Let's start from the very end: On the last night of Operation Guardian of the Walls, the Israel Defense Forces sent dozens of locked and loaded fighter jets up in the air. It warned Hamas that if it dared to fire rockets at Tel Aviv, the IDF would launch airstrikes comparable in force to those that targeted the strip over the course of the fighting. Hamas was deterred and instead tried to achieve the appearance of victory by attempting to kill some Israeli civilians with mortar shells and short-range rockets.
It was a test of our future deterrence, and it likely worked, although each time, Israel finds it needs to use a heavier and heavier cudgel to deter the terrorist organization.
Now the battle for the narrative over the conclusion of the operation begins. Some in the left-wing media don't want to see us collaborate fully with Hamas and avoid discussing conspiracy theories that center on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. These outlets have no choice but to portray the operation as a failure, the result of intelligence failures.
The truth is that when we examine the facts, the IDF has never carried out as effective and precise an operation as it did in this last operation. The veterans, some of whom have been recklessly working to demoralize Israel, certainly recall the broad actions taken in southern Lebanon that began with high-intensity military operations in the 1970s and culminated in 1978's Operation Litani.
Well, the IDF succeeded in taking out terrorists and their infrastructure, something it would have once taken Israel two divisions and a ground operation to achieve, and it did this while incurring barely any casualties. In the past, any ground operation would have meant many losses to our forces, sometimes as many as 30 a week. Other times, that many lives were lost in just two days of fighting.
The level of intelligence in this last operation was unprecedented. The IDF proved itself to be a precision intelligence and firepower machine, able to take out anything from a single terrorist to a network of tunnels. The two main differences in the fighting as compared to previous years were the destruction of Hamas' network of underground tunnels, otherwise known as the "Metro," and the ability to respond quickly and precisely to rocket launching cells. The IDF took out around 70 such Hamas teams throughout the operation.
As for the tunnels, which were to be used for street fighting against the IDF and taking cover, the Diplomatic-Security Cabinet appears to have received a detailed military briefing on the extent of the IDF's achievement. What the ministers heard was highly satisfactory and gave them the sense they could wrap things up without a confrontation with US President Joe Biden.
As it turns out, Hamas prohibited its fighters from entering the tunnels not to keep them from entering a death trap but to keep them from seeing those who had been buried in the rubble. We tend to see Hamas fighters as highly motivated. It seems there are still some things that could cause them to rise up against their leaders.
Unprecedented intelligence
Thanks to its incredible intelligence and technological capabilities, today's IDF can pinpoint terrorist movements underground. This ability was demonstrated in the incident involving 10 or more terrorists who tried to approach the border with Israel via a tunnel. They were assassinated, and the video of their bodies being pulled out of the ground and Red Crescent teams loading them onto ambulances was far from heart-warming.
The IDF has insisted that, given the conditions that were created, "Nothing deterred us from sending in Golani" [Brigade troops] to succeed and assassinate Hamas cells that until now were exposed in the field. The reason this wasn't done is a subject for evaluation only; it seems the image war leads to diplomatic-military deterrence from the sights of the destruction, the result of modern warfare on the ground in a built-up area.
The IDF can do what the Americans did in Raqqa, Syria, but the IDF can do it even better. Yet while the sights of the Islamic State caliphate's capital, with its scorched concrete skeletons, are nothing more than the aesthetic object of glossy American magazines, Israeli soldiers standing alongside the remains of buildings in Gaza get the antisemitic juices flowing in important parts of the West. The symbol of the Western media's collaboration with Hamas is that same office building in which teams from the Associated Press and Al Jazeera socialized with members of Hamas.
