In response to a recent “60 Minutes” episode, which revealed details about the Israeli pager operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon that injured more than 2,700 terrorists and killed nine, British broadcaster Piers Morgan wondered aloud why the Israel Defense Forces couldn’t target Hamas as precisely in Gaza.
“Mind-bogglingly, extraordinary,” he wrote. “Though it does beg the question: If Mossad could do this to decapitate Hezbollah, why could they not have done something similar with Hamas?”
John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, which is part of the U.S. Military Academy, in New York, offered to go on Morgan’s show to explain.
“That is actually very easy to answer,” he told Morgan, about the broadcaster’s question about Hamas.
“The context of the operating environment [is] night and day. Hezbollah lives in a diverse multicultural society of Lebanon, and their fighters having varying ranges of commitment making it easier to infiltrate and use a variety of types of intelligence methods,” Spencer wrote. “Hamas controls power in a homogenous radicalized society, where Israel completely left in 2005.”
“Israel took a containment strategy to Hamas leaving them to govern Gaza. The national security and resource priority for Israel was Iran and then the massive army Hezbollah,” he added. “After Oct. 7, Israel had to approach Gaza as contested enemy terrain with little to no infiltrations into Hamas. The pager operation was over a decade of Mossad work.”