How do we know Israel is winning its war against Hamas in Gaza? Because the Biden administration wants it to stop. At every stage of Israel’s war of survival, a chorus of Cassandras have told us that Israel cannot defeat Hamas; that the Israel Defense Forces would suffer catastrophic losses if they tried to winkle Hamas out of its tunnels; that invading Gaza would cause unparalleled deaths among Palestinian civilians and cost Israel its post-Abraham Accords links with the Gulf Arab states; and even that Israel is committing “genocide.”
Nonsense and lies, all of it. By the last week of February, the IDF had reduced Hamas rocket fire into Israel from a daily torrent to a sporadic irritant. Three-quarters of Hamas’s battalions in the Gaza Strip had ceased to function; the last four were boxed in at Rafah, on the southern border with Egypt. U.S. and Israeli intelligence estimated that between a quarter and a third of Hamas’s fighters were dead. It may be true that you cannot kill an ideology. You can, however, disrupt its adherents’ forces and incapacitate their leaders.
Immediately after Oct. 7, the Biden administration sent several senior soldiers, including Lt. Gen. James Glynn, a veteran of the Mosul campaign against ISIS, to “advise” the Israelis on their response. According to Amit Segal of the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, the Americans predicted that the IDF would lose 20 soldiers a day. At that rate, IDF losses should now exceed the 2,691 killed in the 18 days of 1973’s Yom Kippur War. The fact is, in the 20 weeks of fighting since Oct. 7, the IDF has lost around 250 soldiers. To put that in further perspective, on Oct. 7, Israel lost 373 soldiers in a single day.
Israel is dismantling a fanatical, well-trained, and well-equipped army that spent years, and millions of dollars in humanitarian aid, turning dense urban areas into vast booby traps, and building a network of tunnels more extensive than the London Underground. Israel’s citizen soldiers have proceeded carefully and skillfully, backed by real-time intelligence, high-tech mapping, precision airstrikes, armored support, and even the low-tech method of pumping seawater into tunnels.
The IDF has achieved what was supposed to be the impossible. This innovative combination of tactics, and the IDF’s low casualty rate, will, like earlier Israeli military innovations, be studied and imitated by soldiers across the world. While the media emphasize footage of Palestinian suffering, the truth is that the IDF has achieved this with possibly the lowest ratio of military-to-civilian deaths in any modern war.
The media also report Hamas’s claim that almost all of the 27,500 Palestinians dead are civilians. There is, the eminent military historian Andrew Roberts told Britain’s House of Lords, “no reason” why we should believe this: “We don’t do that with Putin, we don’t do that with ISIS.” Using Israeli estimates of Hamas losses, and subtracting the number of civilians killed by “the quarter or so of Islamic Jihad and Hamas rockets that fall short,” Lord Roberts assessed the ratio of civilian-to-military deaths as “fewer than two to one.” This, he said on Feb. 19, is an “astonishingly low ratio for modern urban warfare where the terrorists routinely use civilians as human shields,” and “a testament to the professionalism, ethics and values of the IDF.”
“Israel has taken more steps to avoid harming civilians than any military in history,” John Spencer, the 25-year military veteran who chairs urban warfare studies at West Point, said on Feb. 17. He added that no other military, the U.S. military included, goes to such lengths to avoid civilian casualties, including texting and calling civilians to warn of impending airstrikes, and even sharing maps of its planned maneuvers each day — measures which may reduce the efficacy of the IDF’s actions and increase its own casualty rate.
“If this is going to be the standard going forward, I don’t know how the U.S. military and others are going to do that,” Spencer said.
Israel is winning its battle with Hamas. The Biden administration is pressing Israel to lose the war, to aid the reelection of a senile president and his unpopular administration, and pander to the Democrats’ anti-Israel Left. The administration supports Israel by blocking malicious resolutions at the U.N., but it proposes to reward terrorism by creating a Palestinian state, even “unilaterally,” as if that is possible.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The Israelis will have to devise a strategy for the day after the war, just as they have innovated while fighting it. But the timetable is not set in Jerusalem or Washington. It is set in Tehran. No Israeli leader can ignore the threat on Israel’s northern border from Hezbollah. No Israeli leader can pretend that Iran, the terrorism-sponsoring, nuclear-proliferating rogue state that the Obama and Biden administrations told us was America’s best bet in the region, has launched a multifront war against the U.S. and its allies.
On Feb. 21, Israel’s parliament voted 99-9 against recognizing a Palestinian state. The White House leaks that Biden privately calls Netanyahu an “a**hole.” The Bibi-Biden bust-up is beginning.
