Despite thousands of air strikes, Israel can’t destroy Hamas
The Israeli air force has shown the world what it’s capable of during the past two weeks.
But everyone is also getting a look at the limitations
of Israeli air power, which will ensure that Israel will come out of
this war only securing limited objectives. Worse, the high civilian
death toll and the inability to fully destroy Hamas’s rockets will mean
this war will likely resume in the future.
First, here’s a startling number.
Since Israel launched a ground invasion of Gaza on
July 17, it’s struck more than 2,400 ground targets. Israel has only
paused its bombing for a 12-hour ceasefire
as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry scrambles to secure a longer
pause in the fighting. Israeli ground troops are up to a kilometer
inside Gaza on the hunt for tunnel networks leading from the territory
into Israel.
That’s a lot of air power in
two weeks. Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighter-bombers are in action, along
with AH-64 attack helicopters. These are likewise supported by orbiting
Heron 1 drones and Beech Bonanza spotter planes, which assist ground
troops and feed data back to strike planes.
Israel relies heavily on air power for several
reasons. It’s often said Israeli society is more sensitive to casualties
than other states due to the country’s small population. Bombing from
the air carries risks, but it’s nowhere near as dangerous as even a
limited ground war.
To put it in perspective, in more than one week of
ground fighting, Hamas has killed at least 35 Israeli troops as of July
25—more than double the toll during Operation Cast Lead in 2008 and
2009. That’s nowhere near the more than 940 Palestinians killed, but
it’s a large number for casualty-averse Israel, and Hamas knows it.
Israel also lacks strategic depth, which air power is a means to theoretically overcome.
Strategic depth is a military term referring to the
territorial space between the front lines of a conflict and the center
of a nation’s population and economy. By firing rockets into Israel—by
threatening lives, property and international air traffic—Hamas is able
to carry its war, with limited degrees of effectiveness, into Israel’s
population centers.
Israel’s response isn’t new. Decades of Israeli
doctrine call for rapid and deep strikes into enemy territory to remove
and deter perceived threats owing to the lack of strategic depth. Air
strikes aimed at Hamas, its rocket stockpiles and launching sites, are
in line with this strategy of carrying the war quickly into enemy
territory.
But Hamas is still able to fire rockets well into the
war—including towards Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport. The extremist group
was firing rockets into Israel just before
the ceasefire. The group buries its arsenals underground, hides them
inside civilian infrastructure and makes them as difficult—and as
costly—to target as possible.
Air strikes and high-explosive bombs in
densely-populated Gaza have also lead to heavy civilian losses. An
Israeli attack knocked out the main power plant in the Strip, creating a humanitarian crisis at Gaza’s overcrowded Shifa Hospital.
Whether Israel is justified or not in attacking Hamas,
the choice the Israeli military to rely heavily on air power to achieve
its objectives has resulted in disproportionate civilian losses
compared to the threat Hamas poses.
But Israel doesn’t have many other options. “With nuclear weapons and carpet-bombing off the table, Israel needs to go in on the ground to achieve its objectives,” Daniel Byman wrote at Foreign Policy. “But ground operations can lead to Israeli casualties that actually undermine its deterrence.”
The result is that either way, Hamas will probably
come out of the fight with enough Israeli dead on its hands to claim
some kind of victory. Hamas will likely be hurting badly. But Israel’s
reliance on air power to destroy Hamas’s rockets will also likely fall
short. Without a political solution, the conflict will almost certainly
resume again.
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