SYNOPSIS
Let us start off by addressing the proverbial elephant in the room.
On October 7th, 2023, the forces of Hamas – the Palestinian terror group with such delusions of legitimacy that they haven’t bothered with elections since attaining power – launched a short, sharp and brutal assault into southern Israel. For the first time since the rise of ISIL in 2011, the world was “treated” to a level of sadistic brutality that beggars the imagination. The acts of savagery – including the live-streamed slaughter, brutalization and kidnapping of mostly under-30 year olds at a literal “peace festival” – stunned the “polite” world as much as the apparent failure of some of the most vaunted intelligence services in the world.
The resulting war, on the fifty-year anniversary of the first “Yom Kippur War”, is now being termed “Israel’s 9/11”.
This article will not go any further into the political situation. Likewise, “sides” are not our purpose, here. This is strictly an examination of Hamas’ military operations, based on published reports and “informed supposition”, from October 7 to October 14, 2023. A much more in-depth examination of the situation will be available to our subscribers towards the end of the month.
OVERVIEW
In the early dawn hours of October 7, Hamas combat units launched a “broad spectrum” attack from its sanctuaries in the Gaza Strip. The assault opened with a massive and concentrated barrage of rocket artillery. The artillery assault was large enough and concentrated enough that it overwhelmed the “Iron Dome” anti-missile system that Israel has relied on for over a decade to defend itself from such attacks.
As the rocket attacks opened, mobile combat groups – some dressed in Israeli Defense Force (IDF) uniforms – infiltrated border checkpoints and massacred or captured the troops within, most of whom seem to have still been asleep. Simultaneously, other units conducted combat breaching operations at several points along the border, using a variety of techniques, ranging from simple RPG-7 rocket, to dedicated breaching charges, to using civilian construction equipment to batter holes in the security fences. Mobil combat groups, mounted on “technicals” and small motorcycles, quickly swarmed through the breaches, and fanned out to assault small town and villages, ultimately capturing and holding these urban areas for up to four days, a circumstance that has not happened since Israel’s War of Independence in 1948.
Perhaps most spectacularly, an airborne element assaulted the aforementioned peace festival using “paragliders” to insert a raiding force into the festival grounds, timed to strike shortly before the arrival a relief convoy mounted in technicals.
In both cases, at the peace festival and in Israeli urban settlements, Hamas forces deliberately massacred civilians, and captured as many as possible, carting them off to Gaza to be explicitly used as hostages and human shields against the expected Israeli counterattack. This has resulted in the largest number of Jewish lives lost in a single weekend since the Holocaust of World War Two.
While some Hamas forces held out for as long as four or five days in places, the bulk of surviving Hamas units had retreated into Gaza within seventy-two hours.
ANALYSIS
Hamas’ attack, on the purely tactical level, stands as a masterclass in operational deception, tactical ingenuity, flexibility and maximizing limited supplies on a shoestring budget.
It was also a complete and abject failure.
Way back in 2022, we discussed the emerging phenomenon of small-scale, targeted, and focused military training that was available to the general public around the world with nothing more than an internet connection. And that remains true – anyone who is at least moderately intelligent and educated can learn a very great deal by searching out real military informational guides via the internet.
The unspoken cautionary warning in the last paragraph is that such information, if not presented in a coherent manner, will most certainly not convey the level of competence necessary to fight and win.
Case in point – Hamas.
While Hamas demonstrated a surprisingly level of competence at the commando/light infantry level of warfare, its forces were absolutely no match for their enemy, once that enemy roused itself, and organized a coordinated counterattack. While Hamas’ leadership seems to have understood this, in a strictly tactical sense, it completely failed to tie tactical acumen to a realistic operational or strategic plan.
There was no possibility that Hamas was going to “win” against Israel in a conventional military sense. Hamas could – and did – certainly bloody Israel’s nose, exposing staggering complacency within the IDF, while also demonstrating the stark reminder that unarmed civilians are nothing but targets in a combat environment. As a result, as of this writing (October 16th 2023), the IDF has eliminated all Hamas forces that remained within Israel after the initial assault…and the IDF is now girding for an all-out assault into the Gaza Strip to put an end to Hamas, once and for all, world opinion be damned.
This also demonstrated the defective strategic thinking of Hamas, as the avowed purpose of taking hostages, to be used as human shields – and joyously live-streaming it via the internet – is something that they allowed themselves to believe would be a viable tool of negotiation with Israel…The problem being, this is not an “intifada” – Hamas’ very success is the agent of their coming destruction, because the State of Israel will now stop at nothing to destroy them.
Put more prosaically, Hamas’ combination of tactical acumen with idiotic and outdated strategic thinking, is effectively the strategy for a “live action” first-person shooter video game, like a combination of “Call of Duty” with “Grand Theft Auto”, where the player gets more rewards for being more ruthless and savage, a view that is being reinforced daily, with the gleeful cheering on of troops in combat zones operating drone that drop grenades on enemy forces…just like in a video game – and if a war crime is committed in the process, that is worth double-XP.
Video games, however, are not real life. They are nothing more than a pale and warped reflection of reality – and basing your military plans on visions of video game victory is not simply a poor strategy, it is a strategy of suicide.
Yours.
Write that on your hand, if you need to.
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About Author
Michael Cessna
Michael Cessna is a former Active Duty United States Marine, a long-time personal protection specialist, security and defense analyst, military subjects instructor, general information researcher and amateur historian. He has been contributing security and defense writing since 2015.
