Why Israel's bombardment of Gaza neighborhood left US officers 'stunned'

Al Jezeera ^ | Mark Perry

[bert]

Analysis: Military sources say Pentagon's assessment of Shujaiya shelling alarmed even Secretary of State John Kerry

August 27, 2014 4:00AM ET by Mark Perry @markperrydc

The cease-fire announced Tuesday between Israel and Palestinian factions — if it holds — will end seven weeks of fighting that killed more than 2,200 Gazans and some 69 Israelis. But as the rival camps seek to put their spin on the outcome, one assessment of Israel’s Gaza operation that won’t be publicized is that of the U.S. military. Still, even though the Pentagon shies away from publicly expressing judgments that might fall afoul of a decidedly pro-Israel Congress, senior U.S. military sources speaking on condition of anonymity offered a scathing assessment of Israeli tactics, particularly in the battle for Shujaiya.

One of the more curious moments in Israel’s Operation Protective Edge came on July 20, when a live microphone at FOX News caught Secretary of State John Kerry commenting sarcastically on Israel’s military action: “It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation,” Kerry said. “It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation.”

Rain of high-explosive shells

The secretary of state’s comment followed the heaviest bombardment of the war to that point, as Israeli artillery rained thousands of high-explosive shells into the neighborhood of Shujaiya, a residential area on the eastern edge of Gaza City. A high-ranking U.S. military officer told this reporter that the source of Kerry’s apparent consternation was almost certainly a Pentagon summary report assessing the Israeli barrage, on which the Secretary had been briefed by an aide moments earlier.

According to this senior U.S. officer, who had access to the July 21 Pentagon summary of the previous 24 hours of Israeli operations, the internal report showed that 11 Israeli artillery battalions —a minimum of 258 artillery pieces in all, according to this officer’s estimate — had pumped at least 7,000 high explosive shells into the Gaza neighborhood, which included a barrage of some 4,800 shells during the seven-hour period marking the height of the operation. Senior U.S. officers were stunned by the report.

Twice daily throughout the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) operation, a select group of senior U.S. military and intelligence officers at the Pentagon received a lengthy written summary of Israeli military action in Gaza. The reports — compiled from information gleaned from open sources, Israeli military officers with whom U.S. officials speak and satellite images — offered a detailed assessment of Israel’s battlefield tactics and the performance of its weaponry, a considerable portion of it supplied by the United States.

Although these reports shy away from offering political judgments on the operation, a number of senior U.S. military officers who spoke about the contents of those daily reports with this reporter were highly critical of some of the IDF’s tactics, particularly in the Israeli ground invasion of Shujaiya. An official spokesman at the Pentagon declined to comment on the contents of this article.

On July 16, the IDF had dropped leaflets into Shujaiya, warning residents of an imminent Israeli attack and urging them to evacuate the area. The next day, after a short artillery preparation, three IDF units, led by the Golani Brigade, began a ground assault into the neighborhood to destroy Hamas bunkers and break up Hamas formations.

'Take off the gloves'

The incursion went well at first, with Golani soldiers meeting little resistance. But by late on Saturday afternoon, July 19, forward elements of the brigade were running head on into well-organized Hamas units, and some IDF formations were pinned down in vicious house-to-house fighting in Shujaiya’s streets and alleys. What had been envisaged as “a limited ground operation” was not going as planned, with Hamas units emerging from tunnels and bunkers in attempts to exploit IDF weaknesses. The Hamas units were well prepared and trained, with their formations hidden so well that Israeli soldiers were rarely able to pinpoint their locations.

“The ground assault was poorly handled into eastern Gaza City,” an Israel civilian advisor to the IDF’s chief of staff told this reporter at the time. “The Hamas fighters showed an unexpected tenacity, and were far more effective against our armored units than we’d anticipated.”

By late Saturday night and into Sunday morning, the fight had devolved into a series of vicious small unit clashes, with IDF squads facing off against Hamas squads, sniper units and teams carrying lethal anti-tank rockets. In one eight-hour period that began during the early hours of Sunday, July 20, the IDF suffered 13 dead, seven of them in an armored personnel carrier that caught fire after a Hamas sapper team detonated an anti-tank mine beneath it. When the IDF moved to retrieve the bodies and the stricken APC, Hamas fighters targeted the rescue vehicles and engaged in running gun battles with IDF combat teams as the rescue convoy retreated.

In the early hours of that Sunday morning, with IDF casualties mounting, IDF tank commanders were directed by their senior officers to “take off the gloves” and “to open fire at anything that moves,” according to reports in the Israeli press.

The three Israeli units assaulting Shujaiya were never in danger of being defeated, but the losses the IDF suffered in the four-day house-to-house battle embarrassed IDF commanders. By the afternoon of Saturday, July 19, even before Israel had suffered most of its casualties, the scale of resistance prompted Israeli battlefield commanders to blanket Shujaiya with high-explosive artillery rounds, rockets fired from helicopters and bombs dropped by F-16s. The decision was confirmed at the highest levels of the IDF.

By Sunday night, Palestinian officials were denouncing the bombardment of Shujaiya as a “massacre” while international pressure mounted on the Israeli government to explain the heavy casualty toll being inflicted on Gaza civilians. The IDF told the press that Shujaiya had been a “fortress for Hamas terrorists” and reiterated that while Israel had “warned civilians” to evacuate, “Hamas ordered them to stay. Hamas put them in the line of fire.”

The only possible reason for doing that is to kill a lot of people in as short a period of time as possible. ... It’s not mowing the lawn, it’s removing the topsoil. Senior officer U.S. military Kerry’s hot-microphone comments reflect the shock among U.S. observers at the scale and lethality of the Israeli bombardment.

“Eleven battalions of IDF artillery is equivalent to the artillery we deploy to support two divisions of U.S. infantry,” a senior Pentagon officer with access to the daily briefings told me. “That’s a massive amount of firepower and it’s absolutely deadly.” But another officer, a retired artillery commander who served in Iraq, says the Pentagon’s assessment might well have underestimated the firepower the IDF brought to bear on Shujaiya. “This is the equivalent of the artillery we deploy to support a full corps,” he said. “It’s just a huge number of weapons.”

Artillery pieces used during the operation included a mix of Soltam M71 guns and U.S.-manufactured Paladin M109s (a 155 mm howitzer), each of which fires three shells per minute. “The only possible reason for doing that is to kill a lot of people in as short a period of time as possible,” said the senior U.S. military officer who spoke with me about the report. “It’s not mowing the lawn,” he added, referring to a popular IDF term for periodic military operations against Hamas in Gaza. “It’s removing the topsoil.”

“Holy Bejesus,” exclaimed retired Lt. General Robert Gard when told the numbers of artillery pieces and rounds fired during the July 21 action. “That rate of fire over that period of time is astonishing. If the figures are even half right, Israel’s response was absolutely disproportionate.” A West Point graduate, who is veteran of two wars and now the Chairman of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, Gard added that even if Israeli artillery units fired guided munitions, it would have made little difference.

Even the most sophisticated munitions have a circular area of probability, Gard explained, according to which a certain percentage of shells sometimes land dozens or even hundreds of feet from intended targets. Highly trained artillery commanders know this, and compensate for their misses by firing more shells. So, if even 10 percent of the shells fired at combatants in Shujaiya landed close to, but not directly on top of their targets — a higher than average rate of accuracy — that would have meant at least 700 lethal shells landing among the civilian population of Shujaiya during the night of July 20 into June 21. And the kill radius of even the most precisely targeted 155 mm shell is 164 feet. Put another way, as Gard said, “precision weapons aren’t all that precise.”

Senior U.S. officers who are familiar with the battle and Israeli artillery operations, which are modeled on U.S. doctrine, assessed that, based on the rate of artillery fire into Shujaiya overnight Sunday, IDF commanders weren’t precisely targeting Palestinian military formations, as much as laying down an indiscriminate barrage aimed at “cratering” the neighborhood. The cratering operation was designed to collapse the Hamas tunnels discovered when IDF ground units came under fire in the neighborhood. Initially, said the senior U.S. military officer who spoke with me about the military summaries of IDF operations, Israel’s artillery had used “suppressing fire to protect their forward units, but then poured in everything they had — in a kind of walking barrage. Suppressing fire is perfectly defensible — a walking barrage isn’t.”

The Israelis’ own defense of their action reinforced the belief among some senior U.S. officers that artillery fire into Shujaiya had been indiscriminate. That’s because the Israelis explained the civilian casualty toll on the basis that the neighborhood’s non-combatant population had been used as “human shields” because they had been “ordered to stay” in their homes by Hamas after the IDF had warned them to leave.

“Listen, we know what it’s like to kill civilians in war,” said the senior U.S. officer. “Hell, we even put it on the front pages. We call it collateral damage. We absolutely try to minimize it, because we know it turns people against you. Killing civilians is a sure prescription for defeat. But that’s not what the IDF did in Shujaiya on July 21. Human shields? C’mon, just own up to it.”

[bert]

This is an analysis of events previously noted but not in such depth. The object of war is to kill the enemy. Apparently the IDF located a large body of the Hamas enemy and did just that

Unmentioned is the exact number of Hamas killed. There are numbers reported for Gaza as a whole but I would guess the number killed in this engagement is classified because it is either very large or unknown.

The fact that the large number of guns was massed for use in just such an engagement is telling. The IDF commanders were prepared to rain down hell on a concentration of Hamas

This engagement alone might have led to a with drawal and cease fire. This neighborhood was likely a key objective to be absolutely destroyed.

We must wait a few years for the memoirs to learn exactly what happened.

[Diogenesis]

Curious Americans want to know:

What did/do these “officers” say about Obama’s release
of the Guantanamo Generals?

or the Obama transfer of MANPADs as an Ambassador
was left to be raped and murdered on live TV?

[wrench]

This action was not an attack, but a response to continued unprovoked attacks by Hamas on Israel.

Do not kick the hornet’s nest then complain about getting stung.

[DManA]

U.S. military sources speaking on condition of anonymity

Profiles in courage.

[DManA]

BTW I stopped reading at the point anonymous started spouting off.

[yldstrk]

Israel had to make time and couldn’t mess around when it found Hamas in a civilian neighborhood. Hope they neutralized the majority of Hamas.

[Shimmer1]

I’m done with anonymous sources by our jaded and leftist media. Whenever they have an agenda to “prove” they pull out the “anonymous sources”

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Looks like a propaganda piece to me.

[CitizenUSA]

You mean some countries still try to actually annihilate enemies? Why, that’s positively barbaric! /s

[Dahoser]

Looks like a propaganda piece to me.

Well, the source is Al Jazeera.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

They started it.

[faithhopecharity]

If American military officers really are surprised by the return of enemy fire, USA is in terrible terrible danger. Israel will continue to defend herself doing whatever is necessary. But will this new American military leadership defend USA ( or any of our allies) ? We have been sold out Please pray for America.

[bert]

How so?

[nathanbedford]

The story suggests that Israelis are risking antagonizing the Palestinians in Gaza with indiscriminate artillery bombardment. The story also mentions but does not pursue the allegation that Hamas prohibited civilians from vacating the target area after warnings of the coming bombardment were delivered by the Israelis.

My feeling is that the Gazans are already anti-Israeli and the Israeli tactic is just as likely to turn them against Hamas as it is to aggravate their already existing animosity against Israel. The Israelis are telling the Gazans, there is a price to pay for putting these people in power.

I think there is an object lesson to the United States here. The Arab world responds to power but not to blandishment. Force them to choose between their own survival and a crazy ideology. Turn them against Hamas, Hezbollah, a Qaeda, and Isis as their most immediate and dangerous oppressors. Force them to that choice.

Force Hamas to fear its own population, that is the beginning of the end of a guerrilla operation.

[onedoug]

Isn’t Israel on with one of her see-saw ceasefires now?

Hamas merely taunts them.

Reminds me of us vs islamists. How long are we supposed to lie down?

As long as we have an enemy islamist President, and a Congress that will not challenge him.

islamism advances.

[Paladin2]

Sounds like the IDF was just steralizing the soil

[DManA]

Anonymous is the twin brother of Fictitious.

I’m supposed to believe that Al Jezeera doesn’t make crap up?

[bert]

I have long advocated just such a massing of guns to show unequivocally the women of Gaza the power that can be brought to bear.

It was accomplished differently than I envisioned but the results are there for all to see and especially hear. The noise and shock reverberated far beyond the target area.

When the women as you suggest, see a better course, perhaps there can be change.

[Arlis]

Simply the liberal mindset of how to wage (and lose) war. No such thing existed in WWII - it was win or die.

Israeli’s know that’s the situation with Hamas - win or die.

We are doomed trying to fight wars under liberal rules of engagement and if things ever get bad for us, we’ve already lost with this mentality.

Just like the shooting in Ferguson - cop shot Brown too many times. No, he shot him until the threat no longer existed as cops are properly trained to do.

Only God can save this nation at this point........

[Netz]

Coming from the Arab world's PRAVDA and designed to defame Israel at any cost, these journalists at Al-Jazeera will always find an American military person who is “appalled” at anything Israel does.

The truth of the matter is that Israel showed MASSIVE RESTRAINT in this battle.

When you look at the amount of ordnance used by Israel, 200,000 Paleostinians should have been killed and not 2,000 over a 50 day period.