The devastation of Gaza was inevitable: A comparison to US operations in Iraq and Syria

As of the middle of February, the Gaza Health Ministry had reported more than 28,000 Palestinians dead in the war precipitated by the murder, rape, and kidnapping conducted during Hamas’s raid on Israeli border settlements and towns on October 7, 2023. Press accounts estimate that in the northern Gaza Strip, almost 80 percent of buildings may be damaged or destroyed. To avoid being caught up in the most intense fighting, according to the United Nations, as many as 85% of the 2.2 million people in Gaza may have left their homes as of mid-December. The scale of death and destruction arising from Israel’s legitimate counterattack has precipitated charges of war crimes and genocide against Israel in the International Court of Justice.

The Israeli government has claimed that it is adhering to its well-developed system for assessing combat in light of the laws of war. But if that is the case, then why has the Israeli offensive produced so much damage and death?

One answer is simple. When war is fought among civilians, civilians are killed. Among the most poignant examples is from World War II: the number of French citizens killed by Allied bombing in the months prior to the June 1944 Normandy invasion. The Allies bombed lines of communication heavily to prevent the Germans from reinforcing their coastal defenses along the English Channel. Historians suggest that some 20,000 French civilians who had the misfortune of living near ports, bridges, roads, or railroad infrastructure were killed in these attacks and during the subsequent two months of ground and air operations.

Some would say that this is ancient history; we would never do that again. But more recent history suggests that, though modern weapons are considerably more accurate and procedures in Western militaries to avoid collateral damage are more formalized, fighting among civilians, especially in urban areas, always means hell on earth for the civilians who may be trapped there.

In 2016 and 2017, a US-led counterterrorism coalition and its Iraqi and Syrian (mainly Kurdish) allies aimed to destroy the Islamic State terror group and eject it from the larger cities that it held in Iraq and Syria — first Mosul, and then Raqqa. These battles were immensely destructive, despite coalition efforts to mitigate civilian harm and the United States’ possession of a lavish supply of the most accurate weapons ever produced.

Like the US and its allies in Iraq and Syria, Israel chose as its objective the destruction of its adversary. That’s why those earlier wars provide important insights into what Israel knew it would face in Gaza, and they help to explain its military strategy, tactics for the campaign, and the level of death and destruction that we have witnessed.

The campaign to destroy Islamic State in Mosul lasted from October 2016 to July 2017. Nearly 94,000 Iraqi troops attacked an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 Islamic State fighters. As many as 29,000 aerial munitions may have been employed by the United States and its partners during the fight, plus uncounted artillery shells fired mainly by Iraqi security forces. Of a pre-battle population of roughly a million people, an estimated 9,000 to 11,000 civilians died, at least a third of them from coalition fire, a third due to Islamic State actions, and a third from causes that are impossible to attribute. Roughly 9,900 structures were damaged or destroyed, including some 65 percent of residential construction.

The Raqqa campaign, which lasted from June to October 2017, is particularly instructive because it was conducted almost entirely under US control. Between 30,000 and 40,000 Syrian and Kurdish militia members fought between 2,900 and 5,600 Islamic State fighters. The militias that did the ground fighting had all been organized and armed by the United States. Most of the air and artillery support was provided by Washington, with some assistance from allies, and the United States attempted to hew closely to the laws of armed conflict.

To somewhat reduce the destructiveness of the campaign, the largest bombs employed were in the 500-pound category. US Air Force figures suggest that as many as 15,000 aerial munitions were employed against targets in Raqqa during those five months, with US Marine Corps artillery adding 35,000 155 mm artillery shells (perhaps 1,750 tons of shells) to the mix.

Raqqa was also bombed and shelled heavily prior to the 2017 offensive. But after the campaign was complete, the bodies of roughly 4,100 civilians were found under the rubble, along with those of some 1,900 individuals wearing “military gear.” Nongovernmental organizations estimate that somewhere between 774 and 1,600 of the civilian casualties were caused by coalition fire. And approximately 11,000 building structures were damaged or destroyed, rendering 60% to 80% of the city uninhabitable.

In Raqqa and Mosul, most civilians seem to have perished due to building collapses caused by bombs and shells, but in Mosul, the ratio of damaged buildings to civilian deaths was about 1-to-1, whereas in Raqqa, it was about 3-to-1.

Though they are cautious in their conclusion, analysts at the Rand Corp. — a US-funded think tank — attribute the lower rate of civilian casualties per building in Raqqa relative to Mosul mainly to one simple factor — a very high percentage of Raqqa’s pre-battle civilian population of roughly 300,000 people left the city, some prior to the battle and some during it.

Hamas presented Israel with a very difficult military problem, even more difficult than Mosul or Raqqa. The degree of difficulty explains a lot about the terrible trajectory of the Israel-Hamas war. (Reasonable questions have also been raised about the impact of how IDF military lawyers interpret provisions about civilians in the standard international treaties on the conduct of warfare — while there is not much evidence that the IDF deliberately targets civilians, some of the destructiveness may be explained by an overly broad interpretation of proportionality and precaution measures.)

Whatever else one can say about Hamas, it is a capable and ruthless adversary. The IDF faced four main problems in starting its operation — the size and quality of the Hamas military force; the urban environment; Hamas’s comprehensive preparation of the terrain, especially including hundreds of miles of tunnels and deeply buried bunkers; and Hamas’s systematic integration of its troops and prepared defenses with the civilian population.

The size and quality of the Hamas military force creates a major problem in its own right. Observers estimate that at the outset of the fighting, Hamas had between 15,000 and 40,000 soldiers, with its actual combat power reportedly concentrated in five brigades. At minimum, this is three times the combat power that Islamic State had in either Mosul or Raqqa — on the higher end of the estimate, more than 10 times Islamic State’s combat power. This alone would produce a significantly more difficult and destructive offensive campaign. (As another point of comparison, it is estimated that 8,000 Ukrainian troops, in perhaps four small brigades, defended Mariupol from a much larger and better-equipped Russian force for three months in early 2022.)

Hamas troops also appear to be well trained, and they benefited from advice by more experienced military experts, both from Hezbollah in Lebanon and from Iran. Hamas’s forces, so far as can be known, are well equipped with light and heavy infantry weapons — such as assault rifles, sniper rifles, machine guns, shoulder-fired anti-tank rocket launchers, mortars, and anti-tank guided missiles. Hamas has manufactured and imported hundreds of artillery-type rockets, most of them unguided, and some with ranges as long as 150 kilometers (93 miles). Hamas also avails itself of commercially available off-the-shelf surveillance technology, including drones and digital cameras.

If the well-equipped, armored forces of the IDF met these Hamas troops on a flat plain, they probably would make short work of them. But a well-trained and well-armed infantry force becomes formidable in an urban environment.

The urban environment favors the tactical defense because it provides the defender with concealment, cover, and canalization. The US military concluded as much following its experiences combating Islamic State; one report released in September 2017 states that “[e]xperiences in Mosul reaffirmed that urban terrain strengthens the defense.”

Buildings provide multiple hiding places. Basements offer not only hiding spots, but also natural bunkers, which can be used to shelter from enemy weapons and protect one’s own fighters so they can shoot effectively. Where there are tall buildings, upper floors provide firing positions and unobstructed fields of fire for long shots down city streets, and they also enable observation of enemy movements. Streets and roads channel the movement of adversary forces; they are natural positions for an ambush.

These attributes can easily be improved by defenders. Holes are knocked in walls within buildings to permit movement from room to room and building to building, obscured from view. Tunnels and trenches are also dug from building to building. Basements and upper floors can be reinforced with sandbags to protect against bullets and shrapnel, as well as with vertical steel and wooden beams to prevent ceiling collapse. Bunkers and firing positions are often built in the interior of buildings, with weapons sighted through holes cut in several layers of interior and exterior walls to confuse the targets about the source of fire. Entrances and stairways are mined and booby-trapped against infantry assault.

Because of the urban environment and the ease with which it can be improved, the defender usually has another line of defensible positions to which it can retreat under pressure, starting the whole process of attack and defense over again.

There was no shortage of materials available to Hamas to improve its defenses despite an ongoing Israeli blockade. United Nations statistics show that significant quantities of construction material were imported into Gaza in the past nine years— 50,000 truckloads permitted in 2022 alone, making up 50% of supplies arriving in the enclave, whereas only 25% of deliveries contained food and 4% contained humanitarian supplies provided by international organizations. Given the group’s administrative control over Gaza, it would be surprising if the construction efforts thus supplied were not influenced by Hamas, and that materials were not skimmed from civilian projects to support underground construction of bunkers and tunnels.

The effect of an urban environment on offensive operations is almost always an increase in the attacker’s reliance on firepower. In Raqqa, the United States and its partners relied heavily on precision-guided weapons, bombs, missiles, rockets, and artillery. They paid careful attention to the rules of war and often employed the smallest practical weapon to the target. (There seems to have been a hidden cost to this practice, because in Raqqa, three weapons were dispatched against each target on average, presumably to ensure that it was destroyed. Thus, the use of less destructive munitions seems to ensure that more munitions are fired to achieve the desired effect.)

In these battles, the nature of the urban environment — coupled with an experienced, committed, and well-armed adversary — were enough to require the coalition to conduct a locust-like offensive in which these munitions, fired in support of advancing ground forces, gradually consumed Raqqa, just as they did Mosul.

It should not be a surprise, therefore, that the IDF now finds itself destroying a great many structures in Gaza.

Hamas further improved the urban environment with a vast subterranean construction project — a deeply buried tunnel network that seems to serve both tactical and strategic purposes. Some tunnels link together fighting positions to support tactical maneuvers, surprise counterattacks and ambushes, and resupply efforts. Others permit leaders to move from their residences to their offices. Some lead to bunkers, which allow command and combat groups to work and rest underground. Presumably, other bunkers contain reserves of ammunition, including long-range rockets. And little has been said about where Hamas builds its weapons, but it seems likely that there are small fabrication facilities underground.

As there are hundreds of miles of tunnels according to most sources, and the Israelis only show snippets of what they find, it could be that much of the network is pretty basic. But most of the videos and photographs that have emerged show what appear to be narrow but well-constructed, usually steel-and concrete-reinforced single file passages, while some tunnels are much wider. Living quarters and possible prisons have also been discovered. The tunnels have numerous camouflaged, vertical shafts for entrance and egress. It also appears that electric cables are strung along the ceilings, which provides power, but presumably also landline communication, allowing Hamas leaders to evade detection by Israeli intelligence.

The inherent defensive possibilities of the urban environment, combined with a significant subterranean component constructed over many years, produced a vast fortress system. Though they certainly dug tunnels, a complex subterranean network like that built by Hamas fighters was unavailable to the Islamic State defenders of Mosul and Raqqa, creating vast new problems for the IDF beyond those experienced by the US-led counterterrorism coalition.

To try to take buildings and more importantly take the tunnel system solely through a series of tactical ground force engagements would not only take a great deal of time, but it would also immeasurably add to the ground force casualties Israel would have been likely to suffer. No military would embrace this prospect. Moreover, even a direct attack would be very destructive insofar as it would ultimately require the demolition of the tunnels from the inside out using large quantities of high explosives.

We cannot know exactly how the IDF chooses which portions of Hamas’s tunnel system to attack from the air, but any sustained attack would depend on bombs of great penetration capability and explosive power. (Western media has been critical of the IDF’s use of one-ton bombs; CNN has analyzed more than 500 large craters in Gaza and found them consistent with those produced by underground explosions.) Because Hamas routes these tunnels under and into buildings throughout Gaza, Israeli attacks inevitably also produce damage on the surface. Though tunnels and underground bunkers are not the only target for the Israeli Air Force, their importance and ubiquity likely induce many of its strikes.

The US military, for example, encountered a large tunnel system near Saigon, called the “tunnels of Cu Chi,” during the Vietnam War. After years of indecisive attacks by ground forces, artillery, and tactical aircraft, Washington loosed B-52 strategic bombers on the tunnel network in 1969 and finally destroyed most of it.

Observers can understand Israeli choices without endorsing them, or more importantly, supporting them. But they should understand the reasons for their opposition. Individuals can oppose Israel’s war on the basis of their own morality, but the United States as a nation, given its own military history, including recent history, does not have much ethical ground to stand on in decrying Israeli strategy.

Neither, for that matter, do Arab governments. Israel is not doing anything that the United States and its Arab allies have not done — and done recently. Some may claim that Washington has had an epiphany and would never do this again, but such a claim is not credible. When the United States is provoked, it is historically quite ferocious. So-called collateral damage results.

Hamas, for its part, appears unconcerned about putting Palestinian civilians in harm’s way. Indeed, this is a feature, not a bug, of their political and military strategy. Some use the term “human shield” for this strategy, but that is incomplete. This element of Hamas’s strategy could also be described as “human camouflage,” and more ruthlessly as “human ammunition.”

On a daily basis, the activities of civil society obscure Hamas’s activities. More importantly, Hamas understands that civilian casualties are an Achilles’ heel for Western military operations. Liberal democracies put a high value on the individual, and hence on every human life. Lawyers have developed an elaborate legal structure to regulate the conduct of warfare because of this respect for the individual, which is enshrined in international treaties.

Western militaries, including the IDF, try to live by these laws, though the law of armed conflict does not proscribe them from waging war. They try to follow these rules in part because they reflect the values of the societies that they serve and in part because of an expectation of reciprocity, but also because pragmatically, they know that lots of civilian casualties can become a political liability at home and abroad. Hamas spends the lives of Palestinian civilians as ammunition in an information war. They are not the first to do so, and they probably will not be the last.

The course of every urban campaign will be influenced by unique factors, but at the same time, they share similarities. When a capable defender, even in small numbers, has time to prepare a defense in an urban environment, the attacker will meet serious difficulties. The attacking force will always be interested in doing as well as it can at the least cost to itself, especially in terms of its own casualties. This means that it will bring not only all of its cunning to bear on the problem, but also that it will, as has generally been the case in modern times whenever the defense proves strong, bring lots of firepower to the fight.

Urban offensives will therefore generally do very serious damage to buildings and infrastructure. If civilians are constrained to remain in these areas of intense combat, for whatever reason, they will suffer immensely, as have the civilians of Gaza.

Cities have grown in size and density as the population of the planet has grown and as more and more people move to cities to be a part of the modern economy. The Israeli offensive in Gaza, the US-led coalition offensives in Mosul and Raqqa, and even the bloody and clumsy Russian siege of Mariupol may not be anomalies.

Instead, they are a window into future war. Rather than imagining pristine military operations, analysts and strategists should better understand the implications of failed diplomacy, or of conflicts simply left unsettled because diplomatic engagement is politically inexpedient.

Few political disputes will be settled by invitational armored battles in empty plains and deserts. War is an extension of politics, and politics happen among people.

‘The Ship Is Sinking!’ Missile Strikes, Panic and a Race to Save the Rubymar
Chief mate Mahmoud Gwealy awoke to a loud bang that sent the laptop on his chest crashing into his nose. The 29-year-old Egyptian sailor had dozed off for the evening while watching Lebanese soap operas in the upstairs quarters of the Rubymar. The British-owned bulk carrier had been rocking in such high swells that he wondered if it had been slammed by a huge wave.

The cabin lights were out as he stepped into a hallway where sailors of the Egyptian, Syrian and Filipino crew had been gathering in flip-flops and nightclothes, struggling to compose their balance. The shudder that echoed through the hull had felt like an earthquake, one said. Shouting over the wail of alarms, crewmates asked each other: Had something struck the Rubymar?

“A big rocket,” one said over the crowd. “In the engine room.”

Gwealy climbed up to the bridge where the captain took stock of an emergency playing out on one of the few vessels still crossing the Red Sea. One missile had struck the ship in the engine room, and another blasted open the starboard side, the captain said, his ears still ringing from the back-to-back explosions. Water was streaming in, pouring onto the shaft that churned the propeller. Pipes had burst open. Fire alerts were blaring on a ship packed with 21,000 tons of fertilizer.

Months earlier, on another ship in the Ukrainian port of Reni, Gwealy had run to the engine room for cover after Russian airstrikes nearby sent thick smoke across the deck. His wife, Khloud, had scolded him for rushing to board the Rubymar. Now standing on its bridge, he cursed in Arabic in frustration: “Ya nahaar eswid!”—“Black day!”  

It was a few minutes before 11 p.m. on Feb. 18, and the Rubymar’s crew would have barely three hours to decide whether and how to save their 563-foot-long ship. Their decisions would determine whether they would live or die and if the Rubymar, slowly sinking on what was once one of the world’s busiest sea lanes—and now its most dangerous—could be saved. If it went under, it would become the first civilian ship sunk in conflict since the “tanker war” of the 1980s, when Iran and Iraq traded missiles at approaching merchant vessels.

Flying the Belizean flag, Rubymar had been en route from Saudi Arabia to Bulgaria. It numbered among the few daredevils still sailing within missile range of Houthi rebels who, from their bases on the shore of Yemen, had vowed to disrupt sea traffic unless Israel halted its military campaign in Gaza. In the months before, they had fired dozens of ballistic missiles designed by their chief ally and benefactor, Iran. But they had only critically damaged one ship: the Marlin Luanda, which had quickly been towed to safety.

The Rubymar was their best shot yet.

Crowding into the bridge, the cook asked his crewmates if they were going to die. An engineer, trying to understand how many compartments were flooding, offered the most reassuring assessment he could think of: “The ship is 50% safe.”

In the historical blink of an eye, the world’s oceans, calm for decades, have become remarkably tense. On the Black Sea, ordinary boats thread between Russian warships and hundreds of sea mines, while Ukraine launches self-detonating underwater drones. China’s Coast Guard has rammed and fired water cannons at Filipino fishing boats hundreds of miles into the South China Sea.

But it is the waters off Yemen where war has most imperiled the cargo ship crews whose labor consumers on every continent take for granted.

Some 80% of the world’s goods travel on the high seas, the U.N. says. The freedom for ships of all nations to carry those wares across the open oceans allowed the global economy of the 20th century to emerge, with America at its helm. In peacetime, a third of all containerships pass through the Suez Canal, connecting Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and Asia.

Along the way, they must clear the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb—“the Gate of Grief,” just 17 miles wide at its narrowest point—between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa. It is that chokepoint entering the Red Sea that is the target of the Houthi movement, using hobby radars from the backs of Toyota pickups to guide cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and bombs strapped onto cheap, swarming sea drones that analysts estimate cost as low as a few thousand dollars apiece.

In return, the U.S.-led Operation Prosperity Guardian has a modern-day flotilla of warships that aim to secure the Red Sea. The U.S. has launched scores of Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles, each valued at several million dollars, from Ohio-class submarines or from the guided missile cruiser and destroyers alongside the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and its F/A-18-led fighter jet squadrons. The British Royal Air Force has dropped laser-guided bombs from Typhoon jets at what it said were command sites outside Yemen’s principal international airport. The U.S. has also dispatched Navy helicopters into the skies above Yemen, alongside MQ-9 reaper drones, one of which the Houthis shot down with a surface-to-air missile.

That display of American firepower has run down the Navy’s missile supply. In a single day this year, it shot more Tomahawks at what it believed to be Houthi munitions depots and launch sites than it procured in all of 2023.

Insurers still worry the rebels need to hit only one ship to incur potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. Rates for war insurance have grown sharply enough to cause ships sailing between Asia and Europe to take a 10,000-mile detour around the continent of Africa. The extra time and fuel costs have snarled carefully tuned supply chains.

A diminishing number of shipping companies have simply tried their luck—hazarding the ship, crew and cargo to save fuel and time, at times offering their low-paid sailors a modest premium to stomach the risk.

The Rubymar was one such ship. If it could make it through the Red Sea unscathed, it would chart a path for shippers at the delicate bottom of the economic pyramid—those carrying goods too cheap or perishable to merit a costly diversion around Africa. The ship had rolled the dice before, one of the few to transport wheat from Ukraine during the first year of Russia’s invasion.

This time, the unlucky bulk carrier became a test case for how far America’s naval power can secure the seas. To track its journey across Houthi-threatened waters, the Journal spoke to five members of the ship’s crew and management, reviewed a handwritten log, recordings of marine radio distress calls and pictures and videos of the attack, interviewed officials from the U.S. Department of Defense and the Houthi-led administration in San’a, and consulted maritime specialists and historians.

“It was a terrible day,” Captain Samer Hejazi said. “I’m surprised I’m still alive.”

Gwealy was off the coast of Sri Lanka when he learned he had two problems.

The first, divulged to him by the captain, was that the ship was setting course to Bulgaria—via the Red Sea. The second came from his wife, Khloud, over a tense phone call. Nobody had come to fix the lock on the front door of their home, which he’d busted open after forgetting his keys the day he had scrambled to retrieve his backpack in time to board the Rubymar.

“You don’t concentrate, you just leave!” she shouted into the phone. He could have waited for another job, on another ship. He shot back: Why didn’t she remind him to take his keys? She told him he’d better remember to be somewhere with cell service to phone home on Feb. 22 for his eldest son Omar’s second birthday.

“You are careless!” she said. “You put the ship first before us and your children.”

The chief mate—whose roles included keeping track of the keys for each cabin and distributing them to the crew—was four years into a career in which he’d risen fast by never saying no. The nephew of a ship captain who’d inspired him to trade a life in the Cairo suburbs for the sea, he’d worked on all manner of ships, from rolled cargo vessels ferrying cars to standing watch in the holds of fetid livestock carriers packed with bleating farm animals.

Now, as second-in-command on the Rubymar, he sat in the office with the captain while his subordinates pulled six-hour stints keeping watch in the fertilizer-packed holds. His last vessel, the Princess Hana, had been a Security Level 3 job—a perilous trip into Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, narrowly avoiding a Russian airstrike.

That was a one-off, he assured his wife, distracted on the other end by Omar and their younger son, Karim. The Rubymar, he was told, ranked Security Level 1.

But en route to the port of Ras Al Khair in Saudi Arabia, Gwealy watched over the captain’s shoulder as he typed out their new course, through the Red Sea waters threatened by the Houthis. Into the destination field of the onboard navigation system, information anybody searching the ship on Google could find, the captain added a warning, referring to four Filipino security contractors who had joined the crew: “Armed Guard Ob [on board].”

“These Yemeni people are crazy,” Capt. Hejazi told his chief mate.

A decade of war had transformed the Houthis from a little-known militia in one of the poorest peripheries of the Middle East to an insurgency capable of choking the global economy from their headquarters in San’a, an ornate medieval desert city ringed by mountains.

After years of skirmishes, the militants were the most battle-tested faction to join a protest that toppled Yemen’s autocratic government during the Arab Spring. After they seized San’a and its international airport in 2014, Saudi Arabia replied with a war to oust them, worried that Iran would arm and equip the Shiite militia. The U.S. assisted the Saudis with billions of dollars in weaponry. A Saudi coalition blockaded imports, intensifying a famine. Over five years, nearly 250,000 people died in the conflict or from hunger, from medicine shortages and the spread of war-related diseases including cholera, the U.N. said.

None of it managed to dislodge the Houthis, whose new recruits learned to dodge Western airstrikes and surface-launched missiles, hiding weapons in drainage ditches and car parts shops. The campaign also pushed them further into the embrace of Iran.

Soon, members of a secretive department of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard called Unit 340 were arriving in San’a to provide training and sophisticated new weapons to the embattled insurgency. They built ballistic missiles such as the Fateh, or ”Conqueror” and Sayyad, or “Hunter,” said Saeid Golkar, an authority on Tehran’s security services at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

In six-month rotations, 340 members operated out of basements, teaching the Yemenis to fashion cruise missiles and ballistic missiles that they launched in early 2022 at military sites and Saudi oil facilities. Secretly, they ventured beyond San’a on short stints to a nearby dam, to test new mobile missiles with the speed and honing capabilities to strike ships at sea, a Houthi official said.

In September, the Houthis paraded their new weapon in their capital: the 30-foot-long Asef ballistic missile, with a 280-mile range and a 660-pound warhead, according to a January report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank, enough to blast through the hull of a bulk carrier.

The next month, Israel’s military surged into Gaza after the Hamas-led attacks. The Houthis claimed the mantle of solidarity with Palestinians and vowed to stop ships connected to Israel, the U.K. or America from passing through. If their campaign caused a global breakdown in the shipping industry, the militants warned, all the better.

“This will certainly affect navigation,” Abdul Malik Al-Ajri, a member of the Houthi political bureau, said in a recent interview. “Even if it is limited to ships related to Israel, it will pose a danger to other ships.”

On Nov. 19, images of their opening attack were beamed across the world. Armed commandos clad in balaclavas and tactical vests helicoptered onto the deck of the Galaxy Leader, a Bahamas-flagged, Israeli-owned cargo ship, hijacking it and capturing the crew. The militants filmed themselves performing infantry formations on the deck and circling their prize in a speedboat, “in the name of Gaza.” In TikTok videos that went viral, a chisel-jawed 19-year-old self-declared hijacker, Rashid Al-Haddad, was nicknamed Tim-Houthi Chalamet after the young Hollywood star.

The White House condemned the hijacking of the Galaxy Leader and began considering whether to designate them as a terrorist group. Washington corralled allies to join what it called Operation Prosperity Guardian, “the Highway Patrol to help safeguard maritime vessels going through the strait.” Ships rerouted en masse around Africa, delays piled up and the cost of shipping a container jumped nearly threefold.

Aboard the Rubymar, chief mate Gwealy and his captain believed they had protection. Before it turned toward the Red Sea on Feb. 8, the four armed guards gathered the crew around a laptop for an instructional video: what to do if pirates board your vessel.

The guards would ring barbed wire around the hull and install metal grates blocking the stairways to the lower decks. The crew practiced scampering downstairs into a safe room, locking it shut.

Gwealy and the captain would be the last pair in, signaling their presence with a secret knock. Four times they would bang the thick metal door, and after a three-second pause, a fifth. From inside, three knocks would answer, then the door would open.

Not once during the drill did anybody ask what to do if a missile struck.

The Rubymar was nearing the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, the crew dining on biryani platters and discussing what gifts to buy their families when they reached Bulgaria.

Gwealy traveled light—clothes, laptop, and a small bag, with little room for presents beyond the tea he’d bought for Khloud in Sri Lanka, though maybe he would get something for Omar and Karim in Europe. The last stretch of the Indian Ocean shimmered with the light of a quarter moon. Before he dozed off in front of his laptop, he ticked off the cargo hold inspections he would run through tomorrow.

Khloud had sent him a video of her with their two sons, trying to fix the lock. “You said this is a small thing,” she said. “Does this look like a small thing?”

Three hours later, he was on the bridge of a ship pierced by missiles.

Over blaring alarms, the captain was struggling to interpret the riddle of the ship’s smoke detectors, which were warning of a fire without indicating the location. Sailors who’d been sleeping minutes earlier crowded into the bridge in confusion, some of them praying aloud. “We’ll be fine, inshallah,” Gwealy reassured them. “Someone will save us.”

“Find the source!” the captain ordered. The bridge, he warned, was the most exposed and dangerous place to be.

Sailors began descending the narrow stairs, fanning out to throw open different doors and check the unlit corners of a towering ship the length of nearly two football fields.

The cook raced to search the bedrooms, ran through the kitchen and peeked into a storage closet. The thought crossed his mind to call his mother and tell her he was dying, but there was no cell service on the sea. Even if he could eke out some signal, his prepaid phone lacked credit.

The chief mate and his captain assumed they were being hijacked. Gwealy radioed distress calls to any ship close enough to lend protection—the U.S. had an aircraft carrier strike group in the region—repeating “mayday, mayday…piracy attack,” then waiting for answers.

“Too many alarms!” he shouted, before a call from Djibouti came in.

Could the Rubymar turn southwest to reach the small East African country’s waters? If so, Djibouti’s coast guard, trained and equipped by the U.S. Navy, would protect it. Gwealy couldn’t understand them over the crackling radio.

That was too far. “Go west,” the captain ordered, towards Eritrea, whose coast guard wasn’t answering his calls. The propeller was churning at 10 nautical miles an hour, pushing 11 straight on, without zigzagging—as if the ship was trying to outrun pirates on swift inflatable boats, not bob and weave from missile fire. “Steady on this course,” the captain repeated.

Twenty minutes later, at 11:15 p.m., Gwealy heard another muffled boom and saw water leaping up from the sea behind them. One of the Filipino security guards, clutching a rifle and watching for pirates off the starboard side, was shouting, “Captain, captain!” Something else had cut through the water, this time barely undershooting the Rubymar by about 30 yards. It was a missile, he guessed.

“They tried to sink us,” Gwealy thought.

That day, the U.S. Central Command station in Tampa, Fla., registered a new weapon in the Houthis’ arsenal: underwater drones, much harder for the Navy to detect and intercept than missiles.

“This is war,” the captain said. “It’s not a piracy attack.”

Slowing the ship, the captain and the chief mate rerouted, now understanding that the task before them wasn’t to outrun pirates but to dodge missiles. The Rubymar veered north, cutting right through the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb. “Otherwise we’d be dead,” Gwealy said. On the radio, the captain asked a British warship to guide him to safe area. There is no safe area, the warship answered back.

A small tabletop device was broadcasting the ship’s name, location, speed and course to anybody in radio range: its Automatic Identification System. “Remove the cable!” the captain ordered.

Gwealy reached behind it, but struggled to twist his hand between the device and the window. His thoughts were stuck on the horror of dying at sea after a fight with Khloud. The image of Omar celebrating his second birthday without him kept flashing through his mind. For the next four hours, it would be the only thing he could think of.

Across the other end of the Red Sea, in the Cairo suburbs, Khloud was lying awake. Omar was unsettled and crying constantly. The boy was especially close to his dad and ran onto the street to see him whenever he returned from a job.

“We knew something was wrong,” she said. “I picked Omar up and told him, ‘Your father will come home.’”

The sailors who’d been scouring the ship for a fire they never found were reporting up to the bridge with details on the fracture on the starboard side.

The anti-ship missiles, designed to hit the engine room, had struck close by—and ripped a major leak into the room where power from the engine spun a shaft churning the propeller. The sea was cascading down onto the catwalk, over metal barricades and stairs, a torrential hiss the pumps were struggling to clear.

If that was all, Rubymar might make it. The ship was designed to survive two compartments flooding, and the deepening inundation sloshing down into the engine room and its shaft accounted for two, Gwealy reasoned. So long as a third didn’t come under, it would stay afloat.

In the meantime, a spray of water behind the propeller shaft had turned a murky color, a signal the sea was mixing with fuel for the engine. A half-hour past midnight, the chief engineer called up to say the engine would shut down imminently.

Capt. Hejazi pulled back the throttle to make a crash stop–a nightmare maneuver that sent the ship shuddering. It was 1:30 a.m. and Rubymar was barely 20 miles from where it had first been struck, listing slightly and surviving on backup generators. The captain shouted: “drop the anchor,” and in eight minutes the crew scrambled to perform a job that usually took half an hour.

For more than two hours, Gwealy had been radioing increasingly urgent pleas every 10 minutes on Channel 16, the international distress frequency for ships in danger. Two vessels passed without helping. The best he’d been able to drum up so far was a U.S. naval helicopter that radioed back to confirm awareness. The U.S. Navy had an aircraft carrier, alongside guided-missile destroyers, a cruise missile destroyer and a submarine strapped with Tomahawk missiles. But that carrier group was more than 100 miles away.

Nor did the Navy have at hand what Rubymar needed, a salvage tug, capable of pumping out compartments and pulling a cargo ship blacked-out in a war zone to safety. Over decades of peace on the oceans, the Navy had slashed its supply of such ships, outsourcing the rare assignment to a tiny number of private contractors, few of them anywhere near the Houthi-threatened waters of the Red Sea.

As he kept radioing, Gwealy caught sight of a troubling indicator from the pressure gauge from one of the cargo holds, No. 5. It was far too high. “I’m thinking: What is happening?” he said. “I’m sure I have a problem in this hold.”

Gwealy grabbed the boatswain and scrambled downstairs, using a hydraulic tool to pry open a manhole where they knew they could peer down into Hold No. 5. With a flashlight, Gwealy bent himself toward the opening and peeked through.

What he saw made him slap the wall in anguish. “God help us!” he screamed. Hold No. 5 was almost completely full of water—a third compartment flooded on a ship that couldn’t lose more than two.

“I knew then for sure 100% we must abandon ship,” he said. “We needed to save ourselves.”

By the time he raced back to the bridge, another sailor was on Channel 16, pleading with the U.S. Navy for help from the helicopter coming into view: “The ship is sinking! We need immediately help!”

“Rubymar, Coalition Aircraft copies all,” the helicopter replied at 1:40 a.m.

“We have only a couple minutes,” the sailor begged. “The ship will sink!”

The captain was done waiting. Around 2 a.m., he ordered his crew to abandon the Rubymar.

Gwealy only registered the turbulence on the seas below—rough waves, at least 10 feet tall—as his lifeboat started rolling in a sickening undulation from the moment it hit the water. Over the crash and hiss of sea smacking into the doors, the third officer piloting the lifeboat could barely hear the captain in the back shouting for their vessel to weave through the water.

“Port,” the captain yelled, his voice drowned out.

“Port,” repeated Gwealy to the third officer who jerked the lifeboat to the left.

“Starboard!” the captain shouted.

As the boat veered right, Gwealy vomited between his legs.

An hour and 15 minutes washed by before the radio crackled with the Ukrainian accent of a cargo ship captain, on his way: “We are going to pick them up.” Gwealy struggled to climb the massive vessel’s rope ladder, collapsing on deck next to a sailor who’d fainted, his face splashed with water to check if he’d died. A sailor brought Gwealy a seasickness tablet, a blanket and coffee, then helped walk him to a cabin where the chief mate could sleep.

Khloud sat upright at 5:15 a.m. to the sound of her cellphone: Mahmoud is calling.

Her husband had said he wouldn’t have a cell connection until he reached the Suez Canal on the 22nd.

“Khloud, Khloud, the ship has been attacked…. We sunk.”

His voice was shaking. Khloud screamed: “Are you OK? Swear to god that you are OK? And everyone is OK?”

“Yes, we are all OK and we are on another ship,” Gwealy said.

After two minutes, the call cut out and Khloud was panicking. She went to pray then checked the internet. Dozens of news items were already reporting a missile strike on the Rubymar.

She dialed the company that had hired Mahmoud, but the woman who picked up the phone hadn’t heard the news, and began to cry when Khloud told her. She kept thinking about her husband on the sea: What if they’re attacked again?

Gwealy had told her to download an app that allowed her to track him at sea. When she opened it, she saw the icon moving rapidly toward Djibouti. Twelve hours later, her phone rang again.  

“Khloud, we are safe,” he said. “You will never guess what happened to us!”

“I know everything,” she said. “It’s all over the news.”

Before the call ended, she realized that Gwealy would be home for Omar’s birthday—and to fix the front door.  

The chief mate still hasn’t been paid. For days after his return, his phone pinged with photos of the Rubymar, still afloat about 16 miles west of Yemen. Oil and fertilizer trailed behind the ship like an ink stain. The tip of its stern sagged just slightly into the sea. The ship’s manager said he struggled to find a salvage tug willing to rescue the vessel, or to identify a nearby port open to what had become a floating environmental liability.

Meanwhile, there is evidence the Houthis’ military capability has expanded to include underwater drones. Those drones are harder than missiles for the Navy to detect and destroy. One Houthi missile came within a nautical mile of the Navy’s USS Gravely recently, forcing the destroyer to resort to its last line of defense—a 20-mm Gatling gun—the closest any militant group has come to crippling a U.S. warship since al Qaeda sunk the USS Cole in the run-up to 9/11.

The U.S. Navy has replied by conducting another round of air and missile strikes at what it said were the Houthis’ underground weapons storage facilities, missile storage facilities, air defense systems, radars and a helicopter.

But the conflict has forced the world’s most powerful fleet to reconsider whether it has the tools—or could possibly procure them—to intercept every incoming cruise or ballistic missile or drone that it would require to secure the vital shipping lane. A future in which the seas are only open to some seems on the horizon. Chinese ships, hoping to survive on the basis of their relative neutrality in Middle Eastern politics, have begun adding a disclaimer in the destination field of their onboard navigation systems: “ALL CHINA CREW.”

“It’s settling in that this is an international problem requiring an international solution,” a U.S. Department of Defense official said. “There’s a lot of lines of efforts, more than just military firepower.”

In the meantime, an update came in last Saturday to the U.S. Central Command station in Tampa. The Rubymar, it said, had sunk.

War with the Houthis in Yemen may be on horizon - analysis
MARCH 6, 2024 13:34

A day after a member of Yemen’s Presidential Command Council warned that the Iran-backed Houthis may be escalating attacks on other groups in Yemen, a new report on Wednesday indicates that the Houthis are “preparing for a possible military confrontation in Yemen.”

The two reports are from UAE-based AlAin News and indicate that its sources are talking about the growing Houthi threat.

So far, the Houthis have been attacking ships and claim to be supporting Hamas in Gaza. They may be using this as leverage and cover for the next phase of their campaign, however, which could be a war against the government forces of an already divided Yemen.

The Houthis are “recruiting thousands of young men and children under the slogan and claims of ‘Supporting Palestine,’” AlAin reported. In fact, the Houthis now appear to be seeking to use their claims of support for Gaza to inflame tensions closer to home.

The Houthis openly recruit under the banner of “Al-Aqsa Flood,” and they are training the new recruits, the report said. Under the guise of the attacks on the Red Sea, this training may be preparations to “launch a future round of war that will assassinate the peace process in Yemen.”

Yemen’s peace process goes back several years. In addition, China helped broker Saudi-Iranian normalization, and Riyadh had sought to end the war in Yemen.

The Houthis began the war a decade ago and sought to take over most of Yemen. The Saudis intervened in 2015 against the Houthi threat. Iran has used the Houthis over the last several years as a testing ground for new drones and missiles. For instance, Shahed 136 drones sent to Russia were exported to the Houthis first.

Using the Iraqi model of 2014 and the “popular mobilization units,” they have created a “population mobilization” as well.

The Iraqis did this to fight ISIS based on a fatwa from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq. In Iraq’s case, the fatwa was necessary to mobilize Shi’ite fighters to defend Baghdad from ISIS.

In Yemen, the Houthis are creating a fake emergency and crisis to exploit it to potentially recruit men to fight and then use them for a different reason. That means the Houthis pretend they care about Palestinians, but their real goal may be a bait and switch.

“During the last three months, the Houthis mobilized 20,000 members from the Sanaa districts, another 20,000 from the Hajjah districts, and 6,000 from the Taiz districts that they control, while the militia leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, claimed to prepare 165,000 members to ‘fight the battle of the promised conquest and holy jihad,’” the report said.

The Houthis also are said to be recruiting children. “The Houthis’ targeting of children and adolescents in particular in recruitment operations extends over two decades… but recently the recruitment rate has increased frighteningly,” a human-rights group told AlAin.

Like Hamas, the Houthis use summer camps to put arms in the hands of children. It is not summer yet, so the new round of child militarization will have to wait a few months if the Houthis intend to use the summer camps for this purpose.

The Houthis exploit poverty and unemployment to recruit people for war, the report also said. The Houthis are now accused of sending 6,000 men to the Marib governorate in preparation for a possible offensive. “Observers believe that these Houthi crowds indicate that the militias are heading towards internal escalation and have nothing to do with ‘Palestine,’” the report said.

It now appears that recognition of the Houthi threat, and how they exploited the Gaza war, is leading to concern in the region. This may represent a turning of the tide in terms of understanding the way Iran has mobilized groups and exploited October 7.

For Iran, the attack on Israel was a huge watershed event. It is now possible that Tehran is using this all over the Middle East to build up its proxies.

The Houthis may want to “return Yemen to the war zone again by leaving the de-escalation agreement for a comprehensive escalation and annexing more land or completing the imposition of absolute control over areas of wealth,” one expert told AlAin News.

It is important to pay close attention to Yemen. If these reports are accurate, the Houthis are now on the move, which could reflect larger ambitions by Iranian groups in the region. They may be preparing something for Ramadan and the months after. If so, October 7 may have been the opening shot of a much larger war.

How the U.S. Arms Pipeline to Israel Avoids Public Disclosure

The U.S. has sent tens of thousands of weapons including bombs and precision guided munitions to Israel since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks using procedures that have largely masked the scale of the administration’s military support for its closest Middle East ally, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The administration has organized more than 100 individual transfers of arms to Israel, but has only officially notified Congress of two shipments made under the major foreign weapons sales process, which are usually submitted to lawmakers for review and then publicly disclosed, U.S. officials said. In both cases, the administration used an emergency rule that avoids the review process.

The rest of the transfers have been approved using less public mechanisms available to the White House. Those include drawing from U.S. stockpiles, accelerating previously approved deliveries and sending weapons in smaller batches that fall below a dollar threshold that requires the administration to notify Congress, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The handling of the weapons transfers underscores the crosscurrents buffeting the White House. It has grown increasingly frustrated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the war but continues to fend off calls to use the arms pipeline as leverage to press him to reduce civilian casualties and increase humanitarian aid entering Gaza.

Some of the officials and several lawmakers said the limited disclosure points to a broader pattern in which the Biden administration has sought to avoid scrutiny from Congress. Some fellow Democrats want President Biden to use weapons shipments to pressure Netanyahu’s government.

The deep U.S. military partnership with Israel, which receives more than $3 billion in military aid every year from Washington, enabled an immediate surge in weapons shipments after Oct. 7. There are currently 600 active cases of potential military transfer or sales worth more than $23 billion between the U.S. and Israel, State Department officials said.

“We have followed the procedures Congress itself has specified to keep members well-informed and regularly brief members even when formal notification is not a legal requirement,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement, adding that “claims that we have split cases so that they fall below established statutory thresholds or failed to appropriately engage partners in Congress are unequivocally false.”

State Department officials informed lawmakers in recent weeks about the full extent of the transfers to Israel, according to a person familiar with the briefings, but there has been no public disclosure of most of the shipments.

“While the State Department has no legal obligation to notify below-threshold arms transfers, using this process to repeatedly end-run Congress—as sales of this quantity suggest—would violate the spirit of the law and undermine Congress’s important oversight role” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, told The Wall Street Journal.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The decision to provide the arms in about 100 tranches reflects the administration’s desire to keep the scope of its military support to Israel out of public view as much as possible, critics of the transfers said.

“This stuff is non-transparent by design,” said Josh Paul, a State Department official handling congressional relations who resigned in October in protest of the Biden administration’s policy on the Gaza war.

The U.S.-supplied arms since the beginning of the Gaza war include at least 23,000 precision guided weapons, including Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, drones, and Joint Direct Attack Munition kits, which turn unguided bombs into “smart” bombs, along with other similar weapons, U.S. officials said.

Israel has also received 58,000 155mm artillery shells and munitions for its Iron Dome air defense system, the officials said.

Most of the weapons and systems came out of U.S. stockpiles in the early days of the war. The flow has dropped off in recent months as the Pentagon has run short of munitions it can provide Israel quickly, while also meeting Ukraine’s needs and maintaining sufficient U.S. stockpiles, the officials said. The U.S. has provided 1,000 precision guided munitions and artillery shells in the past month, U.S. defense officials said.

The handling of weapons shipments to Israel stands in contrast to the administration’s approach to arming Ukraine in its war against Russia’s invasion, in which the Defense Department has regularly published lists of arms that it sends to Kyiv. While not all transfers to Ukraine are made public, the Pentagon provides updates on the total amount of military assistance.

For Israel, the American weapons transfers have allowed the military to sustain the war in Gaza while also staying ready for the possible outbreak of a full-scale war with Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based Shiite militant group with an arsenal of missiles supplied by Iran. The group is considered a more capable adversary than Hamas. Israel and Hezbollah have engaged in a slow-burning cross-border conflict since the war in Gaza began.

The Israeli military has dipped into its own arms stockpiles it maintains on its northern border, but not to an extent that would undermine its ability to fight Hezbollah, said a senior Israeli military official. Israel is concerned that U.S. supplies could taper off if Biden were to apply more pressure to Israel, or threats from China and Russia were to take precedence over the effort to arm Israel, the official said.

“There’s nothing that Israel can say that it has not gotten. Israel got basically what it needed. When you look into the future, I don’t think it’s necessarily going to stay like that,” the Israeli military official said.

Lawmakers and congressional aides say that the administration has broken with decades of government practice by failing to provide, except in a few cases, what is known as an “informal notification” to key congressional leaders of arms deliveries to Israel in which legislators are given weeks to review a potential sale or transfer before the administration sends legally required formal notification.

“There is nothing in the law that prevents the administration from saying ‘this is an emergency and we have to do it. Our national security is at risk,” said Lawrence Korb, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “Usually the executive branch errs on the side of caution.”

Iranian military and security leaders are increasingly discussing the need to expand the Iranian military presence around the Red Sea and Mediterranean Sea. Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi—a senior military adviser to the Iranian supreme leader—stated on March 6 that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Navy and Aerospace Force should “focus” on the Red Sea and Mediterranean Sea.  

Safavi described the Mediterranean Sea as part of Iran’s strategic depth and that Tehran must accordingly “increase [its] strategic depth [by] 5,000 kilometers,” which would extend to the Strait of Gibraltar.

Safavi’s remarks come after IRGC Coordination Deputy Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naghdi threatened in December 2023 that Iran’s so-called “Axis of Resistance” could someday disrupt maritime traffic in the Mediterranean Sea and around the Strait of Gibraltar.  The Iranian desire to develop a military presence, especially a naval one, around the Mediterranean Sea and its periphery is not entirely new, as senior military officials have discussed the idea since at least 2016.

The remarks from Safavi and Naghdi are noteworthy, nevertheless, given recent Iranian efforts in the area. Western media reported on March 3 that Iran requested Sudanese permission to establish a permanent naval base on the Red Sea, which would support Iranian out-of-area naval operations and attacks on international shipping.  

Separately, Israel was likely responsible for an airstrike that killed an IRGC Navy colonel around the coastal city of Baniyas, Syria, on March 1.  An Israeli social media account observed that the naval officer may have worked on coastal missile defenses and/or electronic warfare.

Iran would probably use an expanding military presence around the Red Sea and Mediterranean Sea to threaten commercial traffic, as Iran has long done so around the Persian Gulf and is currently supporting Houthi attacks on global commerce.

Iran has invested in recent years in building surface vessels that are capable of hosting fast attack craft, drones, helicopters, and missiles. These vessels would not likely survive conventional engagements against the US Navy or other modern militaries—but they are optimized for the sort of commerce raiding that has long been a feature of Iranian regional strategy.