Officials across the region are bracing for a broad assault on a heavily populated area that could last for weeks, kill thousands of people and destroy entire neighbourhoods.
On Sunday, Palestinian officials said more than 2,600 people had been killed in Gaza since the fighting began.“I think they’re going to go back in, heavy, and it’s going to be a bloodbath for everybody,” said Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie Jr., a retired Marine Corps general who served as the chief of US Central Command until last year.
Gian Gentile, a retired Army colonel and military historian with the Rand Corp., said that the scope of Israel’s offensive is “obviously going to be much larger” now than operations in recent years, and will come with challenges that the United States was able to avoid in some of its most intense urban combat, such as the November 2004 assault on Fallujah, Iraq.
“In order to clear buildings, basements and the extensive network of tunnels, they will have to dismount their infantry and essentially fight soldier-on-soldier and block-by-block in the built-up areas,” Mulroy said. “Special operations forces may be leaping ahead in surgical strikes to take out Hamas leadership and recover hostages.”
The assessment, published by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, found that Hamas deployed “a different and more dangerous concept of operations than the United States . . . encountered” in Iraq and Afghanistan, and portrayed Israeli military operations “as indiscriminate and disproportional,” despite their being “lawful, defensive responses to aggression.”Advertisement
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