- Israel’s planned ground operation to destroy Hamas in Gaza will be like “moving through a minefield,” experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
- The Israel Defense Forces will face a stronger enemy than previously engaged on urban battlefields, which are already dangerous and require specialized tactics.
- “If you hurry, you not only make more mistakes in terms of collateral damage, civilian deaths, material destruction, but you also take more friendly casualties as well,” Michael Knights, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), told the DCNF.
(Daily Caller)—Israel is preparing to invade Gaza, a task that will require its military to engage in grinding warfare through an urban setting and defeat a Hamas organization that is stronger than ever, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Israel’s objective is to wipe out all remnants of the Iran-backed terrorist organization whose members brutally murdered 1,300 Israelis, mostly civilians, in an unanticipated intrusion on Oct. 7, Israel’s leaders say. While the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is better armed than Hamas and has trained for exactly the kind of operation it plans to execute in Gaza, the coming fight will present new challenges it has not yet dealt with in combat, experts said.
Michael Knights, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), explained the challenges the IDF will face before achieving its war aims. Gaza is packed with secretive tunnels, deteriorating buildings that can be used as strongpoints for attack and thousands of “fanatical” fighters, he said, not to mention civilians.
“Any environment like this — ruins, dents, building quality, lots of civilians— it’s complicated. Then you’ve got hostages, then the three dimensional component [of] tall buildings and really extensive underground spaces,” Knights said. “And then you’ve got an enemy that is probably more advanced than anything we’re seeing outside of the Ukraine environment.”
Hamas is a “fanatical defending force that is actually very well armed,” Knights told the DCNF.
The operation will be like “moving through a minefield” while under fire the entire way through the city, he said.
Hamas mostly controls the 140-square-mile strip of land between Israel and the Mediterranean Sea and for years has used it as a base from which to pummel Israel with rockets.
The organization is highly proficient by the standards of paramilitary organizations, in large part because it receives funding, training, weapons and technical support from Iran, Knights and others explained.
Hamas also boasts a relatively large arsenal of attack drones, rockets and the most advanced anti-armor weapon available to any military, Knights told the DCNF.
Israeli intelligence estimated in 2021 Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups maintained a stockpile of about 30,000 rockets, The New York Times reported. That includes a mix of crudely-made, inaccurate Qassam rockets and more advanced missiles and components components smuggled in from Iran and Syria. But, so far, there is no evidence Hamas has guided surface-to-surface missiles, Fabian Hinz wrote in the International Institute of Strategic Studies.
The terrorist organization fired as many as 2,500 rockets on the first day of the war, according to Hinz — Hamas claimed a number closer to 5,000.
Israel believes Hamas has around 30,000 fighters who will be willing to give their lives resisting the IDF, according to The Associated Press. However, it will also leverage civilians as shields to prevent Israel from striking at Hamas positions or members for fear of killing noncombatants, a war crime, John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, wrote. The IDF called for Gazans to evacuate, but nevertheless many will likely remain.
Hamas’ incursion on Oct. 7 showed that the group has “reached new levels of organizational capability” since it last clashed with the IDF in Gaza, Seth Frantzman, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the DCNF. “It’s weapons are still primarily older AK-47s and RPGs, but it also now has small quadcopter drones and many types of mines and explosives that it can use to booby-trap areas.”
“The real challenge will be fighting in an urban area where there are civilians,” Frantzman said.
Gaza City itself comprises about 20 square miles, and Gaza has a handful of other 5-square-mile urban areas, according to WINEP. However, Gaza is far more densely populated than other urban battlefields of recent wars, such as Raqqa in Syria or Mosul in Iraq.
Comparing Israel’s imminent fight in Gaza to those of Mosul and Raqqa provides limited context. Gaza is more built-up than either of the reference cities and pierced with an extensive network of underground tunnels Hamas, adding an unknown dimension to battlefield space and tactical considerations, WINEP said.
Tunnels can hide weapons depots and fighting positions, potentially for launching ambushes, according to The Economist. Hamas can use the tunnels to relay messages undetected and move rockets from one point in the city to another. The tunnels afford critical protection from Israeli airstrikes.
“In 2008, the air strike and air surveillance [by Israel] took us by surprise … so we made strategic plans to move the battle from the surface to underground,” a Hamas commander said, referring to Israel’s 22-day operation in Gaza, The Economist reported.
In 2014, the IDF launched an operation to degrade the tunnel network, destroying 32 of an estimated 1,300, according to The Economist. A post-operation inquiry found that the IDF was unprepared for the challenges of first locating, then destroying, the tunnels.
An estimated 300 miles of tunnel infrastructure snakes through Gaza and possibly into Israel, according to a 2021 estimate, NPR reported. Many of them are narrow, deep underground and traversing underneath major civilian sites like hospitals or mosques. Hamas is able to use foreign support and capital investment to rebuild tunnels and construct new ones.
While the Islamic State had two years to construct defenses in Mosul and Raqqa, Hamas has been working on Gaza’s defensive infrastructure for 15 years, according to WINEP. IDF forces will have to destroy overhead and ground fortifications and artillery emplacements while also navigating anti-personnel and anti-armor minefields, hidden IEDs and booby-trapped buildings.
At the same time, the IDF benefits from an encyclopedia of knowledge compiled over years of constantly surveilling Gaza, as well as two prior wars in the territory from which to draw insight.
“The IDF appears to be the most cohesive, well-equipped, and well-prepared force to fight major urban battles since the U.S. military itself fought the highly destructive second Battle of Fallujah in November 2004,” Knights wrote.
The Israel Defense Forces mobilized some 300,000 reservists to supplement its roughly 170,000 active duty troops, effectively tripling manpower available for the fight.
Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant pledged to “wipe out” Hamas “from the face of the earth” on Oct. 12, day 5 of the conflict, while standing alongside other members of Israel’s newly-formed war cabinet, Times of Israel reported. In the days since, the defense minister laid out specific war objectives and the broad outlines of a three-phase campaign.
The first phase has begun consisting of a “a military campaign by fire and later by tactical maneuver, the purpose of which will be to assassinate operatives and damage infrastructure” to destroy Hamas, Gallant said on Friday, Haaretz reported.
The second phase will involve lower-intensity combat to “eliminate pockets of resistance,” Gallant said, Times of Israel reported. In the final step, Israel plans to create “a new security regime in the Gaza Strip” and for Israel, eliminating any Israeli responsibility for Gaza’s day-to-day welfare.
Gallant told troops stationed near the border with Gaza a ground operation would come “soon,” Times of Israel reported. He warned the fight will be long, difficult and intense.
IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari said the Israeli Air Force was firing on Gaza “at a rate not seen in decades” to prepare the battlefield for a ground invasion, Haaretz reported.
“The IDF has trained for this, but the reality of this kind of warfare is always more difficult than the training,” Frantzman told the DCNF.
Knights explained the ground operation as “nibbling away” at bits of the city. First the IDF identifies a block or avenue it wants to control, then spends a couple of hours probing it and “pulverizing” areas that respond with gunfire. Then troops move in to secure the area.
“Then you look at the next slice, and you do it again. And you do that 30, 50, 70 or 120 times until you’ve got the whole area” and ideally handing responsibility for those areas off to a multinational forces and observance organization, Knights said. The IDF will be able to commit a handful of troops at any one time to frontline slivers for 24 to 48 hours, ensuring troops maintain fresh and minimizing the numbers of casualties any one unit sustains, he explained.
It will take months at minimum to secure the entire city.
“If you hurry, you not only make more mistakes in terms of collateral damage, civilian deaths, material destruction, but you also take more friendly casualties as well,” Knights said.
“And if you’re working somebody else’s timeline, like how long the U.S. can hold international pressure at bay or something along those lines, then you tend to make more mistakes,” Knights said.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.