This week, Israel may have killed longtime Hamas military chief Mohammed Dief with a 2,000-pound bomb. This comes immediately after the United States announced the lifting of a ban on the shipment of 500-pound bombs to Israel but kept the block on larger-diameter ammunition to include 2,000-pound bombs. In a press conference on the issue, President Joe Biden explained the reason. “I haven’t delivered a 2,000-pound bomb,” President Biden said. “They cannot be used in Gaza or other populated areas without causing great tragedy and destruction.”
President Biden’s words reflect the conventional wisdom about this powerful weapon. As with all conventional wisdom, at least some of it is wrong and unfair. Of course, the war in Gaza has been devastating, and thousands of Palestinians have died tragically. Unfortunately, widespread destruction and high civilian casualty rates are common in urban warfare. And in Gaza, the numbers are overwhelming as Hamas cynically digs itself in under densely populated areas.
The depth of penetration of the 2,000 pound bomb, depending on the type and whether it has to pass through concrete, is believed to be from 16 feet to more than 30 feet. The military wing of Hamas is hidden in more than 400 miles of tunnels, some as deep as 200 feet underground. And in northern Israel, Hezbollah, like Hamas, has been digging deeper and deeper tunnels for years to protect what it believes is an arsenal of more than 100,000 rockets, missiles and drones. South Lebanon is called the “Land of Tunnels” because of the underground network buried miles deep.
Israel has used 2,000-pound bombs against what it assesses as military targets in bunkers and tunnels, despite knowing that there will be inevitable civilian casualties—just as the United States has done in past wars.
Some weapons experts and veterans have recently claimed that the United States has rarely used the 2,000-pound bomb. That is not true.
During the first Gulf war, the United States dropped more than 16,000 2,000-pound bombs on Iraqi targets. During the opening months of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the bombers dropped more than 5,000 such bombs on Baghdad, a city of more than 5 million people at the time, and other urban areas. The US dropped four bombs on just one building in a residential neighborhood in Baghdad, after receiving intelligence reports that several senior Iraqi officials, possibly including Saddam Hussein and his two sons, were there.
The current debate over the use of the 2,000-pound bomb is part of a larger battle over the use of all bombs in urban areas. It can be traced back several years to the creation of a large human rights advocacy coalition, led by Human Rights Watch, which was founded in 2011. This coalition seeks to ban all bombs, missiles, artillery, and mortars from being used in any urban area, called “populated territory,” regardless of context, circumstances, or even if the military is able to evacuate all civilians from the area.
The war against these bombs was eventually named “explosive weapons in occupied areas” (EWIPA). A political declaration was made in which countries would decide to limit or prohibit their forces from using all these weapons in urban warfare. To date, 87 countries have adopted a political declaration to adopt and implement national policies and practices to reduce civilian casualties in urban warfare by limiting or eliminating the use of explosive weapons in populated areas.
The unfortunate reality is that urban warfare is devastating—and it’s not going to end anytime soon. As a scholar of urban warfare, I have concluded and presented to the United Nations that banning bombs and artillery in urban warfare will cause more damage, not less. Restrictions on the use of bombs in the city sucked the war to the city from the countryside. And once in a city, if the invading army does not have these weapons, the defenders engage in continuous block-by-block street fighting that results in mass destruction and the loss of thousands of lives. Without bombs or artillery, urban warfare turned into bloody sieges. And this dragged on the war.
Once again, history is our guide. In the Battle of Manila in 1945, one of the few battles in military history similar to Gaza, General Douglas MacArthur prohibited the US Army from using bombs for fear of destroying the city and killing civilians. However, 100,000 civilians were killed and most of the city was destroyed to defeat a Japanese force not half the size of Hamas in Gaza.
Also, in the second Battle of Seoul in 1950, when MacArthur again limited aerial bombardment, tens of thousands of civilians may have died, and large areas of the city were destroyed to defeat only 8,000 North Korean enemy defenders.
The US battle against ISIS in Mosul and Raqqa in 2016 and 2017, against several thousand defenders, involved little aerial bombing. Some analysts have compared the war to Gaza, pointing out that the United States and its allies are fighting a less destructive war there. But in Mosul and Raqqa, US forces face an enemy that is a fraction of Hamas’s size and capabilities, and without tunnels to retreat from. Eighty percent of Mosul’s Old City was destroyed and 10,000 civilians were killed in an attempt to kill less than 5,000 ISIS fighters. In Raqqa, 70 percent of the city was destroyed, brought to the point where the UN deemed it “unfit for human habitation.”
As a potential ceasefire appears in Gaza, it is still far from clear that long-term peace is at hand. Israel has so far been unable to win in Gaza, and its lack of supplies of 2,000-pound bombs has almost certainly played a role in allowing Hamas to hang on.
If diplomats fail to demilitarize Hamas, the brutal war is likely to continue-this time spilled out into southern Lebanon as well, where Hezbollah is also ready to fight from underground strongholds.
The city war was terrible. But reducing Israel’s, or any other country’s, ability to use 2,000-pound bombs in a war 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 “The Urban War Project Podcast.” He served 25 years as an infantryman, which included two combat tours in Iraq. He is the author of the book. “Soldiers Connect: Life, Leadership, and Social Connections in Modern Warfare” and co-author of “Understanding Urban Warfare.“
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors. These are not necessarily the views of the Department of Defense, the Department of the Army, the Army College, or the US Military Academy.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for a common field.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for a common field.