Richard Kemp reports

There is so much news out of Israel’s current war that one has to work hard to keep up. You don’t hear about the Israelis displaced from their homes because of the attacks by Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north. For some reason or other, the world isn’t crying for them.

You don’t hear about the IDF’s revelations of the Hamas way of war in contravention of international law unless you follow the IDF or any of its several trustworthy spokesmen on Twitter. You don’t hear about the risks and casualties taken by the IDF to mitigate civilian deaths. No, you hear the constant public shaming of the IDF by President Biden and his senior officials such as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Their conduct disgraces the United States.

Retired British Colonel Richard Kemp is an outsider to Israel’s conflict who knows what he’s talking about. He is embedded with Israeli troops in combat in Shijaiyahin Gaza, with respect to which he recorded the following video.

Truth is tough. The fight in Gaza is our fight too. pic.twitter.com/8dsUDZI0hS

— Rɪᴄʜᴀʀᴅ Kᴇᴍᴘ ⋁ (@COLRICHARDKEMP) December 17, 2023

The video is posted with his Ynet column on the friendly fire incident that took the lives of three IDF soldiers taken hostage by Hamas. He writes: “[S]ickeningly, the usual suspects in the media have gleefully rushed to judgment, wheeling out so-called experts to say how this tragedy shows just how trigger-happy, ill-disciplined and gung-ho the IDF is. That’s because they don’t understand the situation in Gaza, have limited understanding of hard fighting on the ground and only too often want the IDF to be the bad guys.”

Colonel Kemp’s Ynet column must run some 800 words. You have to keep clicking “Read more” to get it all. He writes toward the end, where he also draws on his own personal experience in combat with terrorists:

In Gaza, the hostages were waving a makeshift white flag and calling out in Hebrew. One escaped into a building and then re-emerged before running back. Each of these actions could easily have been read as a dangerous terrorist ploy and presumably were by the soldiers on the ground.
There is every reason for that. Hamas has previously feigned surrender and then tried to kill IDF troops moving to capture them. In this same area and elsewhere, terrorists have also used Hebrew voices to simulate hostages in order to lure soldiers into a trap. In one example that I’ve been told about, also in Shijaiyah, they used a speaker inside a building with a recording of a child’s voice crying out for “abba” (father). The soldiers, knowing every second could count, rapidly entered the booby-trapped building and some were killed and wounded. Just a couple of days ago terrorists used a talking doll stolen from a child hostage for the same lethally cynical purpose….

More:

Inside Gaza, I watched two tunnel entrances being blown up, both inside civilian houses. This extensive tunnel network, estimated to be over 300 miles long, brings another incomparable challenge to urban warfare, which is already widely recognized by soldiers as the most difficult battle environment that exists. Fighting in built-up areas diminishes the advantage of tanks, renders air and artillery support much more difficult and is characterized by exceptionally high casualty rates, especially for attacking forces.

I’ve been into Hamas’s tunnels. They are heavily fortified, concrete-lined and with electric lighting and air supply. Pre-prepared with concealed sniper positions and rigged with explosives, some are fitted with heavy blast doors which further complicate any assault.

But that’s not all. IDF Spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari has reported that Hamas have been using suicide attackers, a uniquely difficult and lethal enemy to counter. An opponent who wears civilian clothes and operates within the civilian population can only really be identified if he is carrying or firing a weapon. If you don’t make the right split-second decision when someone appears in front of you in civilian clothes, without a rifle, with his hands up and with an unseen suicide vest beneath his outer clothing, you and your comrades could be vaporized. Or if there is no suicide vest you might just have killed an innocent civilian. There is no tougher call.

Inside Gaza, I witnessed scenes of destruction the like of which I had only before seen first-hand in Mostar in Bosnia nearly 30 years ago and in Bakhmut in Ukraine earlier this year. Most of the houses and other buildings were either totally destroyed or badly smashed up. Why has such devastation been necessary? You will have a better idea when I tell you that in almost every alleyway and something like every other house in Shijaiyah the IDF have found explosives, weapons and booby-traps, not to mention terror tunnel entrances. I entered one partly destroyed house and saw boxes of Iranian-supplied hand grenades that had been stored in a child’s bedroom.

In the midst of this hell, IDF soldiers are daily risking their lives to hunt down Hamas terrorists and to find and rescue Israeli hostages held at gunpoint. I spoke to many of them inside the Strip and saw some of them in action. What I found deeply impressed me. The standards of professionalism and battle discipline of these young conscripts are remarkable, especially when you consider that most are straight out of high school, as well as the older reservists who dropped what they were doing in their offices and factories, grabbing rifles and uniforms to answer the call of duty.

Read it all here. I doubt you’ll be seeing Colonel Kemp’s findings in a mainstream media source any time soon.

Among other things, Colonel Kemp is a distinguished senior fellow of the Gatestone Institute, where he publishes occasional columns. Everything he writes is worth reading. His Gatestone profile briefly notes that he spent most of his 30-year career in the British Army fighting terrorism and insurgency, commanding front-line troops in some of the world’s toughest hotspots including Iraq, the Balkans, South Asia and Northern Ireland. He was Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan in 2003. He has also been involved in direction of British national policy at the highest level. From 2002-2006 he served in the British Prime Minister’s Office, heading the international terrorism team at the Joint Intelligence Committee.

Ynet column via The Mosaic Daily/Editor’s Picks.