DEBKAfile’s military experts: Unorthodox tactics needed to rout Gaza-based Palestinian terror and halt Qassam offensive against Israel. Conventional warfare will no longer serve
May 20, 2007, 2:34 PM (GMT+02:00)
As the Palestinian missile offensive enters its second week, military experts recommend dosing Hamas and its allies with their own medicine: harassment behind the lines by small undercover Israeli units on hit-and-run missions to blow up Palestinian infrastructure, weapons workshops and commands centers and around-the clock ambushes of their fighters and chiefs. Palestinian operatives must be kept on the run in fear of their lives.
They say the moment has passed for a conventional invasion, such as the 2002 Defense Wall operation that cleansed the West Bank of its effective suicide cell structures, such as some opposition leaders and ministers propose. It would have been logical after Israel’s 2005 evacuation of the Gaza Strip. But today, Gaza is swarming with a hodgepodge of Hamas, Jihad Islami, Fatah-al Aqsa Brigades, Popular Resistance Committees and al Qaeda terrorists and militias.
According to DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources, Iranian and Hizballah advisers are telling them how to combat a substantial Israeli ground–tank incursion. They must go underground and wage a guerrilla-terrorist war equivalent to the Iraqi insurgent campaign against US troops.
Israel is strongly advised to avoid that trap.
Unorthodox strategic and tactical thinking is needed, say the experts, not an effort to fight the Lebanon War anew in Gaza. The clock cannot be turned back to the days before 2005, when former PM Ariel Sharon supported by Olmert pulled Israel out of the Gaza Strip and the strategic Philadelphi border route – or when Olmert after becoming prime minister let Hamas win the Palestinian general election in 2006 with FM Tzipi Livni’s support.
Israelis have defeated Arab terror before. In the 1930s, The English military genius Orde Wingate taught Jewish paramilitary defenders his Special Night Squads tactics for turning Arab guerrilla methods against them. Nothing much has changed in 71 years, except for the fact that today, Israel has a strong army of its own, and does not need British or other international force to defend its sovereign territory. All that is needed is a government with resolve that lets the military do its job.
