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The Coming Battle of Gaza City

(Substack) Maj. (ret.) John Spencer - Gaza City is a sprawling metropolis. Streets are lined with tightly packed mid- and high-rise apartment blocks, some rising 10 to 15 stories. These areas create urban canyons that restrict visibility, funnel movement, and expose troops to fire from above. Between the larger roads, narrow alleyways wind through crowded residential quarters where vehicles cannot pass and soldiers will be forced to move on foot, often without line of sight to supporting units. Inside these neighborhoods, nearly every structure can be fortified, every doorway booby-trapped, and every basement connected to Hamas's tunnel grid. Hamas has had two decades to prepare, embedding command posts and weapons caches beneath mosques, hospitals, schools, and apartment complexes. Roads, walls, stairwells, and even ceilings may be wired to explode. Gaza City is believed to contain sites where hostages could be held underground. Commanders expect Hamas to attempt to move or conceal captives in the vast tunnel system or inside fortified civilian structures, both to shield its fighters and to retain bargaining leverage. The advance into Gaza City may bring breakthroughs in intelligence through interrogations of prisoners, the seizure of documents and electronic devices, and the exploitation of tunnel networks to yield new information on where remaining hostages are hidden. The IDF has adapted in real time, learning lessons in combined-arms maneuver, coordination, urban clearing operations, and civilian harm mitigation. It will enter Gaza City with more experience, better integration of technology, and hardened formations. The writer is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point.
2025-08-24 00:00:00
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