Earlier this month, the U.S. announced that it would renew shipments of 500-pound bombs to Israel, but would continue to withhold its larger, 2,000-pound explosives. Its stated reason is that such munitions risk unnecessary harm to civilians if used in the densely populated areas of Gaza where Hamas operates. John Spencer argues that this logic misunderstands how these weapons work, and the nature of urban warfare.

The penetration depth of a 2,000-pound bomb, depending on the kind and whether it must go through concrete, is believed to be from sixteen feet to more than thirty feet. Hamas’s military wing is hidden in more than 400 miles of tunnels, some as deep as 200 feet underground. And to Israel’s north, Hizballah, like Hamas, has spent years digging tunnels deeper and deeper to protect what is believed to be an arsenal of over 100,000 rockets, missiles, and drones. Southern Lebanon is referred to as the “Land of Tunnels” due to the miles of deep buried underground networks.

In other words, the IDF doesn’t use its largest ordinance to cause more extensive damage to a wider area (which would risk greater harm to bystanders), but to penetrate more deeply underground. Moreover, there is little reason to believe using fewer or smaller bombs will really reduce civilian casualties:

In the 1945 Battle of Manila, one of the few battles in military history with parallels to Gaza, General Douglas MacArthur banned the U.S. Army from using bombs for fear of destroying the city and killing civilians. Nevertheless, 100,000 civilians perished and most of the city was destroyed to defeat a Japanese force not even half the size of Hamas in Gaza.

Perhaps most importantly, the careful use of heavy munitions will hasten Hamas’s defeat, the prerequisite for easing the suffering of civilians. There is another possible explanation for America’s reluctance to provide heavy munitions, however: not to hobble the IDF’s efforts in Gaza, where most of its heavy bombing campaign is over, but to deter Israel from going to war with Hizballah.

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.