Falcon29
Elite Member
Israel knew a lot about Hamas, but Hamas also knows a lot about Israel, and Hamas had situation in Gaza on lockdown. Gaza is closed off to the world and 99% Sunni. Hamas governs all of Gaza. That has its advantages. Hamas is more willing to engage Israel and has a more open appetite to confront Israel. Hamas also has more combat experience. Hamas's underground tunnel system is more robust and larger in scale. They can move weapons without detection on a large scale and deploy them with short notice. Despite being narrower tunnel passage ways for the most part.
Israel doesn't truly know how military decisions are made within Hamas and who actually makes them. That's why situation in Gaza can go 0-100 really suddenly. Hamas is very secretive. There's a lot of things that Hamas does right and people underestimate them in. Biggest thing holding them back is the crap 60 year old weapons that's the only thing they can acquire as Egypt has made it so hard and expensive to get decent weapons into Gaza.
Hezbollah dynamic is different. They're disliked by maybe half the Lebanese population. They're concentrated more in southern Lebanon villages they don't really run entire Lebanon. Village environment might benefit them in ground warfare but for deploying firepower (rockets against Israel) it actually makes them more exposed. For some reason everybody knows their actual chain of command and how they approach war time decision making. They take too long and there aren't actually people at the top that can make unilateral orders or give top-down orders right away. They instead consult each other on a wide scale which is why they get caught each time and get attacked during such meetings. Even when consultations are made the chain of command is too long and each battalion doesn't receive explicit orders. They get broad/mixed messaging on what's expected of them.
They're also focused on multidimensional threats whereas Hamas was mostly focused on the Israeli threat. Hezbollah invested resources and invested efforts in other arenas and saw themselves as the Shia asymmetrical force that overseas other Shia factions in the region. Naturally they became worse at combating at the Israeli threat while Israel was not happy with 2006 performance and worked from there to change all of that (started with Iron Dome, more rapid air sorties, Trophy systems for tanks, etc.....).
We thought Hezbollah would be taking lessons from the subsequent clashes in Gaza in 2012, 2014, 2019, 2021 which is why I was personally surprised at their lack of preparedness in 2023. I know they didn't want that fight and I have no qualms with them, it's their fate and decision, but I thought if war was forced upon them that the would be capable of pulling off a impressive military feat.
