Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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I am beginning to have doubts about Israel’s combat effectiveness in Gaza. People have been debating so hard about the moral aspects of the Gaza war that no one has been paying attention to how the war is actually going. And it does not look good for Israel. There have been two major security incidents in the past week causing a total of 12 IDF deaths and dozens of serious injuries. There are indications that the first incident may have been much worse than advertised with potentially as many as 50 deaths. Even assuming that official total is correct that isn’t good.
Israel is almost a full two years into the war and has leveled most of the buildings in Gaza and inflicted enough civilian casualties to seriously impact its standing in the United States and the world. The fact that Hamas still seems to have supplies, an intact organizational structure and the ability to carry out complex operations and ambushes implies that there has not been nearly as much degradation of capabilities as advertised. It also implies that much, or perhaps even most, of the tunnel infrastructure is intact, including the supply tunnels into Egypt.
I have long suspected that the Gaza War hasn’t been going well and I am increasingly convinced of that. I don’t think Israel has the manpower needed to fully occupy Gaza, clear the tunnels, or filter out militants from the civilian population. I think the air strikes that have so badly damaged Israel’s reputation have done little to degrade Hamas.
Like I have said about many other militaries in the past, I also think Israel is concealing its true casualty count. I cannot even find an official casualty count but the videos and individuals incident makes me think it could potentially be as high as 1200 dead and 10,000 wounded, not counting military casualties during the October 7 attacks.
I don’t imply any moral claims here, I am just giving my opinion on the current state of play.
My impression is that the numbers you are mention... aren't that high; Israel is probably willing to spend many more of its own lives in this conflict.
For reference, if we adjust the 150K to 500K deaths[^1] from Russia's war in Ukraine from Russia's population of 143M to Israel's population of 9.757M, we get 10K to 34K, and remember that we are talking about deaths here. So there is room for a 10x here easily.
This doesn't really speak to your point of whether Hamas' fighting capabilities have been degraded. But Israel has been fighting a war with many fronts, in which Iran has been taken out of the picture, Hezbollah has been disabled in Lebanon. Recently the Israeli army claimed that they had operational control of 65% of Gaza, which is congruent with your perspective.
[^1]: Recent reports say 1M dead or injured, but use the confusing term "casualties" for this, to make it look bigger.
In fact, the projections of losses from Iran and Hezbollah operations were much higher than actually happened. I don't have exact numbers handy but I heard from 3x to 10x more, and it still was deemed acceptable to begin the operations with that level of loss projections. So yes, at least as far as Israel government is concerned, they estimate they could bear 10x more casualties without losing the war. I hope we will never verify that in practice, but at least it was the assumption of people whose job is to make such assumptions and decide whether or not to go to war based on them.
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