A Strictly Military Understanding Of Israel's Gaza Campaign

Note: This post emerged out of work I was doing for my next post.  First things first.

You may have seen drone footage of the seemingly endless rubble of what used to be cities in Gaza. I watched it off and on for days. It was hypnotic and horrifying at the same time. What year is this? This is the result of the bombing campaign conducted by Israel upon Gaza in the most recent, regrettable episode in the long-running show “Let’s See How Unholy The Holy Land Can Be.” Holiness is not an idea or a feeling, people. It is how you behave.

The situation is almost incomprehensible to me. For months I tried to figure out how I was supposed to feel about this whole situation, just as I struggled with Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Or the violence in Ethiopia or Sudan or any of a number of other places on this brutal Earth. You can’t relate to it ethically. Everybody’s wrong.

Long-time readers know I have an interest in military history. So I will attempt to relate to this mess from a purely military perspective. It seems the only way to understand why what happened happened – without taking sides. To be clear, everybody’s wrong as far as I’m concerned.

Is what Hamas did to Israel in October 2023 okay? Obviously not. Is the Israeli response okay? Two wrongs don’t make a right. But I have struggled for many months trying to figure out how to articulate what I think about this war or incursion or whatever it is...business as usual in the Middle East.

Tens of thousands of civilian deaths might be considered a war crime if it occurred in other parts of the world. And it would clearly be the case here...except for one thing. It did not start with the unprovoked attack upon Israel where Hamas killed about 1,200 Israeli civilians while kidnapping hundreds more. It (this particular “it” in a long string of one horrific “it” after another) started with the unprecedented secret tunnel system that Israel only fully discovered as it began to respond to the terrorist attack upon its people.

Understand that Hamas used hardwired phone lines installed in the tunnel network over a two-year period to implement their attack. This enabled them to stealthily avoid cell phones and computers that Israeli intelligence could track.

Israel discovered a major tunnel near the Erez crossing—over 4 kilometers long and wide enough for vehicles—that was used to transport militants, vehicles, and supplies in preparation for the October 7 assault.

Hamas used tunnels under the Egypt-Gaza border to smuggle weapons and ammunition into Gaza before the attack. After the attack, freed hostages described being taken through the tunnel network for hours to reach underground holding locations.

Interestingly, Hamas apparently didn't use tunnels to actually breach the border on October 7—they broke through the fence, used paragliders, and came by sea instead. But the tunnel system was absolutely essential to planning and preparing the operation in secret, and to sustaining operations afterward.

So, to understand Israel's subsequent bombing campaign in Gaza, you have to start with the tunnels, which secretly infested almost every part of the strip. Everything else—every hospital destroyed, every bunker-buster dropped, every civilian killed—follows from what Hamas built underground over decades.

The tunnel network began as crude smuggling shafts in the 1980s, dug with shovels and desperation. After Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and imposed a blockade, the incentive to dig deeper became existential. By the 2010s, Hamas had built something close to an underground city: reinforced concrete walls, electric lighting, ventilation systems, command rooms. The network was compartmentalized. Few workers knew more than the section they helped dig. Access points hid in basements and courtyards. The city above provided perfect camouflage—concrete, chaos, density.

This network was kept largely secret for decades through operational security: compartmentalized construction, local contractors, restricted external access. Israel knew tunnels existed and had destroyed cross-border smuggling routes before, but the full scope of the internal military network remained hidden until ground forces broke it open during Israel’s response.

The tunnels were the problem. They gave Hamas a lot of strike capability while offering flexible defensive options. Hamas could move its forces stealthily and ultimately surprise the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) anywhere in Gaza at Hamas’s choosing. It would make rooting out Hamas as bloody as possible for the IDF.

And that was the most important consideration as Israel planned its response. Hamas made sure that as many Israeli’s as possible would be killed and wounded trying to clear the vast tunnel network. The answer was to collapse the tunnels from above. The alternative—sending soldiers into narrow, booby-trapped passages—was rejected. Israel chose standoff destruction instead. Which, given the high population density of Gaza, necessitated numerous civilian deaths.

Understanding that choice requires understanding what the tunnel system represented. It wasn't just tactical infrastructure. The tunnel network was immense—hundreds of kilometers of reinforced corridors, command centers, weapons storage, ventilation systems, the works. It represented a massive organized military project aimed specifically at Israel, hidden beneath civilian infrastructure where it could be protected, expanded, and used for future attacks. Theoretically.

From Israel's strategic perspective, the tunnels were as much the enemy as Hamas fighters themselves. You could kill every Hamas fighter in Gaza, and if the tunnels remained intact, the next generation could simply move back in. The infrastructure had to be destroyed just as thoroughly as the organization that built it.

The US (under Biden) transferred roughly 100 BLU-109 bunker-busters to Israel, along with more than 5,400 MK-84 2,000-pound bombs that could also function as penetrators. These weapons are designed to punch through concrete and earth before detonating, reaching what ordinary bombs cannot: buried command centers, weapons depots, tunnel nodes.

We know at least three hospitals—Al-Shifa, the Indonesian Hospital, and the European Hospital—were struck with bunker-busters. But hundreds more penetrator-class munitions were used across Gaza on other hardened targets, the fortified residences, government complexes, apartment blocks Hamas selected to mask their tunnels.

Of Gaza's 36 hospitals before the war, virtually all of them were damaged or destroyed. A few were hit with penetrators aimed at collapsing tunnel infrastructure beneath them. Most were damaged by conventional bombardment, artillery, or proximity to strikes on surrounding areas. About 94% of hospitals are now either damaged or non-functional.

I could not understand the bombing of hospitals. It seems unconscionable. But, contemplating the tunnels, I realize that the hospitals weren't primarily targeted because they were hospitals. Those that were struck with penetrators were annihilated because Israel believed tunnel nodes sat beneath them. The majority were destroyed as part of broader targeting—surface threats, siege tactics, collateral destruction. From Israel's operational perspective, hospitals were just another category of structure that had to be rendered unusable. Because Hamas fighters would use the buildings to attack IDF soldiers as they attempted to combat the terrorists.

Should Israel have warned the doctors and nurses and patients prior to such strikes? I suspect they felt that no warning was given when Hamas attacked, so why should they? It is a brutal, unforgiving logic.

Let's establish the numbers as clearly as possible:

Total Palestinian deaths is very difficult to determine. Numbers get inflated by the Palestinian side of the argument and minimized on the Israeli side. There is no objectivity here. But at a minimum we can say at least 40,000 and possibly over 60,000 killed as of October 2025 (according to Gaza's Health Ministry.) Some studies suggest this undercounts trauma deaths by roughly 41%. An investigation by The Guardian found that a classified IDF database listed 8,900 Hamas and PIJ fighters as dead or likely dead as of May 2025—representing 17% of deaths at that time. That means roughly 83% were non-combatant men, women and children.

Israel claims between 17,000-20,000 Hamas fighters killed. The Guardian's investigation of internal IDF data suggests the real number is closer to 8,900-10,000. Using conservative estimates: approximately 8,000-10,000 killed in the bombing campaign, similar numbers in ground operations. Total: roughly 18,000 fighters.

Meanwhile, about 890 IDF soldiers were killed through 2024, with approximately 390 killed specifically in Gaza ground operations since October 27, 2023.

From a strictly military perspective, these numbers are extraordinary. An 18:1 to 20:1 fighter-to-soldier kill ratio isn't just good—it's dominating. The United States never achieved anything close to this in Iraq or Afghanistan, despite total air superiority. This level of combat effectiveness, with this degree of force protection, is nearly unprecedented in current urban warfare.

The operation was, by conventional military metrics, devastatingly successful. That's not propaganda, that's just a fact of warfare. Israel broke Hamas's military capability while suffering minimal casualties to its own forces.

And 83% of total deaths were civilians. That ratio—civilian to combatant casualties—has few parallels in contemporary warfare. In the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, 83% of the 8,000 killed were civilians. In Russia's 2022 siege of Mariupol, at least 8,000-10,000 died (with Ukrainian estimates as high as 25,000), the vast majority civilians. In the 1994 Rwanda genocide, approximately 500,000-800,000 people—about 75% of the Tutsi population—were killed in 100 days, overwhelmingly civilians. Gaza's 83% civilian casualty rate places it among these most extreme cases of contemporary mass killing.

Could Israel have done this differently? Yes. A ground-intensive campaign focused on tunnel-clearing and house-to-house fighting would have taken longer and cost more Israeli lives. How many more? Historical urban warfare data from Fallujah, Mosul, and other contemporary city fights suggests the cost would have been measured in hundreds to low thousands of additional IDF casualties, not tens of thousands. A realistic estimate: doubling IDF deaths from around 1,000 to perhaps 2,000-3,000, spread over a longer campaign.

The trade-off is rather straightforward, militarily speaking. Tens of thousands of Palestinian civilian lives for possibly 1,000-2,000 additional Israeli soldiers.

This is where we need to be clear about what happened. The campaign wasn't random or purely retaliatory. It was calculated. Israel faced a subterranean enemy and chose not to fight underground. Instead, they collapsed the system from above using overwhelming firepower, accepting massive civilian casualties as a consequence.  The whole thing is so regrettably unavoidable. The tunnels were worth more than the lives.  Oh god, what are we as a people still?!

The political logic is straightforward: democracies with conscript armies and 24-hour media don't tolerate thousands of dead soldiers. Force protection becomes paramount. So Israel used its technological advantage to turn an infantry problem into an engineering problem, solved with explosives and physics rather than soldiers and time.

The legal justification rests on military necessity: if Hamas operated from hospitals and used tunnels beneath civilian infrastructure, Israel could target those sites. International law allows this, with requirements for warnings and proportionality. The problem is proportionality. When 94% of hospitals are destroyed and 83% of casualties are civilians, proportionality becomes theoretical.

The tunnel infrastructure is largely destroyed. Hamas's military capability is shattered. By Israel's own military metrics, this was a successful operation.

And Gaza is destroyed because destroying Gaza was how they destroyed the tunnels. The tunnel network wasn't separate from the city above it—it ran beneath homes, hospitals, schools, apartment blocks. It was woven into the urban fabric over decades. To collapse the tunnels meant collapsing cities and urban regions filled with Palestinians.

This is the part we need to be clear about: Gaza isn't destroyed as a side-effect of fighting Hamas. Gaza is destroyed because that's what it took to destroy Hamas's infrastructure.  Over decades Hamas grew cancerously close to the Palestinian people living above them.  

Israel destroyed every inch of Gaza where there were tunnels underneath.  Without ever entering most of the tunnels they collapse everything down into them.  Essentially, Gaza was hammered into the tunnels.  That was the only way to actually physically destroy them.

I'm trying to understand how this is okay. There are certainly those who proclaim this was genocide but, right or wrong, that perspective has no real power or authority. They have as much input on the game of war as cheerleaders in a football game.

The only way it's "okay" is if you accept the premise that Israel was justified in minimizing its own casualties at the cost of vastly more Palestinian lives in the calculus of war. The operation achieved its objectives—Hamas's military structure is broken, Israeli casualties were kept low, the tunnel system is largely inoperable. By those metrics alone, it succeeded.

It should be noted that, as of this post, skirmishing continues between the IDF and factions of Hamas who have apparently refused to admit defeat. The war may have just entered a new phase rather than being concluded. Each side accuses the other of ceasefire violations. Its the same old crap we always get from Israelis and Palestinians. Honestly, I don’t know why we bother to intervene. It’s always the same medieval posturing every time, every year, year after year. No one learns anything and hatred only builds...or is at least sustained. 

Anyway, in the latest iteration, somewhere north of 40,000 Palestinian civilians were traded for the possibility that ground operations might have cost 1,000-2,000 more Israeli soldiers. That's the calculation. The hard, cold facts and the reason Gaza looks like Hiroshima today.

The tunnel system, Hamas's genuine military capability, and the rubble that is now Gaza are all inseparable—they're the same fact, viewed from different angles. Israel got what it wanted, and the price was paid by people who had no say in the decision. As is the case in every war since the dawn of humanity.

Again, you can’t call this "The Holy Land" when everyone treats everyone else in unholy ways. Some would argue Gaza isn't technically part of The Holy Land. Regardless, this is all a cursed land – obviously. Holiness is not an idea or a feeling, people. It is how you behave.

(Written with AI assistance.)