Continuing to let Hamas terrorists flee from their Gaza positions is no longer an option - analysis - Yonah Jeremy Bob

 

by Yonah Jeremy Bob

The IDF's plans to invade Gaza City are not about reservist numbers, but whether the IDF can prevent Hamas from fleeing again, hidden among civilians.

 

IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir visits troops in Gaza, planning for Gaza City invasion, August 21, 2025.

(photo credit: IDF SPOKESPERSON'S UNIT)

The big headlines regarding the IDF’s potential Gaza City invasion – might there still be a new ceasefire deal right before or after it starts? – focused on the number of reservists and mandatory service soldiers who will be involved.

Five full invading divisions means somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000 soldiers actively invading, similar to at the start of the war, and the 110,000 to 130,000 potential reservists involved also echoed the early war highs.

But after 22 months, these numbers – strategically speaking – if not irrelevant, are not the main issue anymore.

They will have an intense impact on the Israeli population and may continue existing problems with overuse of the reservists and with risking the lives of some sectors of Israel in the military as the haredi sector continues to resist being drafted.

But there are bigger issues at stake.

All that really matters now is whether the IDF puts into motion plans and tactics to prevent Hamas forces from fleeing Gaza City with the rest of the one million civilians who would flee.

This is one of the main stories of the war.

The IDF is worried about: 1) Israeli soldiers being killed by Hamas; 2) Israeli hostages being killed by Hamas; and 3) Palestinian civilians being killed by Israeli soldiers.

To avoid these three problems, it just lets everyone – including Hamas – flee any area it invades.

This is why since March, the IDF has only killed 2,100 Hamas fighters, according to Wednesday’s update by the military.

That is an average of about 350 per month, compared with the early months of the war when the IDF was killing thousands of Hamas terrorists per month.

Once Hamas figured out it could just keep moving anytime the IDF moved the Palestinian civilian population first, it became very difficult to target large groups of Hamas forces.

The IDF made a very big deal recently when it defeated the Hamas “battalion” in Beit Hanun – a grand total of about 30 terrorists. (Earlier in the war, a battalion usually meant about 1,000 Hamas fighters.)

This shows how hard it has been for the IDF to find Hamas fighters concealed within the local Gaza population.

So, what could the IDF do differently?

It could rush the infantry into parts of Gaza City without starting off the attack with massive bombing and artillery fire first – to try to catch Hamas fighters off guard before they can flee.

This would entail more risk to Israeli soldiers on the front line confronting Hamas attackers, but that is exactly what Israel should be hoping for.

IDF could surround Gaza City, slowly evacuating residents to root out Hamas terrorists

It could surround Gaza City and slowly evacuate Palestinians a few dozen at a time, inspecting every evacuee to reduce the chances of Hamas fighters being able to flee camouflaged into a crowd.

This would make the operation much slower and also might expose IDF soldiers to more attacks, but it would be less dangerous to Palestinian civilians than sending IDF forces in before a mass evacuation.

The difference can be analyzed by looking at the results of the IDF’s takeover of Shifa Hospital in Gaza City in November 2023 and then again in March 2024.

In November 2023, not a shot was fired inside the hospital, as the IDF allowed thousands of Palestinians to evacuate en masse without checking for Hamas fighters fleeing among them. No one was harmed from either side, and what the IDF accomplished for the most part was taking over the area and seizing Hamas weapons, communications, and intelligence-gathering equipment.

This is also most of what the IDF has been doing for the last six months.

In contrast, in March 2024, the IDF surprised Hamas by first surrounding the hospital and then sending in an invasion force.

There was significant fighting, and hundreds of Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters were killed and hundreds more arrested.

The hospital also sustained far more damage, and there was more harm to Palestinian civilians and to IDF soldiers.

But it actually impacted Hamas’s forces, including senior commanders.

All signs are that the IDF and the cabinet will make the same mistake this time that they have made with other incursions, letting Hamas escape.

But if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is going to walk away from another hostage deal to try to deal a deeper blow to Hamas, then continuing to let their fighters flee is not an option.

Yonah Jeremy Bob

Source: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-864962 

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