Word: gaza
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...surprisingly, Hamas disputes the Israeli account. One Gaza commander in the Izzedin al-Qassam brigades, Hamas' fighting force, said the Islamists' plan had been to draw Israeli troops into the crowded urban neighborhoods of Gaza City, where the Israelis would lose the protection of helicopter gunships circling overhead. "We were fighting a modern 21st-century army, and we're just a guerrilla resistance movement," he says. "What did you expect - for us to stand in a field and wait for the Israelis to mow us down?" Indeed, in the classic guerrilla playbook, the insurgent army avoids going...
...Israel halted its advance on the edges of Gaza City, calling a cease-fire on Jan. 18, and Hamas' guerrillas - if indeed they were waiting in ambush - went unchallenged. Still, Israeli war strategists are at a loss to explain why Hamas failed to use the antiaircraft missiles that Israeli intelligence was sure that Iran had provided. "It's an enigma," one IDF officer says. "The air over Gaza was thick with drones, helicopters and F-16s, and Hamas didn't fire a single missile at them." Two possible explanations: either Israeli intelligence was wrong and Hamas simply didn't have...
...Israel may have confounded Hamas' plans to defend Gaza by entering the territory from three directions, avoiding the main roads which Hamas had mined and booby-trapped. Officers say Hamas and other Gaza militant groups had prepared a defensive wall using "hundreds of explosives, mines and booby traps." But for the most part, the Israeli forces were able to go around it, cutting straight to the coastal road and moving down toward Gaza City before methodically dismantling Hamas' defenses...
...Once they had established positions inside Gaza during the first 48 hours of the ground assault, the Israelis launched forays against targets but largely kept to the edges of crowded refugee camps and neighborhoods where Hamas might be lurking. Each battalion commander, using a vision provided by a pilotless drone overhead, advanced his men slowly, working out what one officer described as "micro-tactical solutions" as they moved along. In house-to-house searches, soldiers avoided entering through doorways, which might have been booby-trapped. Some Israeli human rights organizations claim that soldiers used Palestinian detainees to clear houses...
...conflict, Hamas was still firing rockets, but far fewer, and its rocketeers became easy targets. Less than a minute after Hamas fired a rocket, the Israelis were able pinpoint and destroy the launch site. As one senior Israeli officer says, "Everyone is digesting the lessons of the Gaza war - us and them." And neither side expects last month's showdown in Gaza to be the last...