Israel’s new plan to encircle Hamas

livemint.com:

coastal enclave stopped working. Rumours soon spread that Israel had begun a ground invasion of the territory. A terse statement from the army confirmed that ground operations were “expanding" but offered no other details.

The few cameras that offered a view into Gaza captured some of the fiercest bombardment yet in the three-week war between Israel and Hamas, the militant Islamist group that controls the strip. Sunrise brought a bit more clarity. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had indeed entered Gaza from two points: around Beit Hanoun, a town in the north, and Bureij, near the narrow midpoint of the 45km-long strip.

Relentless air strikes and artillery had provided cover for dozens of tanks and other armoured vehicles carrying infantry and combat-engineering troops. The incursion seemed bigger than the raids of the previous two nights, which were small and lasted only a few hours before troops returned to Israeli territory. This time they remained inside and established temporary strongholds within Gaza’s borders.

Still, it was hardly the division-sized attack that the Israeli army had been signalling for the past few weeks, since Hamas murdered more than 1,400 Israelis (mostly civilians) on October 7th. In interviews over the past several days, IDF officials said the aims of the war remain unchanged: to isolate and destroy Hamas’s military infrastructure, particularly its network of underground tunnels, and to remove it from control of Gaza’s government. But the army’s tactics are not what they were assumed to be in the days after the massacre.