How Israel’s Momentum Plan sowed the seeds of devastation in Gaza and Lebanon

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With news of a potential ceasefire in Gaza, analysts are eyeing the military balance in the war which has laid waste to most of the enclave and killed nearly 47,000 people, mostly civilians. More than two million of the 2.3 million population have been displaced at some point in the conflict, many more than once.

In Lebanon, ceasefire violations continue after a war that killed about 3,800 people, many of them Hezbollah members but also 250 children, while 6,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed in the south of the country alone.

For many observers, the seeds of the devastation in the linked conflicts began on October 7, with the Hamas-led attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians. About 50 hostages, 100 of whom are still held, were also taken.

Six years previously however, Israeli military planners envisioned what they called “decisive victory”, through intense firepower and cutting-edge technology.

The Momentum Plan imagined a total transformation of the military into a “networked” high-tech force driven by real-time intelligence and planning that would generate terrifying data sets: thousands of targets bombed in a short space of time.

Some have referred to the “Dahiya doctrine,” widely seen as an ultraviolent form of deterrence, the name coined after comments by Israeli Gen Gadi Eisenkot after the 2006 Lebanon war.

Instead, the architect of the Momentum Plan was Israeli Chief of the General Staff Aviv Kochavi, who envisioned a radical approach to fighting non-state armed groups. Unlike Nato’s military thinking about militias and terrorists – which places emphasis on careful use of force against groups that are often based among civilians – Momentum takes a completely different approach.

The plan sees militants not as fighters, who need to be carefully rooted out of civilian areas, but as armies that can be fought with the full force of military firepower. This was a departure from previous military operations which, to the disappointment of some Israeli commanders, ended inconclusively in ceasefires, with militant infrastructure intact.

“It was a very significant change in the Israeli military approach, to fight in the most fortified the area in the world with an underground web of 700km of tunnels,” says Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at Israel’s INSS and Misgav Institute.

Critically in Gaza, the plan was launched into action against what Israel saw in Hamas as “a very well-organised, well-established, well-equipped and trained terror army of a semi-state entity,” Mr Michael says.

Momentum, the planners hoped, would destroy foes before peace talks could allow them to recover, before they could adjust plans. It brought the full force of the Israeli military to bear as quickly as possible.

Destruction, rather than advances on a map, was the aim. According to Gen Kochavi, the most cutting-edge intelligence resources, from drones to eavesdropping communications, would be brought to bear, “wiping out key centres” of the opponent.

Many observers believed Israel was, after October 7, gradually responding to moves by Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, while taking political considerations into account. “We weren’t playing that game any more,” a former Israeli intelligence official told The National. The approach instead would involve total war.

Gen Kochavi wanted a “more lethal” Israeli army, fusing air power and infantry operations seamlessly through high-tech intelligence-sharing, ensuring that any soldier could call on any supporting weapon, from artillery to drones or jets, within minutes. That closing of the “sensor to shooter” loop would, Gen Kochavi hoped, bring about the “rapid destruction of enemy capabilities”.

New "multidimensional" units were created, Mr Michael says, small brigades of several thousand men, about three times smaller than the traditional army division, who worked closely with intelligence services. "The comprised tanks, artillery, engineering, the air force operating together as a special combat team."

Winning the war rapidly with massive devastation, Momentum’s planners hoped, would save Israel the kind of economic damage suffered in the wars of 1967 and 1973, when mass mobilisations of troops worsened economic crises.

But bringing so much firepower to bear in densely populated areas has sparked accusations against Israeli forces from widespread war crimes to genocide.

Focusing on Hezbollah

“The arsenals of Iran’s proxies on Israel’s borders have required the enemy to be redefined as terror ‘armies'," former Israeli commander Eran Ortal wrote about the plan in 2020.

In the forefront of Ortal’s mind would have been Hezbollah, once arguably Iran’s most powerful militia ally, with an estimated rocket arsenal of 150,000 projectiles, along with an unknown number of precision-guided missiles and drones.

Before the group’s intervention in the Gaza war on October 8, 2023, and Israel’s gradual escalation to invading southern Lebanon in October last year, Israeli experts fretted that the group could hobble Israel by shutting down entire towns under ferocious bombardment and striking power stations.

Momentum might be able to blunt such an assault – which was widely believed to be able to overwhelm the Iron Dome defence system by sheer force in the opening hours of a war. Key to the transformation was big data. Momentum, an anonymous Israeli officer said in 2021, would turn the army into a “data-driven force”.

What this led to was the highly controversial use of AI to generate thousands of “target packs”, which Israeli magazine +972 alleged contained, in some cases, outdated information on suspected terrorist homes, leading to deadly strikes on civilians.

This was in stark contrast to a previous approach described to The National by a former Israeli pilot, which involved a slower and more careful assessment of risk to civilians.

The result in Gaza and Lebanon was terrifying. The Gaza war of 2014 lasted just over seven weeks, with Israel saying it had bombed 5,263 targets throughout the conflict. By contrast, in the first five weeks of the Gaza campaign, Israel said it had struck 15,000 targets.

Big data – allegedly a programme called ‘Lavender’ – was driving Momentum’s preparatory bombardment. In contrast, US forces in the second battle of Fallujah, Iraq in 2004 dropped 318 bombs, many of them 230kg GBU-38s. Anything bigger, one US air force pilot said, would cause “unnecessary damage”. Israel’s air force dropped, by one estimate, 600 BLU-117 bombs – each weighing 900kg – in the first month of the Gaza war and many thousands of smaller bombs.

Similarly intense strikes were seen in the days before Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon, with 1,600 targets hit in 24 hours, comparable to the opening days of the US-led Iraq invasion.

Tal Hagin, an Israeli open-source research specialist who has closely tracked both conflicts, says there is a grim irony that Israeli planning was focused on Hezbollah – the initial force of the doctrine was turned on Hamas in Gaza, perceived as a much less capable foe.

“Hezbollah had been constantly on the radar for many, many years, Israel had been preparing for a war and growing intelligence on them ever since 2006. It wasn't preparing for war against Hamas, not because it didn't have the capabilities against Hamas but because it just didn't perceive them as the same kind of threat.”

But for all the transformation of Israeli military capability, the outcome in Gaza remains uncertain.

Momentum saw Israel’s closest geographic foes lose highly experienced senior ranks – including Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah. Their vast rocket arsenals and other arms stockpiles, built over many years, have been smashed.

But according to a recent US assessment, Hamas has recruited as many men as it has lost in the war. “We assess that Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a think tank event in Washington on Tuesday. “That is a recipe for an enduring insurgency and perpetual war.”