The debate over Israel’s Gaza strategy is wrong.

Each war must be understood on its own terms, not through a template of previous conflicts.

The IDF Chief of Staff meeting with the United States Central Command (photo: IDF/X)

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This is a guest essay by Andrew Fox, a former British Army paratrooper and lecturer in war studies and behavioural science at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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After decades in limited, expeditionary, nation-building conflicts, many veterans and serving soldiers have forgotten what high-intensity war looks like.

They recognise it in Ukraine because it aligns with the Cold War hangover, Eastern European training scenarios that every NATO soldier pre-9/11 experienced, but I suggest that, because Gaza is in the Middle East, they see it solely through their own experiences there, unable to truly analyse what it actually is.

Many American and British military veterans from the 2003–to–2020 period have examined Israel’s operations in Gaza and applied the counterinsurgency (COIN) framework they are well familiar with, condemning Israel against the metrics they themselves were judged on when deployed. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Western forces focused on “population-centric” strategies — securing and winning the support of the local population to isolate the insurgents.

Classic COIN principles include relying on indigenous security forces, considering the support of the population as the centre of gravity, and exercising great restraint with firepower to avoid collateral damage that could alienate civilians. By clearing, holding, and building in liberated areas, the aim was to kill or capture insurgents in a way that would ultimately make civilians feel safer and more supportive of the host nation government. In U.S. Army general and former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency David Petraeus’ words, based on his experience leading the Iraq surge, “You can’t kill or capture your way out of an industrial strength insurgency.”

You must also change conditions on the ground for the people. However, Hamas was not an insurgency; it was the government of Gaza.

It is therefore unsurprising that when Petraeus and other veterans of the Global War on Terror examine the Gaza conflict, they instinctively reach for the COIN playbook. In Petraeus’ view, Hamas’ insurgent network could not be permanently eradicated by firepower alone; Israel would also need to “clear, hold and build” in Gaza’s neighbourhoods to prevent Hamas from re-emerging. He proposed measures typical of the Iraq handbook: establishing secure, gated communities and using biometrics to keep terrorists out, while providing basic services to win over locals.

Petraeus acknowledged that Israel’s initial focus on destroying Hamas was necessary, but he argued that “military force alone won’t accomplish that goal” of long-term victory. In other words, after Hamas’ army was defeated, Israel should switch to a hearts-and-minds campaign, the kind of nation-building counterinsurgency that Western forces attempted (with mixed results) in the Middle East.

The core issue is that the Gaza conflict was fundamentally not a counterinsurgency scenario, and Israeli leaders never viewed it that way. Unlike the U.S.-led campaigns in Iraq or Afghanistan, Israel’s fight in Gaza after Hamas’ October 7th massacre was a seven-front, hybrid state-on-state war of national survival, not a policing operation aimed at winning hearts and minds. Although Hamas is labelled a terrorist group since the mid-2000s, it has also functioned as the de facto government of Gaza, controlling territory, running institutions, and maintaining a sizable armed force with both conventional and unconventional aspects.

Gaza under Hamas’ rule became an Islamist mini-state on Israel’s border. When Hamas launched its surprise attack, Israel responded by declaring war and treating Hamas’ military wing as the army of an enemy state. Gaza was an all-out war against a hostile entity, with victory defined as eliminating the enemy’s military capability, not winning over its population.

Context is everything. Israel found itself, in late 2023, in a multi-front war for national survival. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant publicly stated, “We are being attacked from seven different arenas: Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran.” In other words, the Hamas fight in Gaza was just one theatre of a wider conflict with Iran’s regional network of proxies. Israeli leaders feared that failure to crush Hamas would mean living under constant mortal threat. As Gallant told Israel’s parliament, “Without meeting the goals of the war, people will not want to live [here] … It is a battle of national determination.”

This framing of existential stakes led Israel to prioritise swift, decisive military action to neutralise Hamas, very much in line with its classic doctrine of seeking short, intense wars to quickly restore security. Petraeus himself noted that Israel’s strategic culture, unlike America’s in Iraq, is not about protracted nation-building; historically, Israeli reservists needed to “win and go back to the harvest,” favouring short, decisive campaigns over prolonged occupations.

From the outset, Israel’s Gaza operation was designed as a combined-arms urban assault aimed at destroying Hamas’ military infrastructure, rather than as a patient counterinsurgency to win Gazan hearts and minds. The IDF lacked local indigenous forces to partner with; Gaza’s security forces were Hamas. Nor did Israel have any opportunity to persuade the Gazan population to support its campaign; most Gazans see Israel as an occupying power, considering their long history of conflict. The odds of winning their “hearts and minds” were always nil.

As Jason Dempsey, a veteran of Afghan COIN efforts, observed, “It’s not an internal fight … These are two states that happen to be fighting.” In such circumstances, ‘population-centric’ methods were largely off the table. Any Israeli attempt to hold and rebuild Gaza amid war would have been perceived as an occupation, not liberation (and would have been globally condemned). Winning hearts and minds after generations of hostility would be much more challenging in Gaza than it ever was in Iraq’s Sunni provinces, and arguably impossible.

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Once the war began, the ferocity of combat in Gaza’s cities further highlighted how different this was from recent U.S.-led counterinsurgencies. The IDF faced an enemy that had spent years transforming the urban landscape into a fortress. Hamas turned entire cities into a weapons system. They rigged buildings with booby traps and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), entrenched snipers and anti-tank teams in densely populated civilian areas, and built a complex network of tunnels beneath the streets for movement and shelter.

Israeli troops often found that each apartment block had to be considered a hostile bunker. “You’ve got to clear every building, every floor, every room, every cellar, every tunnel,” Petraeus remarked about the challenge facing the IDF. There were 500 miles of fortified tunnels beneath Gaza — an underground “metro” that greatly exceeded what Israeli intelligence had expected. In Petraeus’ words, fighting Hamas in this environment was “more difficult and more challenging than anything that we [the United States] ever did” in Iraq or Afghanistan. This was full-scale urban warfare of a kind Western forces have rarely encountered in recent decades.

Accordingly, the Israeli campaign unleashed the full arsenal of combined arms in a concentrated area. Air force jets struck thousands of targets with precision-guided munitions. Heavy artillery battered militant strongpoints day and night. Armoured bulldozers and engineering units advanced to breach Hamas barricades and uncover tunnel shafts. Tank brigades and infantry battalions manoeuvred through city streets in tightly coordinated advances. This ‘enemy-centric’ approach aimed to maximise pressure on Hamas fighters at every turn, even if it risked massive destruction to the urban terrain. That is exactly what Israel did in Gaza: They fought a war, not a police action.

Certainly, the major tragedy (and controversy) of this method was the extent of civilian casualties in Gaza. Intense urban fighting against an enemy hidden among civilians is inevitably destructive. Over 71,000 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza conflict. Even if one accepts Israel’s claim that approximately 25,000 of the Palestinian dead were Hamas militants, that still leaves around 45,000-plus Gazan civilians killed.

This toll has drawn sharp criticism of Israel’s actions from many quarters, including critics who argue it could have been avoided with a more cautious strategy. To him and others, this indicates Israel’s rules of engagement were far too permissive, effectively treating large areas of the urban environment and its residents as legitimate targets under a broad interpretation of military necessity. From a COIN practitioner’s perspective, such an approach is not only morally troubling but also strategically counterproductive, because killing thousands of civilians almost guarantees resentment, insurgency, and future conflict.

Israeli officials and supporters counter with a different narrative: Hamas is to blame for these deaths, because Hamas deliberately entrenched itself among civilians as human shields and turned Gaza into a death trap. They (and I consider myself amongst them) argue that the IDF actually went to unprecedented lengths to spare civilian life, given the circumstances.

For example, the IDF established dedicated humanitarian coordination centres and targeting review cells to vet strikes. They dropped millions of leaflets, sent millions of text messages, and made millions of phone calls urging residents to evacuate combat zones. The vast majority of munitions used were precision-guided, not dumb bombs, which theoretically allow for more careful targeting. Petraeus, no stranger to demanding restraint, acknowledged “the lengths that the IDF has gone to in order to try to get civilians out of the way” ahead of strikes, such as warnings and evacuation corridors.

Petraeus called the IDF’s urban campaign in Gaza “fiendishly difficult” and noted that Hamas’ tactics (no uniforms, fighting from civilian buildings, holding hostages underground) greatly complicated efforts to avoid collateral damage. According to the IDF, its own forces paid a price for exercising some restraint. At least 471 Israeli soldiers lost their lives fighting on the ground in Gaza, a toll many times higher (per capita) than what the U.S. suffered in any single battle of the war on terror.

Viewed in this light, it is almost a miracle that “only” 45,000 civilians died, terrible as that number is. Given a battlefield packed with 2 million people, riddled with booby traps and tunnel ambushes, where every block could hide an IED or a Hamas squad, a completely unrestrained assault might have killed far more. For comparison, when Russia flattened Grozny in the 1990s, or when the Allies firebombed cities in the Second World War, civilian deaths ran into the hundreds of thousands.

By using precision weapons and issuing warnings, albeit imperfectly, Israel averted an even higher toll. John Spencer, a retired U.S. Army officer, has stated that “the sole reason for civilian deaths in Gaza is Hamas” and that Israel’s unprecedented precautions effectively fulfilled its moral obligations in a hellish scenario. The truth is likely more nuanced: Israel did take significant steps to mitigate harm, yet also made conscious choices that accepted civilian deaths as collateral damage.

What is clear is that Gaza faced a painful balance-of-risk dilemma with no simple solutions. Every extra restriction on firepower to protect civilians would have increased risks for Israeli soldiers and might have allowed some Hamas fighters to escape and cause more harm later. Every bold move to defend troops and achieve mission success meant the loss of innocent lives. Reasonable people can argue whether the IDF found a justified balance, but it is clear that Gaza’s war was fought under far more severe conditions than the counterinsurgencies where Western veterans gained experience.

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Why did so many seasoned soldiers and officers seem to misread the Gaza war at first principles?

The answer lies in a common psychological pitfall: We all tend to interpret new problems through the lens of our own past experiences. Military professionals are no exception. In fact, they may be especially prone to this, given how strongly formative combat experiences shape their thinking. In my experience, armies do not encourage outside-the-box thinking.

Historians have long noted that generals often fight the last war, projecting the lessons of their prior battles onto the next conflict, even when the situation is fundamentally different.

A classic example: After observing early 20th-century wars, British officers “tended to draw lessons which reinforced [their] own belief and the interests of [their] regiment or corps,”¹ rather than genuinely embracing new realities. In other words, each expert saw what he expected to see.

We see echoes of this in modern times. Veterans who served during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars internalised the importance of counterinsurgency doctrine: securing populations, winning hearts and minds, enforcing restrictive rules of engagement, and partnering with local allies. These were considered the keys to success in their formative conflicts (at least in theory).

As a result, when they observe Gaza, their instinct is to criticise Israel for not doing these things: for lacking a competent local partner force, for not adequately protecting civilians, and for not having a detailed post-conflict reconstruction plan. Their analysis begins with what they know, as if every war were like Baghdad 2007 or Helmand 2010. It is a classic example of what psychologists call availability bias: a reliance on familiar frameworks even when they may not be appropriate.

What is often overlooked in this approach is a proper understanding of Gaza’s unique context. A war studies academic or military historian, for example, might more readily compare it not to Iraq, but to other full-scale urban wars like the Battle of Grozny, Manila 1945, or even Berlin 1945. These conflicts imply very different expectations: extremely high civilian casualties, cities reduced to ruins, victory based on enemy combatants killed or captured rather than winning hearts and minds. Thorough research on Hamas’ strategy, the terrain, and the political stakes makes it clear that Gaza resembled a conventional interstate war (albeit with asymmetric elements) more than a counterinsurgency campaign.

Israeli commanders in Gaza faced an enemy determined to exploit any restraint. Hamas routinely used human shields and launched attacks from protected sites specifically to discourage Israeli strikes. In such a scenario, excessive caution could lead to defeat or higher Israeli troop casualties. The harsh reality is that Western militaries in recent counterinsurgency campaigns have never had to engage in a full-scale battle of annihilation within a city where the enemy literally constructed the city into its defence system. The Gaza conflict was unique, and judging it by the standards of other Middle East wars is a category error.

Ultimately, the debate over Israel’s Gaza strategy highlights a broader lesson: Each war must be understood on its own terms, not through a template of previous conflicts.

To be clear, this does not imply that Israel’s approach was beyond criticism or that significant civilian casualties are inherently justified. It means that any critique must begin with an accurate understanding of the nature of the conflict.

In Gaza, Israel was engaged in what it regarded as a high-intensity war for national survival, facing a heavily armed, fanatical opponent embedded within a cityscape more similar to Stalingrad or Mosul than to Baghdad’s counterinsurgency efforts. This context influenced Israeli decisions, for better or worse. Analysts who overlook it tend to propose solutions that seem sensible (e.g., “use less force,” “build trust with the locals”), but which the combatants themselves found unfeasible under the circumstances.

The most insightful military analysis often emerges from combining practical experience with academic research. Learned war studies scholars and historically conscious officers can step outside their comfort zones and ask: What is the true nature of this war? What do the locals believe? What constraints do the troops face?

These are the hard research yards — the careful study of context that avoids knee-jerk judgments. When we apply this to Gaza, we may still criticise Israel’s conduct (or, alternatively, defend many of its actions), but we do so based on solid ground, rather than rehashing outdated concepts on paper.

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1. “Learning the Wrong Lessons: Biases, the Rejection of History, and Single-Issue Zealotry in Modern Military Thought.” Modern War Institute at West Point.