#366 — Urban Warfare 2.0

Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Well, it's been pretty crazy out there on college campuses. I will have much more to say about that shortly. But today I'm bringing you a podcast that I promised in a previous episode where I said I would talk to someone who is an expert in urban warfare who could help me analyze just what has gone on in Gaza. Today I'm speaking with John Spencer. John currently serves as the chair

of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point. He is the co-director of the Urban Warfare Project and host of the Urban Warfare Project podcast. He's also a founding member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare. John served 25 years in the Army, having held ranks from private to sergeant first class and second lieutenant to major. He was an active duty Army officer during two combat tours in Iraq.

His research focuses on military operations, in dense urban areas, mega cities, and urban and subterranean warfare. John also holds a master of policy management from Georgetown University. And his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, foreign policy, and many other publications. And he is the author of the book, Understanding Urban Warfare. John and I cover Israel's response to October

7th from top to bottom. We discuss the nature of Hamas's attacks on October 7th. What was most surprising about them, the difficulty in distinguishing Hamas from the rest of the population in Gaza, combatants as a reflection of a society's values, how many people have

been killed so far in Gaza, the proportion of combatants and non-combatants, the double standards to which the IDF is held, the worst criticism that can be made of Israel, and the IDF so far, intentions versus results, what is unique about the war in Gaza, Hamas's

use of human shields, what it would mean to defeat them, what the IDF has accomplished so far, the destruction of the Gaza tunnel system, the details of underground warfare, the rescue of hostages, how non-combatants become combatants, how difficult it is to interpret videos of combat, what victory would look like, the likely aftermath of the war, a possible war with his beloved, Iran's attack on Israel, and what to do about Iran, and other topics.

This one is a PSA, so no paywall, as always if you find what we're doing here valuable and you want to support the podcast, you can do that by subscribing at samherris.org. I bring you John Spencer. I am here with John Spencer, John, thanks for joining me. Sam, thanks for having me. So I will have introduced you in the intro here, but perhaps you can state what your background is and how you come to this conversation.

Sure, so I spent 25 years in the US military as an infantry soldier and officer and then spent two combat deployments to Iraq, both in the invasion and at the end. But then I went, you know, throughout my career, my last job was teaching strategy at West Point where I stood up a research center and started researching, you know, all urban battles and I became this chair of Urban Warfare Studies that I am now.

Really, when I left the military, I began this endeavor to travel the world into combat zones to understand them in real time. That has led me to where I am now where I can uniquely provide people, I hope, understanding of the Israel's war against Hamas and Gaza, which is overwhelmingly urban, which is what I specialize in. Yes, so I want to get your expertise here on Urban Warfare and use that to analyze what's happening in Gaza and what isn't happening.

I think there's a lot of misinformation about the nature of the war and how it compares to other conflicts. Where else have you witnessed urban warfare beyond being in your own tours in the military? When I left the military in 2018 and really took full direction of my new job to study academically, I started, I went to Mumbai to study the 2008 terror attacks, which was on a, you know, 10 terrorists took down a whole city.

I went to Israel multiple times studying past wars, so like the 2002 battle of Janine, the battle of Suez City. When the full scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia started, I started going into Ukraine, so I've been four times since the war began studying the urban battles. So, key, buck, moot, mariople, and then of course I've been to Gaza twice since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war. Interesting that you went to Mumbai.

That's something that I've thought a lot about in the aftermath of October 7th because it's really this pure case of jihadism that has nothing to do with Israel obviously, has very little to do with Jews, except for the fact that they did manage to find some Jews to kill in Mumbai, but I'm interested to hear what that was like before we hit our main topic. Sure. I mean, I also, I forgot to mention that I also went into Nagar Nakhara Bak.

There was a war there in 2020, and there's been another one, but I went in after that war to, it ended in a major urban battle over the battle of Shusha. But going back to Mumbai, I mean, it was just fascinating and the planning that went into it. And like you said, they basically hit five targets simultaneously at the exact same your moments with small teams of terrorists dressed as civilians trying to blend in.

And one of them being the Habad, two hotels, a train station, but overwhelmed the systems. And there are totally at a different scale. A lot of similarities between the invasion of Israel on October 7th and the Mumbai attacks on how it kind of overloaded the system. Yeah. Yeah. That was, it's all one thing that's fascinating about this is that to my knowledge, India did not respond. Am I right about that? At least I haven't heard about what India has done in response.

Not an indirect action because it was verified by intelligence that it was a Pakistani-led operation, so really a state-backed operation, but using these proxy forces. And this was a, that traveled from Pakistan into India to conduct the attack. There was a lot of political things that happened to include demanding responsibility, but there was such plausible deniability. It was literally frustrating with the, you know, the terrorist group who did it, but you're right, no direct action.

I mean, there are lots of history there between the Indian and Pakistan. And the concern of, just like we've seen other places, the concern of escalation in that direct attack, but there's a, this is the kind of the Iran situation in the Middle East too. There is always this plausible deniability, even if, in these cases where it can be proven that the terrorists were trained, financed, and launched by a state actor.

Okay. So on to October 7th and Gaza, I was thinking we would start our conversation with the war in Gaza, just supposed Israel's response to October 7th. But is there anything you want to say about October 7th itself before Israel did anything in response? Sure. I think it's, I spent a lot of time walking the ground of October 7th from my lens, right, of somebody who studied urban combat, from Mumbai to all wars.

I think that the world kind of got to miss, really still has it wrong on what happened on October 7th. So I've done a lot of work on walking the ground and going to all the different sites and understanding the scale, the intention, the magnitude, the tactics, everything from October 7th. I think the world wants to put it in the terrorist bucket, right, to put it in the bucket with 9-11, 26-11, or the Mumbai attacks and other terrorist attacks.

And while yes, there are some similarities, but it's more like a full scale invasion. I mean, there are over 4,000, you know, both Hamas and Palestinian civilians across the border between Israel and Gaza, 22 breach sites along the border wall, 4,000 rockets launched in the first few hours with the intention of moving much farther north than they did. I mean, it was a, and I've struggled with what was October 7th. And as from a military lens, it is as clear as an invasion as you can get.

Interesting. Someone confounded just optically and then conceptually by the fact that as you just pointed out that there were Hamas, you know, fighters, I mean, not properly thought of as soldiers in the state act or sense, perhaps, but they were, you know, obvious insurgents. But then as you pointed out, there were almost as many or even as many or more Palestinian civilians who came across the border and participated in the violence to one or another degree. How do you think about that?

I mean, we all want frameworks in which to think about it. I think about it as in a war lens. It's hard in this situation. I can't, what was Gaza? It was at a state and was this a launch of a state attack, right? It's not. So it falls into these two buckets of whether internationally armed conflict or non-international armed conflict, but I do it.

Like I said, as an invasion with different forces, yeah, the first wave of forces were these Hamas, Nukpa, some even wearing uniform forces with clear instructions. I mean, they had guidebooks on how to create as much suffering. They had guidebooks on how to wear their GoPro cameras. There's just so much uniqueness. But I do, if you cross the border, I do use a combatant really. So in war, there's two categories.

In combatant and in combatant, and yes, you can get into like illegal combatant and all of these things. But if somebody crossed the border from Gaza into Israel with the purpose of partaking in the hostilities, they immediately make themselves in combatant. Yeah. So let's move forward into it. And I think as we talk here, I'd like both of us to be alert to any topics about which we think many people are confused.

So if I just raise something about which you think there's a lot of misunderstanding out there in the public, please flag it unless linger on it so that we don't miss any opportunities here to rectify some of the confusion. So now that the war has started, and we're talking now where there's been a lull in the fighting and really the question, the open question, still, perhaps it'll still be open when we air this, is whether or not the IDF is going to go into.

Or Rafa, I'm sure there's some conflict happening even as we speak, but there's definitely been a lull in the fighting. What do we know about the war in Gaza and how do we know it at this point? And just how much, how is information getting out? How do you view the quality of the information? On some level, this is the most witnessed conflict and human history judging from social media. But in other ways, we know that there's a astounding amount of misinformation and confusion about it.

What is going on in Gaza and how do we know what is going on? Sure. I think that's a great question and it's hard to say from from the time from October 7th till today, how have we known what is going on and how is that shaped our, basically, our information about the war? And I agree with you, we used to have these terms like TikTok wars.

They're calling this the first open source war after Ukraine, but the evolution of being able to be bombarded by information, not through the traditional means, but through social media and other aspects. We can see into the battle continuously, but we're also looking through a so distraught and a lot of people are interpreting what they're seeing where I agree with you. We can really start from October 7th.

We talked about that and how I think people have gotten that wrong on it was just a terrorist attack. It was oriented towards the military, all these different immediate disinformation campaigns that seemed to be gaining traction to sticking even in Israel's response. But once on October 8th, Israel declared war against Tomas.

So that's a really great framework at a state because they went on the news and made a formal declaration of war against Tomas in Gaza because of what happened on October 7th. That's pretty straightforward. They set forth their goals, which again, as time has gone in different media messages or information operations, what we call them, social media trends or whatever, there's been so much of the truth that has been translated. You ask me how do we know what we know?

So for October 7th, we know because Hamas uploaded all their videos a lot of time in real time. We can pretty much, people are starting to make their own opinions on October 7th based on the overwhelming information being uploaded, but it's really interesting how despite even Hamas' videos, everybody formed their own opinion on it was resistant. It was oriented towards the military. There wasn't this no rape happened, all these things, despite the overwhelming evidence we all had access to.

Is all that video still up there or has it been in some ways taken down? No, you can go to October, there's actually a video, I forget the name of them, October7th.com where people have collected, unfortunately, all the Hamas' videos they can find and put it on as a record because you know, you ask the thread of X or telegram, whatever, it can be lost in the threads, but people have, it's all still available. I saw the video that the Israeli government put together.

I saw it back in November and it was really shocking and I wrote about how much it jared me despite how much I've seen of war, how much my own experiences. Yeah, I haven't seen that video and perhaps I should, I think I've been staring myself the experience, but what did surprise you about it? One of the biggest surprises was just the unique.

It wasn't the fact that Hamas recorded so much of the atrocities they were doing, but also the fact that there were so many sensors, what we call them, traffic cameras, dashboard cameras, victim cell phones. The, what Israel did, which nobody has access to, and let's say seen this video, was to take all those different points of view and then put them in time and location. Like if you're at the Nova music festival, the video shows you the Hamas GoPro approaching the festival.

It shows you the dash camera of somebody there trying to get away and of the frightened teenager who's recording it. It brings it all together, which I think really creates this very mixed reality experience of which is unique to war reporting. Like I've watched my fill of evil things happening around the world, but how this was put together I think was really unique. It really jared me.

I mean, other things that I saw in the video that were very unique to me was like the video of Hamas rolling through the border, really jubilant about what they were about to do. And I've led a lot of soldiers in the combat and that's not normal, even for soldiers for anybody to be really excited, you're foric about what they were about to do. And then lastly, I found some of the videos of the children crying out and paying. There's one scene where there's two young boys.

The Hamas members had just killed the father and they had brought them back into the house and you can hear the boys moaning, which is something I as a soldier have heard, you know, enemy combatants do on the battlefield. Like it's like the death, the death moan, I call it.

And to hear that coming from a boy was really traumatic, but I've also seen, you know, innocent civilians being caught in between, you know, in war and how the soldiers will overwhelmingly stop to give aid and to have a little boy crying out his eyes missing, his dad's dead. And for the Hamas member to be standing there, like shut up, be quiet and then go to the fridge and that's the scene that everybody talks about where he grabs the coke out of the fridge and starts drinking it.

That's really, you know, very unique. Yeah, I was just, we're talking now and on the day that Cheryl Sandberg released her documentary on the violence against women on October 7th that's available on YouTube. And I just started watching it. I only got maybe 15 minutes in before we had to jump on the microphones here, but it shows some of the footage which I had seen before of which many people have seen.

I really think everyone should see of some of the hostages being dragged across the border into Gaza. And you know, some of the young women who almost certainly have been raped, I mean, there's one who's got obviously blood around her pelvic area on her pants and actually looks like her Achilles tendons might have been cut, which is a diabolical detail if true.

The thing that's so striking about so much of this footage of the hostages being dragged across the borders that so many of the people in the scene are absolutely ecstatic. And they're, you know, basically all you hear are shouts of Al-Ahu Akbar and it's coming from, you know, I guess many of these people, certainly some of the people are official members of Hamas.

But judging from the sheer numbers in many of these shots, it really seems like a lot of these people are just Palestinian civilians who are getting caught up in the mob violence. But it does strike me as unusual. I mean, it's very hard. I can imagine a lot of things. You know, I can imagine based on some experience of being a victim and wanting vengeance and you know, I can imagine being on the other side of violence, even wrongful violence.

But what I find very difficult to imagine is a scenario where an obvious non-combatant, you know, in this case, a girl or a mother clutching two children to her breast being taken hostage and finding the taking of these hostages it caused for celebration. Right? Like this is the win I've been hoping for. This is the thing that's going to get me shrieking to heaven in jubilation that we finally grabbed one of these mistreated girls who's already bloody, it may be grievously injured in some cases.

In some cases, dead where you have people rushing forward to spit upon the corpses of, again, in many cases, obvious non-combatants. You can understand it. You know, this, you know, really fully lean into the principle of charity here. Perhaps you can understand it if these are soldiers being taken hostage.

But when you have a woman clutching her kids being dragged onto a motorcycle and you have people shrieking in jubilation over this, I have a, I mean, I know why I think people are capable of this. But it's, you know, I would say you have to believe some very specific things about the moral order in the universe and your place in it to find these sorts of moments, the fulfillment of your aspirations, right? And a cause for happiness, not grim, murderous determination or sadism or, but just joy.

And so it's something, I think people find it very hard to interpret these scenes and I think they've just averted their eyes from them. But they do suggest that any bright line we want to draw between, you know, evil, mustache, twirling terrorists, you know, IE the core members of Hamas and other Palestinians is in fact difficult to draw.

I'm just wondering how you view those scenes because they do strike me as surprising in ways that echo the surprise you just expressed over the jubilation of the combatants coming across the border as kind of a nonstandard mood for soldiers. Yeah, it's an interesting. So it's not the first time I've seen it to be truthful.

Now those who crossed the border and engaged in the activities in any way to include the looters who even came forward and walked over the dead children's bodies and took their clothing back into Gaza. Like I'm a very law of war, rule of law, a realist basically.

So have I seen similar, of course it's this disgusting to see reminded me of, you know, scenes of Mogadishu in 1993, the entire population celebrating the death of American soldiers in Indonesia, 2004, the entire seems like the entire city coming out to dismember Americans, burn them, drag them, hang them from their bridge and celebrate. It's not, yes, I a hundred percent agree with you.

It's a massive problem with, you know, Islamic radicalization of populations and where you can bring yourself to be celebrating the rape of women and taking of babies as hostages. So many fundamental issues with that. But I also draw a Creole line because I understand the history of war and this is again where I think people have gotten it wrong.

And I think that to think that those videos didn't lead to like Israel's quest for vengeance and and the way they act, that is all stemming off of what happened on October 7th.

I strongly believe from being on the ground, you asked me how do I get my information or other people from being on the ground with the IDF, that is also not how soldiers approach, even after the Battle of Fallujah or other instance, which is very similar in the difficulty of distinguishing between, okay, who's a combatant or non-combatant, innocent civilian.

It doesn't lead to nations or like the IDF in this case where no matter what they do, people think they're intentionally trying to target people because of those videos, which is not the reality on the ground. Yeah, I mean, can you imagine the reverse case of the IDF dragging obvious, non-combatant women and children out of Gaza across the border into Israel and random Israelis celebrating their rape and abuse, there's some glaring asymmetries here, which people are losing sight of.

We'll get into the details of what the IDF has done and what they may have done wrong. And I really have no doubt that there are examples of war crimes to be found in the war in Gaza on the IDF side because it seems like it would be impossible for some soldiers, not to have gone haywire in certain circumstances, right? And this is just the nature of war, as I understand it.

But what I don't think you would find is an appetite among the Israelis to have raped non-combatants paraded before jeering crowds in Tel Aviv. There is just a cultural asymmetry here that is quite glaring and almost never remarked upon.

And I agree with you, this is really that the misinformation that is so shocking that you have so much misunderstanding of who the Israelis are, as in the IDF, the people of Israel, how there is an aspect of, of course, the law of war, I'm sure we'll talk about following the law of war in all of its intricacies in the execution of a war. But also the moral, ethical code of your society. Military are a reflection of their societies.

So like you're right, the asymmetry here is that you think that the Israel society would be okay with any of that. And clearly they're not, and they want to hold soldiers if they do go wrong and war accountable. There's so much of that that is that's not who we are, that people don't understand that militaries take into war. They're a reflection of their society's values, so there's so much misinformation out there that it becomes confusing to people who have never been there.

They couldn't tell you what the difference between Gaza and the West Bank is. They couldn't tell you what the size of Israel is or what. There's so much they don't know, but they formed these immediate, you know, hardened and emphatic opinions about, that's just what Israel does. Like what are you talking about? So back to the information question, let's just focus on the raw numbers here. How many people have been killed in Gaza and what is the proportion of combatants to non-combatants?

And because one thing we're dealing with here is that for the longest time people have simply been restating numbers that have come straight out of the so-called Ministry of Health, which is really Hamas in Gaza, you know, I don't think anyone can doubt that many thousands of people have died and many thousands of non-combatants have died. But what do we know about the numbers and the proportion, or do we simply actually not know with any confidence at this point? Yeah, that's a great question.

It's interesting how many times I've gotten the question unique to this war only. What is the combatant to civilian kill ratio? It's just, I of course haven't studied so many urban battles can tell you what it was in the past. I can tell you for, so the question was how many have died? The answer is nobody knows. But for some reason, unique war is a contest of will, we have to fight what the narrative is.

So because unique to this war alone, and I don't say this based on opinion, just but empirical evidence, this is the first war in history. Or anybody has had a running count of the civilian casualties down to the single digit in real time. I mean, if you just imagine a fake running count. Correct. I mean, we're taking the actual opinion of a third party in who is affiliated with the enemy Hamas. So the Gaza Health Ministry is a Hamas because Hamas wasn't just a military force.

It was the government and you couldn't be part of the institution. If you're not, it's complex. And to get a number from within the environment, from the enemy and say that's the number that the entire world runs with with no caveats, one, it's physically impossible to know how many civilians have died in Gaza. It has never been done in the history of war. The greatest battle since World War II was the battle of the soul in 2016 and 17.

And a year after the battle, the Iraqi government still did not have a number in which how many civilians had died. Now, it went all the way from 9,000 to 40,000, the mayor of the city said it was over 40,000. Because of how many people are in the rubble, how many people are unaccounted for who left them. There's no report on where they went. You can imagine in a very dense urban environment, like how could you possibly have a number?

But if I ran with the numbers that we all use, so let's say that Gaza Health Ministry, as we're talking, says 33,000 civilians have died. It is not, let me caveat myself, is that the Gaza Health Ministry says that 33,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza since October 7. That number, if we are truthful in, and we used Hamas's numbers, or the Gaza Health Ministry's numbers, it accounts for every death that has happened in Gaza no matter the cause.

It is, it includes all Hamas members, anybody who died of natural causes, anybody who died actually from Hamas's hands, because of the 12,000 rockets that Hamas has launched out of Gaza towards Israel since October 7th, 20% of those have landed inside of Gaza and killed many Palestinian people of Gaza.

But if we ran with the 33,000, which includes everybody that died, and we took Israel's number because if we're going to believe Hamas, why don't we believe Israel, who says, given our battle damage assessments, we believe we killed 12,000 Hamas combatants. So you subtract 12,000 per 33,000, you get about a one enemy to two, if not one to one of enemy to civilian ratio, which would be historically low to any urban battle, and this is a war, not a battle.

So it's actually really interesting how somebody will try to take a battle from the past, especially the last 30 years, and compare it to the war in Gaza, which includes, you know, like 10 massive urban battles together. But they aggregate the numbers to kind of tell the message they want.

It would still be a historically low, given all the context of urban combat, where you have a civilian population where no matter what you do, many of them still stay, you're trying to identify separate enemy from civilian or combatant to non-combatant, like the battle Masool, where it took nine months for 100,000 Iraqi security forces to get four to 5,000 ISIS members out of the city, and they killed 10,000 civilians in the process of that nine month battle to liberate the city.

So that's a one to two ratio. But this is, I mean, the fact that every person that I ever interviewed asked me this question is really shocking because it's never been the question, that's not how the law of war works. But we have this number in our head. Like clearly this means everything that's going on is illegal and Israel is purposely killing civilians, but look how high the number is.

The relevant of the context of the war, like we're not even talking about the numbers, the challenge that the idea faced in Gaza. Nobody wants to talk about that, like the 40,000 Hamas numbers, tens of thousands of other terrorist members buried in 400 miles of tunnels, intermixed between a population of 2 million who Egypt won't let into Egypt. There's so many complexities in this battle that no military has faced in the history of war, but nobody cares.

They just want to know what's the civilian death toll. And there is no number. Yeah, well, obviously I asked the question very much in the spirit of echoing the observation that the news has made, which is that the very question shows how upside down everyone's analysis of this conflict is and it became really immediately, even before Israel responded. It was already a massive distortion of moral and political priorities in how people were thinking about the ensuing violence.

And I just want to continue to flag what is unique about this and just the ways in which people focus on, I mean, it's almost like we have at this moment something like a billion people, maybe two billion people, maybe three billion people, for the first time discovering that war itself is intolerable. And the onus is on Israel. Really, and the onus is on the Jews if you want to get down to it. But there's a layer of anti-Semitism here, which we can table. It's really not my focus.

But when you ask about, what was it, what is the origin of all of the double standards here and the weird inversions of priorities and the, you know, for the first time in human history, the seizing upon details that no one ever thought about in any other conflict, you know, the standards to which the IDF is being held, which no other army has ever been held, especially in the face of the challenges they're facing, which we're going to talk about,

which you just began to reference, I.e. 400 miles of tunnels. The strangeness of all of this is something that I want to keep in view. But I do also want to just simply deliver the information in so far as we have it, and to concede whatever can be conceded to the people who are horrified by the images they're seeing coming out of Gaza, because it's understandable that people are horrified.

And especially if there for the first time looking at the evidence of war, the evidence of urban war, as I've said before, there really, there really is no argument for the justness of any war and it's even necessity that makes sense of the image of a child being pulled out of rubble, right? It's unacceptable. Whatever the rationale for it.

And some billions of people are having that experience on a hourly basis because of social media, and it's all being framed in the most invidious way possible against Israel and against support for Israel defending itself in this case. Well, I guess a high level question here. It is because of this imagery and because of the way the discussion has been framed, again, largely on social media.

There's this widespread allegation against Israel and the IDF that they're guilty not only of war crimes, but the very war is itself a crime. And they're guilty of genocide, they're guilty of the collective punishment of the Palestinians, the deliberate murder of non-combatants, and even the deliberate murder of journalists and aid workers, right?

So when you have the seven employees of Jose Andres's humanitarian organization killed, it is analyzed so as to suggest that Israel has intentionally killed those aid workers. As though the killing of those aid workers worked to the advantage of Israel in some way. It would be a colossal act of self-harm for them to have killed those aid workers on purpose, given the consequences for world opinion. But people seem to effortlessly interpret every casualty as something that the IDF has intended.

What if anything in this downpour of disparagement of the IDF and Israel is true? I mean, what is the worst thing that can be honestly said about how Israel has been waging its war in Gaza? So the only thing that I can say would be the most honest, fact-based criticism of Israel is that it has done a horrible job on fighting the counter narrative of what they're actually doing. One of the main reasons that is is because they did not embed foreign media and journalists.

And this is the example I usually give when I'm teaching a class, the first battle of Flusia 2004, four American citizens were killed, the US President orders the military in to get those accountable. Who did it accountable? The world says that there is too much use of force, too many civilians are being hurt, they're committing war crimes. So six days into the battle, the US military is defeated and told the stop because of the perception of the use of force.

Very minor example of the totality that is the war against Hamas and Gaza. But it's a great example where they were defeated and there were zero media embeds in the first battle of Flusia. Six months later when they redid the same operation, 60 media embeds.

So that's the honest criticism, but I could help you kind of go through every narrative, every accusation to include the targeting of journalists, aid workers, or civilians in general, where the US government, not even me, John Spitzer, who's been there, who

doesn't have access to all the classified information said there's based on their investigation, there is zero evidence of a single event in which Israel intentionally caused harm to civilians, journalists, or even the world, central kitchen event, where

people don't want to accept the fact that accidents do happen, especially in the fog and friction of urban combat, which people just don't have a clue of like of what it actually takes and they get to this point where they interpret situations, right? And I think that was really important.

You said that because even the way that war crimes work from the ridiculous use of the word genocide, a big factor is to intention based on the information you have at the moment you take your action, not the results. So everybody sees footage of Gaza, especially Northern Gaza or seas.

Like you said, the unfortunate, everyone of them is a travesty, you know, civilian destiny, they interpret, well, of course that means Israel did all that on purpose and that there was no alternative, which I think could be a part of the conversation is that people who have no information on how war works. Like you said, people woke up to not the Syrian war, not to the last 30 years of wars, not to real massacres, Russia taking 20,000 babies out of Ukraine.

They woke up to and want to start interpreting based on their knowledge, the wars that they see based on short clips and videos. Or they think that there's an alternative, which I actually think is I've been arguing with literally like national leaders who have proposition that there was another way. And that's not the history of warfare.

One example I'll give is there was a very another news story of Israel has used more 2,000 pound bombs than any other military in the last 30 years, which is a true statement. But it is given as a negative to paint the picture that Israel had a choice. It could have not used those bombs. It could have just not did bombing at all. And the actual evidence shows that that has been a feeling between in many wars. If you just bomb less, there'll be less damage, less civilian casualties.

It's actually the inverse, like in 1945, battle of Manila, where there were 4,000 Americans in the UK, in turnies, prisons of war being held by the Japanese and the city of Manila. The general general, Makarzer, said, you know air power. I don't want you destroying Manila. I don't want inappropriate civilian casualties. And still the military move forward and there are 100,000 civilian deaths. Because of the complexity of urban combat, you think that if there would have been just less bombing.

Or the fact that the actual normal closure of a 2,000 pound bomb, we haven't talked about it yet. But one of the things that difficulty for the IDF is that the enemy, there's no enemy on the surface. They're underground and they're deep underground. So yes, Israel has used more 2,000 pound bombs because of the only military in the history of war who's faced an enemy so deep underground under civilian structures in which a tool like that is the weapon that can get to that military target.

Okay. So talk to me about, I guess you can talk about urban warfare generically and guerrilla warfare generically. But what is unusual about this war? What is Israel facing that we didn't face in Iraq or Afghanistan or didn't face to the same degree? And what is novel about what they have done in the direction of being more scrupulous, more averse to producing collateral damage than we or any other army has been in the past?

Sure. If you're going to say just that all that Israel has really done wrong is to fail to anticipate how colossally badly the PR war was going to go for them. And they failed to embed journalists who could give credible real time information about all the efforts they're making to not kill the wrong people. And I agree it's been, I don't know if it would have mattered, had they done that? I certainly hope it would have mattered.

But I agree that they have not done a good job at all of changing the narrative. But if that's their only crime, what have they done that has been scrupulous and compassionate and beyond the usual course of action for an army launched from a democratic state into combat? Sure. So, too easy actually, things to pick apart. One is what did they face that no military has faced and what did they do that no military has done? So on what they have faced, one is just the proximity to the enemy, right?

That this is not hundreds of miles away. So if you want to use a US military example, it just fails. Step one, just proximity to the actual national security, the existential threat. So that's October 7th, right? But the war is being waged in eyesight of the homes of those, the size of the combatants of 4,000 combatants launching rockets over the head of the military.

So no military and modern history has faced in combat and who is launching 12,000 rockets over their heads headed for their homes behind them, the tunnels, of course. So this what Hamas had built over 15 years hasn't been seen in war period. Yes, there's been tunnels in war before. But the fact that there were 400 miles of tunnels ranging from 15 feet to 250 feet underground where no military munition could reach, but solely under civilian sites.

So civilian homes, hospitals, schools, you went facilities on purpose so they could deploy this what they call this human shield strategy. Because you know, non-state actors, terrorists, whoever have learned from the history of really modern wars in which you have a military who follows the law of war against a combatant who doesn't, that they use the laws which in urban combat you immediately enter and you already have restrictions on these supports, right?

You can't, that's the underlying thing is do not target civilians and only target military sites and that's really hard to do in urban areas. But there's lots of rules that we can talk about on that. So Hamas deployed this human shield strategy, but also a human sacrifice strategy where, I don't know why the world just won't take for on its head what Hamas says.

Like literally they tell you these things and the world's like, yeah, but they're the fact that they say they want as many of their civilians to die as possible. And one evidence of that is the fact that there are 400 miles of tunnels in Gaza and not one civilian is allowed in them. The entire population, 2.2 million could fit in Hamas's tunnels with ease.

Whereas you take in another example in another war like you cranes were where the civilians did seek refuge in the subway tunnels and underground and the hostages. So the fact that you know that Hamas immediately took over 240 hostages which really gets to the time variable, right?

So in understanding the challenge at the idea face you have to factor in the rockets, the tunnels, the hostages which really get to your alternatives on would just wait, just pursue some other strategy and just leave your hostages in captivity. So all those variables, no military has faced that in modern times. And I could go back to war two and give you some variables like the Battle of Manila 1945 the 1950 Battle of Seoul which will get you close but not all those variables.

And especially not the variables in which Israel relies on the support of the United States. All wars are contest of will so Israel knowing that of course everybody agreed it had to write to self defense and to launch the war. But to know you have to maintain the will of the international community in how you respond. That's a little different than let's say post 9-11 when of course the United States saw a coalition but it was going to and it did take action.

Now on what did the idea of do which again is unique to actually in novel and preventing we call it civilian harm mitigation. So everything you do to not have civilians hurt. And the biggest thing that really the only thing that has been very effective in wars in modern history or even war two is if the conditions allow weight and evacuate the cities of the civilians. So this is a very like the biggest thing you can do so Israel waited after October 7th.

One it had to mobilize but then it still waited three more weeks and sent notice especially the northern Gaza where the the greatest meat of these 40,000 Hamas members organized in 30 different battalions. The greatest really population of them were in northern Gaza so it evacuated the entire northern Gaza. And they got criticized for doing that.

And telling this the civilians to please leave these combat areas and they evacuated 850,000 of the million population in northern Gaza and they were criticized for that. But it was it was the standard and how you do that through the dropping of flyers was pretty straightforward. Of course Israel because they have the capability and they've developed what nobody else in war does started also using phone calls text messages pre recorded voice messages to help with those evacuations.

And they deployed drones with speakers and they deployed speakers dropped out of a pair you know from the sky on parachutes to help evacuate without very high level of fidelity. So that way when you enter the environment you there's less civilians caught in the middle of it. So they waited and I heard reports that Hamas tried to prevent people from evacuating to make their human shield and human sacrifice strategy more effectively.

Are those reports credible 100% I mean and again we have to believe that they are not those reports as much as we believe the other reports of course the idea of told the civilians what road to use and where to go and Hamas targeted them or sent them messages

took the cars preventing the civilians from leaving and most of that comes from the civilians in the environment where the information comes and as you say Hamas targeted those points of egress you mean the like Hamas snipers shot people on those roads correct and and bombed

murdered those roads and this is the thing where people will say the other report is that Israel targeted the exact areas in which they told the civilians to go which is a you know usually misinformation as a kernel of truth where like Hamas would set up a rocket

firing for this next to a humanitarian zone and then launch rockets so Israel would respond to that and then the world would only pick up on Israel is targeting the humanitarian areas they told civilians to go to get out of the combat area.

Really the only you know that's a safer area but Hamas again using the human shield has wanted that narrative and this is also the difference to to Hamas as a combatant as opposed to most other urban combatants even ISIS right so ISIS in the battle of the soul used

human shields but its purpose wasn't to get as many civilians killed as possible nor was there a way to really hold the people into the area so this again gets to the uniqueness to this wars and the civilians can't get out into Egypt but they were identified this

this place in southern Gaza that was identified which is now the al-Mawasi humanitarian zone it was picked because it was one of the few areas that the IDF believed there were less Hamas tunnels or Hamas military in general and initially the civilians wouldn't go there

but yes the Hamas and really we can talk about what Hamas did during the temporary ceasefire that happened for the hostage exchange which nobody comments on is that during that ceasefire Hamas sent hundreds of thousands of civilians into areas and repopulated them with over 300 percent of the civilians that were there before the war so like in Khan units Hamas increased the population of Khan units by 300 percent before the IDF could start their operation in that area.

What do you make of the difference you know albeit a subtle one in how ISIS or the Islamic state used human shields versus how Hamas is doing it you say that the Islamic state wasn't seeking though they used human shields they weren't seeking to maximize the loss of civilian

life I mean the only way I can interpret that is to imagine that Hamas recognizes that in this conflict with Israel the role that global opinion plays is you know it's a lever that they really have in hand and can easily pull and the way to pull it is to maximize

the loss of civilian life because you know they know Israel will be blamed for every single body and that the blaming of Israel will matter in a way that I can imagine the Islamic state did not imagine they had that same kind of leverage with in fighting the US and you know much less you know local Iraqi and you know forces in you know being led by the US.

Yeah it's a great question as you really have to look at in war the strategy of both sides so this has been trying to have people understand that the Hamas military strategy in the war is not to defeat the idea as in military force it is also not to hold terrain

just in those two objectives it's different than ISIS who is trying to hold the terrain that it had captured to include Masoo al-Wish is the capital of their self-proclaimed caliphate they were really trying to hold the terrain the Hamas strategy in accordance

with what they have done has always been about just biting time and why they built this vast tunnel networks was to be in the tunnels when IDF came I don't think they assumed that Israel would maintain the will to continue even this far but it was always about biting time for the world to stop the IDF like which has happened in Israel's previous wars.

ISIS didn't have that strategy as their military strategy or their grand strategy where Hamas again again according to them their grand strategy is all this is just in the pursuit of a political objective to Israel not existing and for there to be a Palestinian state which

includes everything that Israel is currently sitting on right now that gets into this military aspect where you see a vast difference between ISIS and Hamas both used terror tactics one was a full out government of this region received billions of dollars to improve

the region funneled most of that money into building this terror military that had the intention of just causing the IDF to not be successful and that has been where again they say that the civilian should die to achieve that goal and they're fine with all of them dying in the pursuit of this like you said that there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what Hamas and this radical interpretation of Islam which leads them to pursue this strategy in real time.

Yeah it's um I don't think I can really recover from my astonishment that people can't see this more easily than they than they have I mean it's that when you look at the protest on college campuses which now have devolved into in many cases explicit support for Hamas right

they're not even trying to draw a line between the Palestinian cause and Hamas right there's just and needless to say there's no concern for a return of hostages and all these calls for a ceasefire but they're just actually so you know they're just nakedly supporting

Hamas and yet what should be obvious to everyone is that there's nobody who cares less about saving the lives of Palestinian non combatants than Hamas right I mean this is when you're looking to see who is the most callous about the lives of Palestinian children it is

a sin war and his colleagues down there underground and it's so remarkable that people have you know either lost sight of that or have never seen it and that we're seeing it is somehow doesn't matter in how they're interpreting the situation.

Yeah I mean this is the uniqueness I agree with you it's it's it's shocking and concerning where our world's best academic institutions are creating the dumbest students who can't critically think or get access to their own information this has been the you basically

the survey based analysis of the protesters like do you know which river in the sea means do you know who Hamas is what do you know what happened on October 7th it's it's just shocking but I will give you have to analyze it almost empirically on how Hamas has been able to

tap into all these human storytelling techniques of the you know the the week versus the powerful their press versus their presser and the ideal that there is just an alternative if you just stop you know just ceasefire now everything will be better if we just cease fire and this

has been my position from the beginning as a student of wars that if Hamas was allowed to survive the war period as in Hamas not the ideal which again I think the world to include military analysts have just every day since October 7th tried to compare this to a counter

insurgency counter terrorism campaign which we just are comfortable with over the last 30 years is what we know rather than a conventional war mindset of this is a political body with a military holding terrain with political objectives but the fact that the world thinks

that you know if you just stop fighting to stop the war right like you said they woke up to what war looks like and that it's intolerable war is hell it is death and destruction one they want to fail or recognize what the idea I've done to limit and restrict themselves

and and to prevent civilian army but they also think that the world will be a better place if the war just stops that if Hamas who they are today the Hamas that was October 7th in my interpretation if they survive the war they have achieved a massive victory in the

history of war they struck Israel and as they say as Iran says Israel and then through Israel the United States if they survived that they become more these giant legends I mean they'll make statues out of them they'll have it they'll be celebration days in Iran for

Hamas leadership who pulled off October 7th and survived it and that we will see a much more violent Middle East and world if they survive yeah I fully agree with that premonition I just think it's the only answer to the triumphalism of jihadism is to defeat it right there's

no it has to be a stark defeat and so I guess my next question for you is how likely is that I mean I guess before you answer that you can perhaps tell us what the idea of has actually accomplished thus far in Gaza and and now as I said we're we're waiting to

see if they're going to go into Rafa and I think we both think they should but what is the idea of done what is left to do and how likely is it that they can destroy Hamas and what does that what is destroying Hamas actually mean does it mean killing every

last member of Hamas does it mean just killing the leadership or you know bringing that otherwise bringing them to justice and then we should talk about what conceivable aftermath there might be if they do what can be done here so what have they done what can be done

and what does it look like afterwards sure so what they have done and especially keeping in mind what the objectives were you know return to hostages destroy Hamas as a military organization with the ability to harm Israel and secure Israel's borders so if you if

we compare to has Israel been successful thus far right I can't tell you who's going to achieve ultimate victory in the war yet thus far Israel has historically cleared denser been trained at a pace and with a despite the numbers low collateral damage low

civilian casually count they of the 30 battalions 24 those being light infantry battalions of Hamas they have destroyed 20 of the 24 active battalions they have cleared 75% of Gaza as in broken apart those functioning military organizations they have identified the weapons

capability right because the rockets are a big part of Hamas military capability that they had immense to include the manufacturing capability so these deep buried weapons manufacturing as in rocket production plants underground that Israel has found it has

destroyed much of Hamas's terror tunnel networks it has returned half the hostages home through military pressure which led to negotiations and it has now created a situation in which there is only four battalions the Hamas leadership and the remaining at the time we're talking

you 133 Israeli hostages left to fulfill the objectives of Israel so that's what they've done so far now the question of destroy Hamas that gets everybody going right actually let me just add one yeah footnote to what you just said so obviously what you we started

this conversation talking about how unreliable all the numbers are and now you just kind of went through confidently detailing the numbers in some basic sense you give him a proportion of Hamas fighters versus non combatants but again what you're doing here is basically taking

Hamas as numbers of dead at face value which we can't really do but you know what one can imagine it's a something like a worst case scenario number like at the moment 33000 dead and we're taking IDF's claim to have killed something like 13000 combatants and just using

those numbers as as the framework for the proportion right right and this is really gets a bigger question on that we're in a world in which nobody trusted anybody right so they're gonna trust anything Israel says the United States says United Kingdom says but they'll

trust Hamas says which is unique but let's say I trust everybody's numbers that's where I get to right and everybody's statements to include Hamas is I'm taking all the information available and and making these statements based on what we know like the 33000 are we confident that the

that Hamas had 40,000 fighters in the first place and is there are those Hamas numbers or those IDF numbers or that both sides agree on the number of Hamas fighters yeah that's a great question no it's it's a combination of both Hamas leadership both the political wing and Qatar and the

military wing in in Gaza and the IDF and US and other intelligence agencies estimates based on a collection right what we call all source analysis a collection of both what Hamas says what the IDF says what we can gain and we had to achieve some type of okay we we'll agree that this is the

number right so when you say they have remind me the proportion of Hamas battalions that have been destroyed or or fatally compromised is what so 20 of the 24 basically infantry kind of terrain holding battalions before the war there's an estimate of 30 battalions which includes like the

people who shoot the rockets the headquarters everything so of the Hamas military 20 battalions of their 24 battalions that they had on October 7th have been destroyed and by destroyed it means broken apart so they're no longer a function as a military unit of able to do their their

assigned mission whether it's defend or attack and how do we know is it in terms of the damage to the tunnels I mean what what are you picturing or what are you what are you aware of being true there where I mean 400 miles of tunnels it's just it's just staggering and I when I say that

number or hear it I can't shake the feeling of of incredulity right I just it just seems impossible but accepting that something like that is true Israel could not have destroyed no matter how many 2,000 pound bombs they dropped much of that network maybe they took out crucial nodes in the network

what do you imagine has happened and what is the result I mean we're we now talking about Hamas fighters and Israeli hostages trapped inside tunnels and you know dying of starvation or what I mean what is what is the reality of of that destruction yeah it's really hard to get a true

estimate like nobody's given the number of sheer number you know miles of tunnels that have been discovered and destroyed but given the way urban train is cleared the reporting of over a thousand shafts identified the number of tunnels in which the idea have controlled destroyed as in using

explosives to destroy I mean I was in one in December along the border of Israel and Gaza those two and a half miles long it was an invasion tunnel if you were just to take up the number of ones that they have publicly announced and shown the world it's still many many miles but it is a great

question and I've gotten this question as somebody who studies underground warfare too it's like when is will they ever be able to destroy all the tunnels absolutely not and if you get to the realization of like how is it possible to have hundreds of miles of tunnels underneath a

space that is only you know Gaza strip is 25 miles long at the widest part seven miles wide and if that is the really the uniqueness to what Hamas has been digging over 15 years so many different levels of tunnels and the idea have shown the world much of that and shown how they both identified

like here's a two mile here's a three mile tunnel here here we are destroying it it's really hard to get that estimate but in the clearing of this is why you couldn't have done it was just bombing right you could not have bombed your way to this nor could you it's going to be hard do it quickly

undinifying every tunnel and you have to prioritize what is a you know certain level of a tunnel and you won't ever be able to destroy them all because you're not going to find them all but you get to a certain level of fidelity and what they have discovered is more than anybody thought

that was ever there are idea of soldiers going down into the tunnels and engaging Hamas fighters in shooting battles underground or are they simply finding shafts and dropping explosives into them and and and considering that part of the tunnel destroyed when it

when it all collapses and what or they sending robots down there or they doing all of those things what what is underground warfare like in this case yeah all above so absolutely like it started like you we were talking about you know with identifying known key bunkers and underground spaces and

and hitting those with with aerial munitions moving forward and as the idea moved forward like in northern Gaza they found a tunnel shaft they would stop bring up the special to Israel the unique forces trained only for underground warfare you know they have underground

dogs or dogs made for tunnel warfare and they actually lost over 30 of a very large military working dog because once you find a tunnel then you bring up these special units there were fire fights that happened in tunnels that they're they're very few though because once the tunnel has

been found Hamas has booby trapped it and moved on or to another tunnel and there was a unique this to the world approach in northern Gaza versus by time I visited in December or knowing in February and Connunis there was a different approach at one point the idea for flooding the tunnels

with both seawater and freshwater to flush the in the Hamas out and to clear the explosives everything has been tried but in by time I get to Connunis really which is this is a Hamas space and Hamas is using the tunnels by time I visit the idea in you're just a month and a half ago

they were entering the tunnels before Hamas knew they were in the tunnels and using basically taking control the tunnels and maneuvering on Hamas at the same time they were moving above ground but this is the challenge of underground warfare you have to develop new types of equipment

yes they used the robots the drones that could work on the ground yes they destroyed and really there's only a few ways you can truly destroy the tunnel like the flooding that did not work to destroy a tunnel because the tunnels are made of concrete and they have some of them have

drainage and it's just it's just not a solid tube so the water's not going to stay in there where explosive force is really the only tried and true way to destroy a tunnel and you have to you're string a tunnel you're string mines together along the full width of a tunnel which if

you imagine it's two miles long it takes a lot of explosives and how are they doing any of this while keeping the lives of the hostages in mind what sort of intelligence do you think they have about the location of the hostages when they're simply blowing up a tunnel how can they be

confident they're not killing hostages or burying them alive yeah I mean this is this information you have and and if so what do you know about the I mean it seems to me that the existence of the hostages as is intended complicates this picture immensely I mean yes it complicates the prosecution

of the war immensely in in all kinds of ways as as you pointed out it sets the clock ticking in a way that wouldn't otherwise be true and the idea that you can just sort of buy your time and decide you know what you know how you want to respond over the course of weeks and months and years

that goes that completely out the window once you've got hundreds of people now being the held hostage and mistreated underground but it also it's it's very hard to imagine how they can be confidently destroying tunnels with Hamas in them knowing that their the hostages are

somewhere underground right no it's it's a great topic from really the highest strategic level down to that tactical level where you're not going to especially destroy a tunnel without first investigating what's in the tunnel so most of the destruction outside of the aerial

bombardments which are intelligence driven like they know what they're targeting on military target underground and they have some form of human intelligence signals intelligence some other aspect to know whether or not a hostage is present with the enemy combatant that they're striking

but once you get you know close and you're sending those drones the dogs everything in the tunnel the destroying that I was talking about is really after you've exploited what's in the tunnel because of that immense risk that I agree with you complicates every aspect of the war

is the fact that you know your enemies underground but there is also the possibility of your your citizens your the hostages in there which leads to all the even the the highest level um which I argued in a Wall Street Journal article that the ideal that there's an alternative

to the way that Israel has done it right which does like you said would you just to wait a few years use intelligence to find the hostages and do raids which is really a fallacy is never happened where you have an enemy environment like that because a raid relies on in lots of intelligence

and immense surprise and some type of like a permissive because you've surprised whether it was the Osama bin Laden raid in the Pakistan Pakistan didn't know we were coming for him they didn't they say they didn't know he was there but to imagine that you were going to build enough

intelligence to one day just to do a bunch of raids into Gaza a hostile environment by definition who knows you're coming and that you could eventually achieve your goal of bringing the hostages home a different way is not true it's just never it's not historically backed up but that has led

to this ideal of like you said just just just go take a lot of time just just leave them in captivity let Hamas survive for now and we'll figure out a different way it's just not backed up by history yeah especially once it's a return to again the probably the least comfortable topic here

the imaginary line between the public sentiment of the Palestinians and Hamas I mean just you're talking about a population that if it's not entirely supportive of the project of keeping these hostages enough people are supportive of it that the problem is shrouded by a hostile population

that is it seems happy to collaborate with Hamas's project of keeping the hostages for as long as they want to keep them yeah but I think this again I definitely 100% that factors into what could be done about the situation but in war I'm a very I'm in such a proponent for the law of words

people just don't understand because it's meant to put bounds on the brutality of war and that there is such thing as an you know innocent civilian or non combatant but people don't understand what it takes for that person that too partake in the hostilities and make themselves a combatant

you don't have to be carrying a weapon you could be reporting on the enemy that's coming you could be doing building things there's so many other aspects of being a combatant versus a non combatant where yes in this world of Hamas where they wear civilians use human shields use the hospitals

use everything they can to make Israel look bad it's it is the greatest challenge for any soldier let alone in Israeli soldier to operate within these all these different challenges actually let's linger on that point for a second because this is this might help people interpret some video

which is really anyway you look at it it is shocking video that I've seen I think at one point I saw Joe Rogan on his podcast show the video and respond to it as really any untudered person would as just he believes he's seen clear evidence of idea of war crimes and the video is just

men who do not appear to be armed being bombed right I mean this for all I know this could be video from some other theater of combat and they could have been drone a drone attack on by us by on on men in Iraq I don't you know I don't know actually the province of the video but assuming this

was what these were Palestinian men you know walking among amid rubble being killed and they're not in the process of firing RPGs or or rockets and they didn't even appear to be armed how is it possible that a strike like that could have been justified on its face it looks impossible to justify

right really especially with somebody who's never seen you know doesn't have any comprehension of the way the law war works war works in general and I watched Joe interpret that video and he bet he any and just by the words he was saying I knew that he didn't have a framework in which to

understand what the world was watching in that 22nd clip right he said unarmed kids he actually said kids which is getting to this definition of what is a you know what is a kid or an adult where that line is drawn in that combat situation right which everybody acknowledged it's a combat

zone you that 32nd clip doesn't give me any ability to understand what was going on other than there is somebody who is struck with a bomb no idea on what that person was doing before that video started did they come out of a tunnel did they do something before and then they were did the

idea I already know who those individuals were again you can be a member of Hamas like a designated member and that's that makes you a combat it has nothing to do with if you're carrying a weapon at the moment or if you're you're shooting at the idea at the moment you're a member of the the

enemy force there's so much that video that is unknown especially like what were they doing before where did they come from what were there who were they were they intentions that clearly yes the the IDF meant to hit them so they have to let's say if you did an investigation say this is again where people look at the the end results but the IDF under question would have to show like okay how did you know that was a military target because clearly they use precision guided munitions to strike

just those four individuals which again get you to the kind of the false negative that you would have the proofs and of course they're targeting civilians right that that's what they do like no you have to see what the war the law of war the war crime accusation requires you to know what they

were doing we want to interpret we see the explosion like clearly they were targeting those on armed civilian kids like there's so much wrong with that we don't know the the the crucial detail that you just you don't know what they were doing moments or minutes before I mean perhaps

the full video is showing people who just planted an ied or did something that was obviously the behavior of combatants and now they're walking away and then they get targeted or who they were like literally the fact that Joe says look clearly they're not carrying any weapons like okay that's

a data point but that doesn't mean that you're not an enemy in in in in this combat area I mean that the power of facial recognition in all these other aspects you have to know what the IDF knew at the time they took that strike and clearly they they targeted those individuals that's

a fact because they did it very precisely yeah well I mean again that for those who haven't seen the footage this is the footage was not at night right so it's not it doesn't suffer from the same and there were no these people weren't hidden inside of cars right so the it's not analogous to the

world central kitchen false ID problem where they were clearly striking people they were intended to strike they just were the wrong people in the world kitchen yeah yeah well so you've spoken about what the IDF has already done and you you seem to believe that Hamas really does have to be

defeated at the end of this what is reasonable to hope for there I assume this means that the the IDF by definition has to go into Rafa what what would destroy Hamas look like and what would the aftermath look like I mean what what you know if they have destroyed Hamas

perhaps not down to the last man but you know rendered the whole Hamas project obviously a failure and now Gaza is this hellscape that has no one to rule it except whatever lunatics can rise up out of the ashes and be you know nearly as extreme and irresistible as Hamas it's not going to be a

stable victory and certainly world opinion will continue to cut against Israel there what what does destroying Hamas look like in the best case and how can they conceivably manage the aftermath yeah it's a great question and it really gets to this I guess this misinterpreting of what does

them what does it mean to destroy Hamas where people say it's not possible right because they mix the you know destroy the idea of Hamas versus the destroy what Hamas was on October 6th and its military capabilities and all of its resources that it it created and immersed and smuggled in and

it was sent in everything like that one thing is that what the best case scenario is and I don't agree although it is the most likely scenario that it requires a full ground invasion into southern Gaza right Rafa city Rafa refugee camp the other areas because Hamas could surrender tomorrow

Hamas could surrender to include disarm agreement to disarm themselves and surrender anybody who took part in October 7th and committed those heinous crimes they could give all the hostages back and that would lead to a much lower intensity operation that would still in my opinion be required

because in order to destroy Hamas what it was on October 7th you have to search for its military capability it's remaining rocket supply it's remaining smuggling tunnels it's remaining weapons manufacturing capability you would still have to search southern Gaza in my opinion to

achieve the goal of destroying Hamas as both the ruling power because you don't fight an insurgency against the ruling power you fight an insurgency for a the people or a government against an insurgency but you you have to remove Hamas from power you have to remove their military

capability so best case scenario is that the remaining four battalions are destroyed as functioning units able to do their mission the Hamas military leadership remaining in Gaza is killed or captured all the hostages are returned home then like you said is absolutely the next phase that will

determine whether the world views it as your success or not because the challenge of Gaza is the that next phase that the post-complic phase of rebuilding reestablishing a different framework right this is just the ideal which I know will be a big challenge because it hasn't been there yet

is a viable partner who actually has the the pursuit of a better life for the people of Gaza as their number one priority and not the destruction of Israel as their number one priority this has been the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict right is it's having a viable partner who will

acknowledge Israel should exist to disavow terrorism and pursue a path to include by action of really caring for the people so once Hamas is destroyed which in my opinion has to be done then Israel has to help in creating the next governance the power structures the security

framework but also and I think they will ensure that whatever comes next in self-determination isn't able to gain that much military capability for the sole purpose of doing October 7th or launching rockets as their primary goal yeah which suggests that you know in a even in an ideal

world a two-state solution can't really be two states in any normal sense we're not talking about a state that has its own army and etc because we would have a have to have very different set of facts on the ground for Israel to imagine they can live next to a Palestinian state after October 7th

right which is been the you know the the great lies the ideal that Israel has been the only hurdle to a two-state solution with Palestinians and Israelis live inside by side in harmony the great lies at the greatest greatest hurdle to that was Israel versus organizations whether it's the PA

Palestinian Authority Hamas whatever it is whose sole you know ideal its construction everything it does is actually to attack Israel rather than pursue a better life within the it's almost like the diplomatic laziness just two-state solution has been especially the US administration's goal right

but they can't nobody can articulate what that actually is in reality in real terms and and it has been which is now leading them the uninformed of the world on that's the solution to the violence two-state solution which October 7th can't become Hamas's independence day right it can't become

Palestinian independence day they did October 7th and they should get you all the things in return just to make the violence stop that would just lead to a much more violent world as well but it's it's really like diplomatic laziness to think that that's the solution like without any recognizing

the decades of administration should have pursued that objective and failed yeah I mean the the reasons for that failure as you point out have have almost never been acknowledged but it is another one of these obvious and an absolute asymmetry is that strangely everyone seems to

ignore which is that Israel has wanted a two-state solution I mean not everyone in Israel but but a majority of Israelis certainly have wanted a two-state solution they have wanted to live in peace with a Palestinian neighbor that would live in peace with them but that has not been

reciprocated on the other side there has been a pervasive commitment to not the Palestinians getting the state they want alongside of Israel but rather for the annihilation of Israel the existence of Israel has been the thing that has always been put in question on the Palestinian side and that's

just not a symmetrical situation so you you would need a Palestinian regime at a Palestinian population that actually wanted to live in peace alongside Israel for there to be anything like a basis for a two-state solution right and this is something to get back to the now what is what

is what comes after Hamas I don't know and I don't think Israel knows but it knows like I can talk in certainties versus the uncertainty that Hamas has to be destroyed for the peace of the Middle East and the peace of Israel and the Palestinian people like that's step one what comes day after

the day after really matters and how the world be viewed so Israel has a lot of decisions but so do the people of Gaza but don't you see the the untenability of it being a prolonged Israeli occupation of Gaza I mean the picture of the aftermath that you're envisioning does that

include an internationalization of the whole project where you bring in some of the Arab states to figure out how to pacify and rebuild Gaza or are you actually picturing a you know many years of Israel essentially being the government in Gaza or backstop in the the whatever the Palestinian

government is yeah that was a great question so I don't envision that at all because not because of my own thought because Israel says they don't want that that was tried and then they left in 2005 and and Hamas was elected in 2008 and said that's not what we want it despite the accusations

of occupation since then in the blockade and apartheid and all these misinformed opinions but the other proposition you provided with like you know an Arab nation all these to other actors is also not present right this is the Egypt wants nothing to do with the people of Gaza they're a part

of this if there was a multinational Arab nation coalition who could assist and of course there'll be rebuilding but you know for Israel not to have a part of that as in for another terrorist regime to because the United States wanted there to be an election in Gaza and Hamas was elected

both in Gaza and the West Bank and the West the Palestinian Authority just said we don't do that as a legitimate election that whatever comes next you know I can't Israel says they don't want occupation but they will of course be a part of ensuring that another Hamas which they're

having to do in real time and they and they do own that right they they own some of that to prevent another Hamas not just to destroy and leave it in chaos absolutely I agree with that and that's the the history of such operations as well and I agree with you that in order for this to work

there has to be multiple other nations involved on a identifying who is the other viable partner in Gaza how to rebuild rebuild all the structures not just the buildings so that they're on a path to a better life than what Hamas was giving them I know we're getting to the end of our

lot of time here but I just want to ask you the not so simple question of what do you think Israel should do must do will do about Hezbollah to the north yeah that's a great question I wish more people would ask it and recognize and tell the facts about how Hezbollah and in my last trip

back in February I went up to northern Israel to the blue line I walked the line of where Hezbollah is attacking since October 8th it entered the war a second front was there in Hezbollah has been attacking since October 8th with not just Rockets but taking out all the security posts and cameras

and sending people across the blue line violating the UN Security Council I don't you know they say and again if you if you want to listen to them say the reason they did that was because of the war in Gaza which is interesting since they started on October 8th and Israel hadn't even declared

in conducted operations in Gaza yet but with the situation I can say with certainty can't continue there's 80,000 people just in northern Israel who haven't been home in the last six months you're living in hotels when I go there they're in the hotels that I stay at because of the daily

threat of Hezbollah and Hezbollah is a much larger problem and Israel and other nations have been pursuing a political solution because it all doesn't have to turn into war for Hezbollah to back up to the UN Security Council agreed framework and stop attacking Israel but if they're not

willing I don't see how Israel doesn't have to also use force to secure its northern border and allow its citizens which 80,000 like the number almost surpasses people's ability to imagine what that looks like on the ground with all these cities evacuated 80,000 who can't go home because

Hezbollah attacks every day. I know Hezbollah is a larger problem in that they're a larger force, a better trained force, a better armed force they have more rockets which is to say it's a in the end it's probably a more important problem to solve but I'm wondering is it as larger problem with respect to the prospect of civilian casualties if they decided to launch a war into Lebanon?

I mean if the idea of woke up tomorrow and was fully committed to destroying Hezbollah as quickly as possible with all of its all the applicable force available to it would they be by definition creating as much collateral damage as they have in Gaza or things different up in the north and are the combatants much easier to target without the same kind of loss of civilian life.

Right yeah it's a great question of course it's less density there are still urban areas in southern Lebanon that would require their restraint on the use of force but there is a lot more military real because Hezbollah didn't develop the same strategy as Hamas of of course it went

underground and they actually called the land of tunnels in southern Lebanon of course that's what militaries do to protect their systems and there's hundreds of miles in southern Lebanon but unlike Hamas has what didn't build them solely underneath civilians to get civilians killed.

Yes it would be a much different situation although the scale is 10 times right well hundreds of thousands of Hezbollah fighters with your estimates of tens of if not hundreds of thousands of rockets but they are also much more targetable from a military stance without

the civilian harm because they're but they're in mountainous terrain they're more protected it would still be a very big challenge for the idea to defeat Hezbollah but you you get to this question which again people won't recognize that October 7th was an existential threat to Israel

not just to southern Israel they wanted to get to Jerusalem Hezbollah poses an existential threat to Israel so it has to respond hopefully not with military force but if that if you have to then you have to and it would take an immense war to defeat Hezbollah let alone just push them back

to their no longer threatening Israel. I hesitate to pull the question of Iran in here because I know we're short of time but do you have an encapsulated version of what you think can and should and will be done with respect to Iran either by Israel alone or by some coalition of forces.

Yeah I mean I do and I can I think I can do it shortly that of course Iran is the head of all these snakes first we have to acknowledge that Hezbollah Hamas and the Houthis are all Iranian backed organizations who are trained funded finance and directed by Iran themselves so Hezbollah says it like could we at least believe these groups when they say that they act in accordance with

Iran's direction. Iran is the big disruptor of the Middle East where you have some people believe October 7th came about because Israel was close to a bilateral relationship with Saudi Arabia like it has with Jordan Egypt and other Arab nations and that was too much of a threat to

Iran who was it has its ideals of the Middle East and has pursued this proxy war using its proxies to attack Israel that's absolutely and what it did on April 14th when it attacked Israel with 300 drones cruise missiles and ballistic missiles people just kind of it was a part of the

news but it wasn't like that's huge that's a historic like that Israel as a nation was attacked by Iran directly not through its multi year decades long use of proxies to attack Israel but it directly attacked and is kind of like it was in the news everybody wants to deescalate so it kind of

we'll just keep moving forward the world has to deal with Iran not Israel the United States has to change its position with Iran and what what would that change look like or what should it look like I mean do you think I'm sort of mystified as to why even prior to the attack on Israel

or just with the the Houthi attack on shipping why we didn't decide to just exact some price directly on Iran at that point right like to just destroy in their ports or their ability to export oil it seems like the deterrence has completely failed with respect to Iran in fact it's

reversed Iran has effectively deterred the United States up until this moment strangely the United States seems more averse to and worried about and just frankly scared of a war with Iran than Iran does 100 percent no I think it's a great assessment that what we've seen in the last six months has

a bit of failure of deterrence it was a failure of Israel to deter Hamas it was a failure to deter Iran it's a failure of U.S. foreign policy to deter Iran from pursuing and nuclear weapons to using its proxy forces to attack countries in the Middle East 100 percent

but I do understand because I understand the significance of state on state warfare where why can't the U.S. just strike Iran well there are reasons why because that would open a whole pain doors box of second and third order order consequences but this is what you have the lunacy

of Iran attacking Israel and everybody's like yeah you know just let it go just let go well is the the letting it go moment is it to what degree did Iran engineer a flamboyant but nonetheless benign attack on Israel by telegraphing what they were going to do allow it making it as easy as

possible for the U.S. and the Jordanians and and the Israelis to nullify everything that was incoming a house and sear an attack do we think that was and that how much of it was just a kind of a face saving maneuver which was meant to say okay let's let's not have a war after we do this

let's settle down yeah no I think it's a great question because it has been the great again interpretation of the facts um the fact that even the United States like we had no warning there was no telegraphing yes because it's really hard to move stuff around in Iran without somebody seeing

it you know from satellites and everything but there was nothing that was telegraphing by the intentions of what was shot at Israel and yeah so everybody uses the 99% of it all shot down thanks to Israel's defensive capabilities and the fact that United States helped and Jordan

helped and Saudi Arabia helped and like what world are we living in where no that was a legitimate attack with full intention to really cause a massive amount of damage and civilian casualties in Israel me 300 drones isn't a oh I know you'll shoot all this down ballistic and cruise missiles

I know you'll get all these you know we all know I'm just trying to save face no no the fact is that they actually had and that was a technique that has been used in like Ukraine send away the drones to overload their defense then send in cruise and ballistic missiles just because it was

all knocked down wasn't mean that we're in tension and actions really matter but we're living in a world where in the the result matters like that's that's not the way it works yeah so that's that's another interesting asymmetry here the effectiveness of Israel's defense Israel's

defense in this case in concert with their allies helping them the effectiveness is being held against Israel as a sign that that any further engagement with Iran would be by definition an overreaction because nothing happened you know like they tried to kill you but they didn't succeed

so you like you're the one who's now hysterical yeah what are you doing it respond into this you know it's the same thing that's happened for years with you know Israel haven't invested so much in iron dome and in their bomb shelters that the ineffectuality of Hamas's rockets and has

been lost rockets has delivered the message to the whole world that Israel doesn't really have an existential problem because they everyone can just keep going to bomb shelters and and the iron dome seems to work so you know there's really no no factor over there all the while has been lying

Hamas are really trying to kill civilians in Israel it's an amazing situation well John it's it's been fantastic to get you on the podcast and to get your expertise here you've cleared up I think a lot of confusion even and it's some of my own confusion frankly on many of these points so

please keep doing what you're doing and as the chaos proceeds I would love to get you back here at some point to bring us up to the minute and help us understand what's been happening well thanks Sam and thanks for having me a great conversation