What Would You Have Israel Do to Defend Itself?
The New York Times Opinion by David Brooks March 24, 2024

Old article but most still ring true, in this terror war.... including regarding Hezbollah

Extracts:
John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, said,

• These measures are real but in addition.... Israel has,
  1. cut off power in Gaza,
  2. making it hard for Palestinians to gain access to their phones and information
  3. and most important, the evacuation orders published by Israel
  4. Israel has also destroyed a vast majority of Gaza’s cellphone towers
  5. and on occasion bombed civilians in so-called safe areas and safe routes

They are caught between a nation enraged by October 7, 2023 and using overwhelming and often reckless force and a terrorist group that has structured the battlefield to maximize the number of innocent dead

So to step back: What do we make of the current Israeli strategy?

• Judged purely on a tactical level, there’s a strong argument that the IDF has been remarkably effective against Hamas forces
• IDF claims to have killed over 13,000 of the roughly 30,000 Hamas troops
• IDF has disrupted three-quarters of Hamas’s battalions so that they are no longer effective fighting units
• IDF has also killed two of five brigade commanders and 19 of 24 battalion commanders
• As of January 2024 US officials estimated that Israel had damaged or made inoperable 20 to 40 percent of the tunnels

Many Israelis believe the aggressive onslaught has begun to restore Israel’s deterrent power

(Readers should know that Brooks' son served in the IDF from 2014 to 2016; He’s been back home in the States since then)