With IDF dead and wounded reported almost every day from the fighting in Gaza, some political leaders have called for simply "flattening" the entire settled area in the Gaza Strip rather than risk soldiers in house-to-house fighting.
Calcalist aerospace expert Nitzan "The Captain" Sadan says this is a grave mistake.
First, Sadan notes, it's important to realize that for all the intensity of IDF bombing since the Gaza war began, just 18,000 of the estimated 200,000 buildings in the Gaza Strip (according to UN estimates) have been damaged to one degree or another. In other words, even with all the heavy and intense strikes, many of the buildings that were hit are still standing and most remain largely unharmed.
To truly flatten every single building in the Gaza Strip would take a full year, 131 billion NIS (close to double Israel's entire defense budget), and a determined and careful effort to destroy each and every building's foundations.
As Sadan notes, even the air forces of WWII did not come close to entirely destroying whole cities, including Dresden and Tokyo, and even the Hiroshima bombing "only" destroyed about 67% of the city's physical structure. Simple physics and the weakening of explosions due to distance and obstacles prevents a true wipeout even with atomic weapons.
Most importantly, "wiping out" all of the Gazan infrastructure would be no guarantee of eliminating the Hamas threat, as much of the rubble would serve as excellent and easy cover for ambushes of all kinds. So the effort would likely be for naught, an act that would not even achieve its stated aims.
The IDF approach of targeting only places where terrorists reside or which they use for attacks or coordination is thus the right way to go, as frustrating as it is, and as frustrating as it is to hear Israel's critics claim its air forces are simply bombing indiscriminately when the truth is very much the opposite.
