If there are actually civilian corridors, most of the civilians will flee.
I’m pretty sure Hamas would prohibit civilians from fleeing for this precise purpose. Probably would be a “anyone who evacuates will be shot” thing.
That’s what the Israeli news is reporting, yes.
Eta: but from other reporting it does sound like very many people did manage to leave, which is great news and makes a more limited operation more feasible.
It might take a huge army to succeed in cutting off part of Gaza. And they’d have to cut it off to the point at which supplies really couldn’t get in; as well as have enough boots on the ground to keep the rest fairly pacified.
Yeah, I think the invasion of Gaza is bad because I can’t see how they’ll successfully eliminate Hamas by doing it. But then again, I don’t know how they’re going to eliminate Hamas otherwise, including blockading Gaza indefinitely. Bad options all around.
Looks like they plan to systematically destroy the underground tunnels and bunkers Hamas has built up over the last 15+ years.
Meanwhile I kind of expect that the off-sight Hamas leaders are going to find things very hot for the next few years.
Ideally they’ll find them very hot for a fraction of a second.
I’m guessing many will be dead within the next few weeks but the others will need to be on the run for years. I don’t actually know anything of course, but the Israelis seem pretty good at this stuff. Will Hamas leaders be effective while hiding in caves in Afghanistan or keeping a low profile in Iran?
I’m guessing accommodations at nice hotels in Doha, Qatar are probably going to leave them vulnerable.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the IDF has a variety of crawler robots that would specialize in going into tunnels and, under some form of human control, can gun down Hamas militants that they see.
Yeah. I feel really conflicted about a lot of stuff in this war, but I’ve no doubt that the leaders of Hamas–who either directly ordered these mass terror murders, or failed to leave and condemn the organization once they occurred–should die.
For Israel’s sake, I hope they avoid the US’ error following 9/11 of squandering international support after having been attacked.
I’ve said it before, it’s not that Mossad is so great at these things as incredibly persistant at tracking down and killing the enemies of the state. Nope, cushy hotels in Doha will no longer be safe.
It would not surprise me if those “crawler bots” would just gun down anyone found in the tunnels regardless. The IDF does not seem to be exerting much effort to avoid collateral damage.
I suspect that ship has already sailed…
Who would be in Hamas tunnels but people working with Hamas? I think it’s safe to say that anyone found down in those tunnels is a fair target.
And certainly there would be less collateral damage than going after Hamas hiding in hospitals and schools.
Hostages?
Walking around in the tunnels? Surely they are locked up somewhere.
I doubt the IDF has any autonomous lethal weapons, so any tunnel drones will still require a human to pull the trigger.
I’d expect there to be rooms as part of the tunnel complexes, not only walkways; though I don’t actually know anything about the layout.
Some of those rooms might well be lockable.
Oh just spitballin here, hostages?
It would be a certainty that Shayetet 13 (Israeli Special forces) have trained for tunnel warfare.
Wonder if maybe there’s no need to go into tunnels? The IDF could just seal off every tunnel entrance with concrete as it finds them, and thus force the Hamas militants inside to either come out or be entombed alive.
Unless the IDF is concerned that there are Israeli hostages in the tunnels, or that they’d be missing something valuable that they could discover inside.