Military Analyst Talks Israel’s Expanded Ground Operations

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, SENIOR GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Gaza City is currently being rocked by a series of large explosions. What you’re seeing now is the sky above Gaza as it is hit by those explosions. The Israeli Defense Forces have not commented on an uptick in military activity there or whether there has been a scaling up of their efforts targeting Hamas. Joining me now on this is Wesley Clark, a retired four-star general in the U.S. military. He served as the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and the commander of U.S. Southern Command. General, so great to have you on, especially now, given that we’re seeing an increase in some sort of targeted assault into Gaza. What do you make of this, and could it be what the defense minister had warned just yesterday of the signs of the third wave of their response?

GEN. WESLEY CLARK, MILITARY ANALYST, FORMER NATOI SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER AND FOUNDER, RENEW AMERICA TOGETHER: Well, I think this is part of the Israeli what they call shaping operations. So, this is a combination of efforts to go after some high value targets that could impede an incursion. It’s an effort of fainting and showing different aspects of Israeli capabilities and planning to Hamas. It’s a chance to check Hamas reactions. And so, all of that is going on right now, preparatory to a major ground offensive.

GOLODRYGA: And is this something that suggests to you that this ground offensive will be as large in scale as everyone from the defense minister and Prime Minister Netanyahu had warned in the days immediately after the October 7th attack or do you think that this could still be a smaller scale incursion given some of the intricacies now with pressure from the United States and the West and perhaps even change in military strategy within Israeli forces?

CLARK: You know, it’s difficult to speculate without knowing what’s going on, on the inside at the classified level. But it seems to me that Israel is going to go ahead with this offensive. Now, how it unfolds is going to be very interesting because typically the pattern in an urban action is you rush in, you make a lot of headway and then everything slows down. You get bogged down. You’re using a lot more ammunition. You’re taking casualties. The logistics are difficult because of blow down and bubble in the streets and it slows down, and that’s the pattern of almost every urban operation. It’s possible that the Israelis will set a different pattern. So, for example, they could concentrate only on a small section of Gaza with their ground troops. Clean it, stay with it, and then start to rebuild it, even bringing in Gazans back to the area in which they lived. And this could take many months of gradually squeezing Hamas into a smaller area. There’s one thing that’s really different about this operation than what the Americans did in Iraq, and that is when we were going into Ar Raqqa in Syria or Fallujah or Ramadi or any of these other cities we went into, the idea was to drive out the terrorists. Here, the idea is to pin the terrorists and eliminate them, eliminate Hamas. There’s no escape route for Hamas here. This will be a battle to the death for Hamas if the Israelis follow through on what’s been announced. It’ll be a challenge to set — go ahead.

GOLODRYGA: Well, I was going to say, another difference is that this is not thousands of miles away from American borders. This is literally just kilometers away from Israel’s borders. And I’m curious to get your thoughts on how these tunnels that we have reported in great length upon and the detail in these tunnels and the amount of investments that Hamas has made into building them impacts what this offensive may look like.

CLARK: Well, we’ve seen some indications that the Israelis have a partial network diagram of the tunnels. We don’t know if that’s complete and they don’t know if it’s complete. So, I think the Israelis best approach, at least the one I would be advocating if I were on the inside of this, take it step by step. When you’re working above ground to clear the buildings of the enemy, you’ve got to work below ground simultaneously and you’ve got to hold it so you don’t want the enemy popping out of a tunnel behind you and knocking off your fuel trucks and logistics and innocent people back there, you’re going to try to take it step by step and the tunnels are a big part of that. So, they’re going to have to go into the tunnels. They’re going to have to try to map them out. They may be using robots. They may be using unmanned aerial vehicles down in those tunnels. There’s a lot of different techniques that could be used in addition to just walking through the tunnels with troops and weapons, but they’re going to have to work it very systematically to make it a successful operation.

GOLODRYGA: So, thus far, we have seen a number of targeted raids into Gaza and the IDF reporting that they’ve killed a couple, at least, high ranking Hamas officials and leaders there, at least responsible for what they say their role in the October 7th attacks. How effective have those targeted raids been thus far in your view?

CLARK: Well, the targeted raids may or may not have been directed primarily to kill individual people. They also may show a deceiving pattern to the — to Hamas on where the Israelis could go in, there may be a test of Israeli breaching equipment where they go in through the fence and they may be a check of how Hamas is going to defend these avenues of approach that the Israelis are going to use. So, a lot of things can happen. But one thing we do know is that when you take-out high-ranking members of an organization, it does have an impact right away on the effectiveness of the organization, but over time, days, weeks, months, other leaders step in. They may not be quite as skilled, but the structure of the organization is — has been pretty resilient in our experiences with these organizations like Hamas.