Israel’s invasion of Gaza has been very distinctive and has been very different than what was originally expected.
While there are many sides to these differences, one key consequence could be a longer and more drawn out invasion in the South, which could lead to extended harm to Israel’s North.
Not that the IDF moving slowly in Gaza causes inherent harm to cities and villages in Israel near the Lebanese border.
However, given Hezbollah’s and the IDF’s strategies against each other on the northern border so far, it appears that Jerusalem will not succeed in getting the terror group to halt its provocations any sooner than the end of the war in Gaza.
This was not inevitable, and still isn’t.
Rather, it has been a choice by top Israeli leaders that the cost of losing more soldiers (and possibly killing more Palestinian civilians) in a faster invasion of Gaza is higher than the cost of the damage Hezbollah is causing to the Jewish state with violence at current levels.
How is all of this playing out?
Israel could have already chosen to invade Gaza around October 13 when its public deadline for Palestinians to evacuate northern Gaza expired and by which time there was a significant boost in reserves ready to go into action.
At that point, Hezbollah had started to ramp up its rocket, anti-tank gun, and shooting attacks on Israel’s North, but it had not yet reached their current high levels.
In fact, it was not until around October 13 that Israel started a full evacuation of its residents living within two kilometers of the border with Hezbollah in Lebanon, and not until several days later than the evacuation was extended to those living within five kilometers.
An evacuation of Kiryat Shmonah came even slightly later.
That means that if Israel had invaded on October 13, the IDF would already have been a week into the invasion by the time Kiryat Shmonah was evacuated.
Next, that first week would have been very different from how the first and second weeks of the invasion have actually looked.
Instead of small, tailored incursions of mostly elite forces in Gaza’s north accompanied at all times by a protective air power and artillery power envelope, the IDF could have hurled far more troops in all at once in both northern and southern Gaza.
Unquestionably, the IDF would have lost more troops than it has to date.
More troops would have moved slower and been easier to sneak up on and ambush, more troops would have been exposed simultaneously to counter-attacks by Hamas, and more troops would have been in greater proximity to being attacked.
It would have been harder for the air force, artillery, and tanks to guard such a large force all at once and it would have been harder for IDF forces to expose ambushes as they move through areas quickly, but without being ambushed.
LIKEWISE, it is possible that a slower invasion has allowed more careful target consideration, more warnings to Palestinian civilians, and therefore, more civilian lives saved.
But with a weak resistance, almost all fighting being guerilla warfare, and no consistent defense line that Hamas has presented, the IDF might have been able to achieve initial control of all of Gaza’s major centers within a couple or a few weeks.
In other words, the main fight for Gaza might have been over by now, and we might have already reached the stage of fighting pockets of insurgency, versus a collective, united Hamas military machine.
No one knows exactly when Hezbollah will stop firing on Israel and return to calmer, peacetime levels of violence on the border.
Yet, it is fair to say that Hezbollah will not stop as long as the main invasion continues and as long as the terror group believes that its keeping the pressure on could shorten Israel’s invasion, and give Hamas a better chance to survive in some fashion.
It is also fair to say that once the main invasion of Gaza is over, the IDF will become less tolerant of Hezbollah’s provocations and will gradually escalate toward a threat of much greater attacks across Lebanon if the Lebanese-based terrorist group does not halt its provocations.
Whether the process of convincing Hezbollah to return to the quieter pre-war border status takes days, a week, or a month after the end of the main Gaza conflict, those two events are likely connected.
This means that if the IDF continues its slow-motion invasion of Gaza and does not complete the main stage of wiping out Hamas’s primary forces for months, Hezbollah’s attacks may also last for months.
This also means that evacuees from the North may need to spend months longer as “refugees” from their homes than if the invasion had started and moved forward at a much faster pace.
For force protection and for avoiding killing Palestinians civilians, this may be the right move.
But it is important that the public understand the trade-offs, because nothing in this war – or in this world – comes for free.
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