Tablet or NYT - What is the basis for the dramatically different assessments of the IDF’s achievements in Gaza?

Recently, two articles were published in American media, offering profoundly different takes on the IDF’s achievements and future strategy in the ongoing Gaza War against Hamas. 

ALL ISRAEL NEWS published summaries of both the Tablet article (original here) and The New York Times article (original here). 

In reading both articles, one is struck by a clear difference in the assessment of the same facts by two different groups. 

However, what also becomes apparent, is that both groups are making those assessments from different understandings of the conflict and the goals of the IDF in fighting Hamas. 

For readers of mainstream news sites in Western countries like the U.S., Britain, or Australia, there is a general assessment that Israel is doing poorly in the war, that it has failed to achieve most of its goals, that it lacks a consistent strategy for the war, and that the political leadership in Israel lacks both a strategy for the war or a plan for the “day after” the war. 

These views have become such a part of the news narrative, that they are rarely questioned or challenged. The NYT article described the IDF’s current strategy in Gaza as “a Whac-a-Mole strategy”, in which the IDF receives intelligence about “a potential regrouping of Hamas fighters” and then launches a raid to destroy that small threat. 

The article cites Ralph Goff, a former senior C.I.A. official who served in the Middle East, who told the Times, “Hamas is largely depleted but not wiped out, and the Israelis may never achieve the total annihilation of Hamas.” 

This statement, that Israel cannot wipe out Hamas has been phrased in many ways, including one, which has become something of a mantra among Western analysts, “Hamas is an idea, you can’t defeat an idea militarily.” 

This truism has become so common in these assessments, that analysts forget that the governments of both Germany and Japan during World War II were based upon ideologies that fueled their actions and strategies in that war. And yet, both governments were defeated militarily and replaced with other systems based on different ideologies. 

The NYT piece admits that Israel has, in fact, “achieved a meaningful military victory” in Gaza. In fact, at the beginning of the article, the authors admit, “Israel’s military operation has done far more damage against Hamas than U.S. officials had predicted when the war began in October.” 

Yet those same officials conclude that “Israel has achieved all that it can militarily in Gaza.” 

Meanwhile, writing for Tablet Magazine, former British Army Officer Andrew Fox argues against that assessment, saying that the IDF is winning the war against Hamas, and needs to be allowed to finish that job. 

Fox presents a much more granular analysis of the Gaza War, apparently based on his own military experience, and interviews conducted with IDF officials. 

It might be tempting to conclude that Fox’s experience explains the difference in assessment. However tempting that might be, analyzing the difference in viewpoints and how they are expressed in each piece, seems to provide a better explanation for the drastically different assessments. 

To start, both articles admit that the IDF’s achievements in only 10 months of war in an urban combat situation exceeded the expectations of Western military analysts. 

What Fox notes, and the NYT article does not, is exactly how the IDF has had to fight. Fox makes two statements that exemplify the difficulty the IDF has faced in Gaza. 

“The IDF is having to fight a determined enemy that hides among and weaponizes the civilian infrastructure and population as human shields—all with the eyes of the world ready to condemn the slightest Israeli error,” Fox notes at the outset. 

“This is not, and never has been, a counterinsurgency or counterterrorism operation—It is a conventional urban war against an irregular but fully formed terror army, with their own underground citadel,” he continues.

These statements provide a significant clue in understanding how Fox ended up with such distinct conclusions from those of the New York Times. 

The New York Times authors, apparently dependent on the opinion of the U.S. military officials and Biden administration officials are viewing the Gaza War through the lens of past U.S. actions. 

However, the war the IDF is fighting in Gaza is not the same type of conflict that the U.S. Army encountered against ISIS in Mosul. During the fighting in Mosul, much of the civilian population fled, and the fighters of ISIS were not so heavily embedded in the civilian population and the civilian infrastructure. 

Hamas has had around seventeen years to prepare for this conflict, gradually constructing an intricate and vast underground tunnel network, hiding weapons caches within civilian homes, and commandeering facilities within schools and hospitals. 

These factors have created a different type of battleground for the IDF than the U.S. coalition in Iraq had to fight on. Accordingly, Fox argues that attempting to use previous Western action as a metric to judge Gaza is therefore misguided. 

In his breakdown of the IDF’s campaign in Gaza so far, Fox notes that the IDF has had to do things that Western forces in Iraq did not have to, such as: maintain operational freedom, conduct and protect humanitarian efforts, identify the location of hostages and attempt rescues, while also eliminating Hamas’ leadership. These additional constraints were not present in Western fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

The success of the IDF’s strategy, despite Western detractors, is seen in the inability of Hamas to mount any form of successful defense or counter strike against the IDF. There have been small, guerrilla-style attacks on individual armored vehicles, or small squads, but the number and quality of those attacks has significantly decreased. 

In other words, the IDF has turned the Gaza War into a game of cat and mouse, with Hamas in Gaza largely reduced to fleeing from hiding spot to hiding spot, while attempting to harass the IDF along the way. 

While the war is taking a long time, the drastic drop in the number of civilian casualties per IDF strike is a historic achievement in such an urban combat scenario. When that is coupled with the repeatedly observed Hamas strategy of deliberately embedding within civilian areas in order to cause civilian casualties, the IDF’s strategy suddenly makes more sense. 

Rather than a strategy of “mowing the lawn”, the phrase coined by the military to refer to repeated limited military operations in Gaza before the war, the IDF withdraws and waits for signs that Hamas is attempting to regroup. Then it returns and attacks those regrouping elements. This strategy, while it has led to the repeated evacuations of Palestinian civilians from certain areas, has allowed the Israeli military to strike Hamas in a more pinpointed manner, further reducing civilian casualties. 

Fox highlights the second Shifa Hospital raid as a prime example of the IDF’s strategy. After the IDF withdrew from the Shifa Hospital for the first time, it expected Hamas fighters to return. In fact, it encouraged that through deceptive moves meant to convince the fighters to return there. 

When the IDF raided the hospital the second time, it found over 800 Hamas fighters there. Special forces killed 200 of those in storming the hospital, and captured the remaining 600. Despite the claims of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, civilian deaths from that raid were minimal. 

The IDF has also destroyed a significant amount of Hamas’ tunnel network, and by destroying significant connections between the various tunnel systems, it has rendered the remaining tunnels a local problem, to be dealt with as the IDF enters a specific neighborhood. 

The West has become increasingly repulsed by the ugly realities of war, with a habit of seeking a resolution to the conflict without changing the conditions that led to the war. It is, therefore, no surprise that the Biden administration, along with countries like Britain and France have been pushing for the Gaza War to end. 

However, these nations have their own reasons for wanting the war to end quickly, reasons usually connected to internal politics and concerns for political “optics.” 

The fundamental difference in the analysis of the authors of the NYT article and Andrew Fox is their understanding of the nature and purpose of the Gaza War.

Fox appears to understand that Israel is facing an existential war, not because Hamas by itself has the power to threaten Israel’s existence, but because Hamas is merely one tentacle of a larger threat. 

If Israel gives in to Western pressure to end the war before it achieves its objectives, it risks finding itself in a similar position with Hamas in a matter of a few short years. However, Hamas isn’t Israel’s biggest regional threat. 

Hezbollah has a tunnel system larger than Gaza, it has around 200,000 guided and unguided missiles, capable of overwhelming Israel’s air defense systems on the first day of a full war, and it has over 5,000 Radwan Force fighters with battlefield experience from the Syrian Civil War. 

Israel needs to defeat Hamas now so that it is able to focus its full attention on Hezbollah. If the IDF is not allowed to finish this job, then Israel will be hamstrung in its ability to meet the Iranian threat, which will actually lead to increased conflict in the Middle East. 

The policy of the Biden administration is not to fully support Israel in achieving freedom from threats. Consistently, the Biden administration has talked about maintaining Israel’s ability to defend itself. In the recent announcement of the approval of $20 billion in weapons sales to Israel, the Pentagon said it is not trying to "upset the balance of power" in the Middle East through these arms sales. 

In other words, the U.S. and its allies don’t expect or even want Israel to win so decisively that its local enemies stop trying to attack it. They only want Israel to be able to repel attacks that do happen with a minimum of Israeli casualties. That strategy of continued appeasement is exactly what led to the October 7 invasion. If it continues, it will likely lead to something worse. 

For Israel, a strong IDF is a central pillar of its diplomacy. Even in the past, Israel has achieved its most lasting peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan not through political diplomacy alone, but through repeated demonstration of the ability to crush any attempt to violate Israel’s borders. 

If the Middle East is to become a more peaceful place, and Israel is to expand the Abraham Accords to more countries, it will have to come through a demonstration of the will and the ability to demolish any threat against it.