SWORDS OF IRON Part 3 - End Game or Bloodbath?

Over 80% of HAMAS forces have been decimated. The last fighters are hiding amongst 1.5 million refugees. Can Israel rout them without a civilian bloodbath?

ANALYSTS NOTE: This article was written in March while I was in Israel meeting with the Israeli Defense Forces commanders prosecuting the ground war in Gaza.  I held off publishing it for four weeks to allow what I thought would be a quick operation to secure the HAMAS stronghold in Rafah.  Months would pass.  Now that the operations are underway, I won’t violate any organizational security secrets I learned abroad. Also, my Nancetrodamus prediction skills remain unparalleled.

An IDF Merkava tank runs over and smashes the I LOVE GAZA sign at the Rafah aid crossing during a gunbattle with HAMAS on 6 May 2024 (Photo: IDF)

Months of organized college protests in America and Europe gave HAMAS’s leader, Yahyah Sinwar, a feeling of confidence that the Israeli-HAMAS war was about to end in his favor. Almost ten weeks of wrangling and begging Hamas to accept cease-fires led protesters around the world to start chanting. “Palestine is almost free.”

Having just spent five weeks in Israel, it was pretty clear to me that protesters were living a delusion. Israel remains a mighty, likely nuclear-armed regional superpower that could defeat the best of whatever was thrown at them. Even after Iran had fired almost 350 drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles at Israel (virtually none of which damaged anything except critically wounding a Muslim Bedouin girl), the mood around American campuses was that their efforts were being noticed and that a cease-fire was imminent. Perhaps this irrational exuberance was seeping into the decision-making of the terrorist group’s senior management.  It would be a fatal error.  I’m sure the HAMAS fighters that were being bombarded on a minute-to-minute basis all across the Gaza Strip were not so agreeable. 

Still, HAMAS was feeling pretty good about itself when they decided to launch what had to be their last remaining short-range rockets from a location very near a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) shelter with several hundred civilians in it. The terrorists hoped the Israelis would strike the building and accidentally kill civilians. This would drive the protesting American university students crazy.  However, the Israeli Air Force struck the rocket site with great precision, but not before four IDF soldiers died in the barrage of terrorist rockets that hit their base.

This attack was the last straw for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  He has given orders for the Israeli defense forces to start operations to destroy a HAMAS in Rafah. This comes after almost three months of wrangling, where cease-fires and hostage releases were dangled in front of Israel to get them to stop what will surely be the last days of the HAMAS terrorist group.

On the other hand, HAMAS was relying on a building wave of global protest, especially those on American campuses, to pressure President Joe Biden to stop Israel’s incoming juggernaut. 

The situation for HAMAS is so desperate that in the last 24 hours, they suddenly agreed to a ceasefire proposal that they had rejected numerous times.  Until Israeli army tanks entered the Rafah humanitarian border crossing, there was no real reason for the terrorists to accept changing a situation that was going their way.  Now they want to talk. 

By taking the Rafah crossing from HAMAS, Israel now controls the flow of food into Gaza. HAMAS had been regularly seen boarding the humanitarian shipments and driving them off to feed their fighters, families, and tribes that support them.  The IDF has also discovered at least three illicit smuggling tunnels that passed underground from Egypt.  These and other tunnels were how HAMAS smuggled in over 30,000 automatic weapons and millions of rounds of rifle and machinegun ammunition. 

One thing is certain: the Rafah blitz is an existential crisis for HAMAS.  This operation is the end game for their terrorist force that just seven months ago invaded and massacred 1,200 civilians and cost Israel the deaths of over 300 soldiers.  The IDF’s mission is likely to be successful, and it will result in the decimation of the last of the organized HAMAS battalions and the long overdue death of the most senior commander, Yahyah Sinwar. 

We are most likely seeing the beginning of the end of the Israel-HAMAS war.

Here is how it will unfold.