adopted by the U.S. military at that time was to launch an attack from the four corners of the city at the same time, not seeking speed, but only seeking stability, once a certain house was attacked, quickly withdrawing, and at the same time radio calling for air force support, blowing up the house, and finally from November 7 to December 23, 2004, the U.S. military killed a total of 83 people, wounded more than 600 people, killed 2,000 rebels, and captured 1,200 prisoners.
Why can't Israel adopt such a strategy of encirclement?In fact, the Israeli army's north-south encirclement of Gaza can be regarded as a copy of the US army's Fallujah campaign, but there is a major premise that the attacked side cannot change its position at will. For the first time, the Russian army suffered heavy losses in the Battle of Groniz, because Dudayev soldiers could constantly change their attack positions in the sewers, fight guerrillas, and inflict a large number of casualties on the Russian army.
Now, Hamas's tunnels are a replica of the Gronitz sewers, and the Israeli army has realized that in order to destroy Hamas, it must first destroy the Hamas tunnels. Therefore, in disregard of international accusations, the Israeli army used pumping equipment to directly pour seawater into the Hamas tunnels.
The situation in Israel is very unoptimistic, the time for the Israeli army to act in Gaza has become more and more limited, and the plight of the Israeli army is not only to face the endless sneak attacks of Hamas, but also to face the increasingly heavy international **.