The Gaza operation: Hamas is waiting

Hamas has been training with Iranians, and the battle of Gaza is going to be difficult, dangerous, and bloody.

Reserve-duty paratroopers who completed a month of duty in the Gaza Strip last week say that facing militant groups such as Hamas was like taking part in a “mini-war.”

During the patrol company’s operations deep in Palestinian territory, four Hamas militants and one Israel Defense Forces soldier, Sergeant-Major (Res.) Ehud Efrati, were killed. “The people we killed weren’t terrorists, they were soldiers,” an officer in the company told Haaretz.

“In a direct confrontation, the IDF has superiority over them, but in all parameters – training, equipment quality, operational discipline – we are facing an army, not gangs,” he said. “On the professional level, Hamas in the Gaza Strip is nothing like the terrorists we dealt with before. We saw the bodies of their men after the incidents. They had elastic bands on their pant legs. How many reservists do you know in the IDF who are that well kitted out, with elastics on their pants?”

This does not bode well. The Hamas fighters are fighting like an army.

The paratroopers were impressed by their adversaries’ discipline and good equipment. “The fingerprints of Iran and Hezbollah are all over it,” a veteran intelligence officer said. “The Palestinians never looked like this.”

On the bodies of the Hamas fighters the reservists found, in addition to their weapons, night-vision equipment identical to the IDF’s. And it was not from Israel. “It’s available on the Internet, you can order it from eBay and have it sent to an Arab country and then smuggle it to Gaza,” the intelligence officer said.

The good news is that the IDF is still better. But Hamas is improving. A lot.

Hamas, which provides a support “umbrella” for the smaller organizations launching the rockets, dispatches cells to harass the IDF. It also deploys defensive forces at the entrances to settled areas based on its analysis of the IDF’s routes.

The result, say the reservists, is that every penetration into the strip of more than one kilometer faces coordinated resistance from Hamas. “Shooting, sharpshooters, mortar shells. Pass the one-kilometer mark, the war is on. They’re not suckers,” a company officer says.

Something else that you find in this article is the news that doesn’t get highlighted as much: Israelis are still willing to do what has to be done to protect their nation.

The reserve officers accept both the method and their role of being in the advance force. “If these missions were left to the regular soldiers, like before the withdrawal from Lebanon, no one on the home front would understand what’s happening in Gaza. Every reserve soldier who returns home from a month in Gaza says exactly what’s going on there to the civilians around him,” the officer says.

They also know they’ll be called back to Gaza within a few months for a major offensive assault. Their commanders are already readying them with cliches about “two trains heading full force at each other.”

In contrast, perhaps, to what the public has heard, they don’t blame anyone. They were equipped and trained properly and feel ready for their appointed missions. “We didn’t come to whine. The state must see to two things: To compensate properly the few who bear the burden of reserve duty and to [budget] sufficient reserve days for training so the failure of the Second Lebanon War isn’t repeated.”

And it is very important to them to speak about Ehud Efrati, their friend for over 20 years. “At Ehud’s funeral his father, Avishai, said the state must protect the people of Sderot,” an officer in the company says.

“That was true nobility, and it is typical of his family. Ehud was a hero, pure and simple.

Time and again, we read the negative aspects of the IDF. We heard only this week that one out of four Israelis is refusing to enlist in the IDF. But the 75% who do go are more than willing, it seems, to do the job.

And the job is going to be done. Ehud Barak is warning that a major Gaza operation is nearing.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak (Labor) said in a meeting with Labor activists in Tel Aviv on Wednesday that the Israel Defense Forces are approaching a major incursion into the Gaza Strip.

“We are getting closer to a large-scale operation in Gaza and we’re likely to say there for a long time,” he said. He emphasized, however, that before such an operation, all other means to stop Qassam rocket fire should be exhausted.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that it will happen after Annapolis. But I think it may happen before the end of the year. It needs to be done, no matter when it occurs—but it’s not going to be easy. And the world, of course, will scream in outrage, although the world is utterly ignoring the near-daily rocket fire toward Israeli schools, homes, and hospitals in Sderot. More on that later.