What Israel can learn from the battle for Mosul

Excerpt

Israel’s fight against Hamas has been compared to the war against Isis between 2015 and 2019. That war was largely waged in Iraq and Syria, and one of the most important battles was the struggle to retake Mosul from the Islamists in 2017. The city and its outlying areas were home to two million people when Isis conquered it in the summer of 2014, and Isis had embedded itself within the local population. Around two million people live in Gaza today. It’s hard to distinguish Hamas from civilians.

When the Iraqi offensive against Isis in Mosul began in October 2016, there were warnings about the threat to the civilians in the city. I covered the battle when it began, and again as Iraqi forces, backed by US-led coalition aircraft, pushed slowly into the heart of the city in the following March. The nine-month battle was a grinding, slow war, fought street-by-street. Israel’s war against Hamas has been historically very different. Israel has preferred relying on air power to pummel Hamas in past conflicts, such as those in May 2021 and before that in 2012. But Israel has also sent ground forces into Gaza in the past – in 2009 and 2014. In each conflict, including the one today in Gaza, civilians are harmed. The explosion near a hospital in Gaza on Tuesday illustrates the horrors that can result from these conflicts.

The writer is the author of After ISIS: America, Iran and the Struggle for the Middle East (2019) and adjunct fellow at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).