This week, Israel very likely killed the long-time head of Hamas's military, Mohammed Dief, with multiple 2,000-pound bombs. This comes directly after United States announced it was lifting the restriction on 500-pound bombs shipments to Israel but keeping a block on larger diameter munitions to include 2,000-pound bombs. In his press conference on the issue, President Joe Biden laid out his rationale. "I have not provided them 2,000-pound bombs," President Biden said. "They cannot be used in Gaza or any other populated area without causing great human tragedy and damage."
President Biden's remarks reflect the conventional wisdom about these powerful weapons. Like all conventional wisdom, it is at least in part misguided and unfair. To be sure, the war in Gaza has been incredibly destructive, and thousands of Palestinians have tragically been killed. Unfortunately, widespread destruction and high civilian casualty rates are common in urban warfare. And in Gaza, the numbers are as high as they are because Hamas has cynically dug itself in beneath densely populated areas.
The penetration depth of a 2,000 pound bomb, depending on the kind and whether it must go through concrete, is believed to be from 16 feet to more than 30 feet. Hamas's military wing is hidden in more than 400 miles of tunnels, some as deep as 200 feet underground. And to Israel's north, Hezbollah, like Hamas, has spent years digging tunnels deeper and deeper to protect what is believed to be an arsenal of over 100,000 rockets, missiles and drones. Southern Lebanon is referred to as the "Land of Tunnels" due to the miles of deep buried underground networks.
Israel has used its 2,000-pound bombs against what it assessed to be military targets in bunkers and tunnels, even while knowing that there would be unavoidable civilian casualties—just as the United States has done in its past wars.
Some weapons experts and veterans have recently claimed that the United States has rarely used 2,000-pound bombs. That's simply not true.
NewsletterDuring the first Gulf war, the United States dropped more than 16,000 2,000-pound bombs on Iraqi targets. During the opening month of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it dropped more than 5,000 of these bombs in Baghdad, a city of over 5 million residents at the time and other urban areas. The U.S. dropped four of the bombs on just one building in a residential neighborhood in Baghdad, after receiving intelligence reports that some senior Iraqi officials, possibly including Saddam Hussein and his two sons, were there.
The current debate over the use of 2,000-pound bombs is part of a much larger fight over the use of all bombs in urban areas. It can be traced back years to the creation of a massive human rights advocacy coalition, led by Human Rights Watch, established in 2011. This coalition sought to have all bombs, missiles, artillery, and mortars banned from use in any urban area, termed "populated areas," no matter the context, situation, or even if a military was able to evacuate all the civilians from the area.
Exclusively Available to Subscribers Try it now for $1The war on bombs was eventually titled "explosive weapons in populated areas" (EWIPA). A political declaration was crafted whereby nations would commit to restrict or ban their forces from using all of these weapons in urban warfare. To date, 87 countries have endorsed the political declaration committing to adopt and implement national policies and practices to reduce civilian harm in urban warfare by restricting or refraining from the use of explosive weapons in populated areas.
The unhappy reality is that urban warfare is inherently destructive—and also unlikely to end any time soon. As a scholar of urban warfare, I have concluded and presented to the United Nations that banning bombs and artillery in urban warfare would perversely result in more destruction, not less. Restrictions on the use of bombs in cities sucks the fight into cities from rural areas. And once in the city, if the attacking army is deprived of those weapons, defenders engage in protracted block-by-block street fights that lead to mass destruction and thousands of lost lives. Without bombs or artillery, urban battles become bloody sieges. And this drags out war.
Once again, history is our guide. In the 1945 Battle of Manila, one of the few battles in military history with parallels to Gaza, General Douglas MacArthur banned the U.S. Army from using bombs for fear of destroying the city and killing civilians. Nevertheless, 100,000 civilians perished and most of the city was destroyed to defeat a Japanese force not even half the size of Hamas in Gaza.
Similarly, in the 1950 Second Battle of Seoul, when MacArthur again initially restricted aerial bombing, tens of thousands of civilians probably died, and huge swaths of the city were destroyed to defeat just 8,000 North Korean enemy defenders.
U.S. battles against ISIS in Mosul and Raqqa in 2016 and 2017, against a few thousand defenders, involved less aerial bombing. Some analysts have compared those fights with Gaza, suggesting that the United States and its allies fought a less destructive war there. But in Mosul and Raqqa, U.S. forces faced an enemy that was only a fraction of the size and capability of Hamas, and without tunnels in which to retreat. Eighty percent of the Old City of Mosul was destroyed and 10,000 civilians died in the effort to kill fewer than 5,000 ISIS fighters. In Raqqa, 70 percent of the city was ruined, brought to the point where the U.N. considered it "unfit for human habitation."
As a potential ceasefire comes into view in Gaza, it's still far from clear that a long-term peace is at hand. Israel has thus far not prevailed in Gaza, and not having a ready supply of 2,000-pound bombs has almost certainly played a role in allowing Hamas to hang on.
If the diplomats fail to demilitarize Hamas, the brutal war is likely to resume—this time spilling out to southern Lebanon as well, where Hezbollah is also ready to fight from underground strongholds.
Urban warfare is awful. But depriving Israel, or any other country, of the ability to use 2,000-pound bombs while fighting in densely populated areas only prolongs the human tragedy.
John Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point, codirector of MWI's Urban Warfare Project and host of the "Urban Warfare Project Podcast." He served for 25 years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq. He is the author of the book "Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connection in Modern War" and co-author of "Understanding Urban Warfare."
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own. They are not necessarily the views of the Department of Defense, the Department of the Army, Army University, or the U.S. Military Academy.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
