Israel’s Golani Brigade avenges troops killed by Hamas on Oct 7 with Gaza gains

With up to 40,000 Hamas fighters holed up in Gaza’s tightly packed streets, experts predicted a similar campaign to the gruelling nine-month operation to defeat Islamic State in the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2017. That cost the lives of an estimated 8,000 Iraqi troops, despite them having back-up from Western air power and special forces troops. Jack Watling, a senior research fellow in land warfare at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, said that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had made “substantial progress” so far. “They started with fairly extensive airstrikes on Hamas commanders and infrastructure,” he said. “That disrupted Hamas’s ability to organise its defence, while the IDF was itself mobilising for the invasion. Troops had managed to surround and isolate Hamas’s forces in Gaza City, he added, and were now doing slow block-by-block clearance operations, taking care to clear Hamas tunnels that could be used for ambushes. “They are being fairly effective and killing lots of Hamas fighters,” he said. “It is a slow process, but I’d expect it to last weeks, not months.”