US troops in Gaza could trigger an insurgency, military experts warn

American forces would quickly incur casualties, something the public is unlikely to tolerate

Fighters of the Ezzedine Al Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, in Gaza city. Bloomberg

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Any attempt by the US to seize and rebuild Gaza with the help of American forces would face massive operational challenges, military experts say. It would raise the risk of an insurgency and the need for a sustained military presence that contradicts President Donald Trump's stated desire to avoid foreign conflicts.

The situation in Gaza makes it fertile ground to grow the sort of open-ended and costly conflict the US waded into in its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, which cost US taxpayers trillions of dollars and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers.

Mr Trump has not committed to sending US forces into Gaza as part of his vision to clear the Palestinian enclave of all its residents and then embark on a major reconstruction project to turn it into what he envisions as the “Riviera of the Middle East”.

Yet on Tuesday, Mr Trump said he would send troops into Gaza “if it's necessary”. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, welcoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House on Wednesday, emphasised the possibility.

“To the question of Gaza: the definition of insanity is attempting to do the same thing over and over and over again,” Mr Hegseth said in brief remarks to reporters. “We look forward to working with our allies, our counterparts, both diplomatically and militarily, to look at all options.”

As with many things Mr Trump says, his words can be viewed as a maximalist bargaining ploy to try to extract concessions in a negotiation. But, taken at face value, his remarks have unnerved allies and observers. Experts told The National that a hypothetical military presence in Gaza would be complex even in a best-case scenario for planners: the surrender of Hamas, an unlikely prospect.

An air strike by US-led coalition forces in Mosul, northern Iraq, in 2017, during the battle against ISIS. It took five years to clear the city of explosives once the extremists were dislodged. AFP

Alex Plitsas, head of the Atlantic Council think tank's Counterterrorism Projectand a former chief of sensitive activities for special operations and combatting terrorism in the Office of the Secretary of Defence, said Mr Trump's suggestion that the US can somehow clear and rebuild Gaza assumes a massive level of military and economic involvement. But the President has not outlined who would pay for the endeavour, he added.

And any US troop presence would quickly incur American casualties, something Mr Trump's isolationist supporters are unlikely to tolerate for long, as any Palestinians remaining Gaza after a forced displacement would almost certainly take up arms against an occupying power.

“We learnt from Iraq, very clearly, that a counterinsurgency operation is extremely costly in terms of blood and treasure, and we saw the significant loss of life of the civilian population that was caught in the middle,” Mr Plitsas said. “And you would need to make a long-term strategic commitment to a country to see that through, and there would be a lot of suffering that takes place in the process.”

Even some members of Mr Trump's largely compliant Republican Party have voiced concern over the Gaza proposal.

“I thought we voted for America First,” Republican senator Rand Paul said on X. “We have no business contemplating yet another occupation to doom our treasure and spill our soldiers' blood.”

Mr Plitsas said several military divisions, up to about 100,000 troops, would be needed to take, hold and clear Gaza. “And that's just the security piece. You have the reconstruction piece of it as well, and the governance and nation building, which would also entail other elements of the [US] government,” he noted.

John Spencer, chairman of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute, at the US Military Academy, also said it would require a commitment of tens of thousands of soldiers arriving by land and sea for a mission that would take a long time, depending on the extent to which Hamas had been eradicated or laid down their arms.

“The enemy gets a vote,” said Mr Spencer, who has toured Gaza four times with the Israeli military since October 7, 2023. “If it's active combat, it takes a long time. That has to be acknowledged.”

He said Israeli troops had predominantly cleared urban areas, then left them again. The US military mission would be to clear such places, hold them and then defuse any unexploded Israeli bombs or booby traps left by Hamas.

Mr Spencer said making any area safe for reconstruction would be a hugely intricate undertaking, as buildings and rubble would need to be cleared, along with any Hamas tunnels underneath.

In the case of Mosul in Iraq following the battle to rid it of ISIS fighters, it took an estimated five years to clear explosives – and that was just one city.

“People aren't acknowledging the very unique features of this war, like the rubble and the destruction,” Mr Spencer said. "I think people are discounting the actual amount of work that would have to be done."

But even contemplating the logistics of a US military operation presupposes that Arab countries would be on board with the plan, and there is zero indication to suggest they are.

Jordan and Egypt have made it clear that the displacement of Palestinians, either in the short term or long term, from either Gaza or the occupied West Bank, is a non-starter policy position.

“Because it would mean the potential non right of return on the end of Palestinian statehood, which is something that they neither will and would support,” Mr Plitsas said.

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