At a recent televised debate among candidates for re-election to the Knesset, the participants astutely identified the problems with their interlocutors’ positions. But when it came to the crucial issue of relations with the Palestinians, none was able to present a convincing solution. To Haviv Rettig Gur, who served as the one non-politician on the panel, the lack of ideas stems from “a broader national bewilderment”:

A majority of Israelis want to separate from the Palestinians. A majority—who overlap a great deal with the previous group—also believe an Israeli withdrawal is unlikely to deliver safety. And so, in a sense, everyone is right.

Hilik Bar [of the Zionist Camp party] insisted that Palestinian independence would increase, not decrease, the political window for an Israeli military response to any post-withdrawal attacks. Ayelet Shaked [of Jewish Home] calmly pointed out that the Gaza situation didn’t quite work out that way.

Shaked insisted the country could “manage the conflict,” leading Yaakov Peri [of Yesh Atid] to retort that instead the conflict was “managing” the country, holding an outsized role in setting the national agenda. . . .

At the end of the day, after a long string of failed peace talks, Israelis no longer believe in the policy narratives of the past. They do not believe peace is attainable in the near term, or that annexation might resolve the fundamental questions of the conflict. And neither, it seems, do the candidates in this election.

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.