While the incumbent Israeli prime minister, whose Likud party won a plurality of votes in the recent election, has two weeks to form a governing coalition, it seems that he cannot do so unless he is able to coax individual parliamentarians away from their parties. Meanwhile the Likud lost a Knesset vote on Monday for control of the “arrangements committee.” Haviv Rettig Gur explains:

The panel is a short-lived entity established by each new Knesset to manage the parliament’s agenda and conduct much of its business between the new Knesset’s swearing-in and the official formation of a ruling coalition a few weeks later.

The committee is immensely powerful for the duration of its brief lifespan. It is responsible for establishing the new Knesset’s committees, appointing their chairs and members for the interim period, and coordinating the legislative agenda between the parliamentary factions and with the as-yet interim government.

With control of the arrangements committee, Netanyahu might have had a chance at calling for a direct election of the prime minister, which could in theory end the political deadlock. But it was not to be, and the reason why is significant:

[Netanyahu’s challenger from the right, Naftali] Bennett, voted with Likud on the arrangements-committee question, after Likud promised to give him one of its own seats on the panel. . . . But Netanyahu neglected the Islamist party Ra’am, apparently feeling that its leader Mansour Abbas was in his pocket. And Abbas did not like being ignored. The opposition leader, Yair Lapid, made Abbas a better offer, and Ra’am’s vote with the center-left proved decisive, handing the right its first clear defeat in the new Knesset.

On Monday, even as Netanyahu discovered just how troubled his political prospects had become, Yair Lapid and his allies in the so-called “change camp” continued their efforts to block him at every turn, with the [Lapid] meeting the leaders of various factions, including publicly announced and photographed talks with the once-taboo Arab MKs in the Joint Arab List and Ra’am.

Of course, even with support from the Arab parties, there is no guarantee that Lapid will have the necessary seats for a coalition either.

When the IDF finally caught up with the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, he wasn’t deep inside a subterranean lair, as many had expected, but moving around the streets the Rafah. Israeli forces had driven him out of whatever tunnel he had been hiding in and he could only get to another tunnel via the surface. Likewise, Israel hasn’t returned to fight in northern Gaza because its previous operations failed, but because of its success in forcing Hamas out of the tunnels and onto the surface, where the IDF can attack it more easily. Thus maps of the progress of the fighting show only half the story, not accounting for the simultaneous battle belowground.

At the beginning of the war, various options were floated in the press and by military and political leaders about how to deal with the problem posed by the tunnels: destroying them from the air, cutting off electricity and supplies so that they became uninhabitable, flooding them, and even creating offensive tunnels from which to burrow into them. These tactics proved impracticable or insufficient, but the IDF eventually developed methods that worked.

John Spencer, America’s leading expert on urban warfare, explains how. First, he notes the unprecedented size and complexity of the underground network, which served both a strategic and tactical purpose:

The Hamas underground network, often called the “Gaza metro,” includes between 350 and 450 miles of tunnels and bunkers at depths ranging from just beneath apartment complexes, mosques, schools, hospitals, and other civilian structures to over 200 feet underground. . . . The tunnels gave Hamas the ability to control the initiative of most battles in Gaza.

One elite unit, commanded by Brigadier-General Dan Goldfus, led the way in devising countermeasures:

General Goldfus developed a plan to enter Hamas’s tunnels without Hamas knowing his soldiers were there. . . . General Goldfus’s division headquarters refined the ability to control forces moving underground with the tempo of the surface forces. Incrementally, the division refined its tactics to the point its soldiers were conducting raids with separate brigades attacking on the surface while more than one subterranean force maneuvered on the same enemy underground. . . . They had turned tunnels from obstacles controlled by the defending enemy into maneuver corridors for the attacker.

This operational approach, Spencer explains, is “unlike that of any other military in modern history.” Later, Goldfus’s division was moved north to take on the hundreds of miles of tunnels built by Hizballah. The U.S. will have much to learn from these exploits, as China, Iran, and North Korea have all developed underground defenses of their own.