Episode 38: What will it take to defeat Hamas? With Prof. John Spencer

Ask Haviv Anything

Haviv Rettig Gur

History

4.9 • 640 Ratings

🗓️ 27 August 2025

⏱️ 73 minutes

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Summary

Twenty-three months after the October 7 attack, Hamas is massively degraded in Gaza. At a terrible cost to Gaza itself, and after losing hundreds of IDF soldiers on the battlefield, Israel has managed to shatter its battalions and kill nearly all its pre-war command hierarchy.

Yet, as with all guerrilla groups, the bar for Hamas to remain a strategic actor is very low. It can still disrupt aid distribution at a large scale, still launch guerrilla attacks out of tunnels, still even launch the occasional rocket at Israeli towns. Hamas also continues to refuse any demand, including from the Arab League, to disarm and surrender its claim to power in the post-war Gaza Strip.

On the cusp of what is shaping up as Israel's most significant military offensive to date against the terror group, the incursion into Gaza City - the largest pre-war city in the Strip - we turn to Prof. John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, to ask if this long-delayed denial of Hamas's last major bastion and sanctuary in Gaza might finally bring this painful war to an end.

This episode was sponsored by Gideon and Lance Drucker and their firm Drucker Wealth, a financial planning and wealth management firm. They asked to use this dedication to introduce our audience to an organisation called The Legion, a non-profit to help Jewish Americans learn how to defend their families and their communities. You can learn more at their website: https://www.legionalpha.com/

The Druckers would also like to dedicate this episode to Gideon's former officer in the IDF, Maj. Ariel Ben Moshe, 27, a commander in the elite Sayeret Matkal unit, who was killed in the battle against Hamas infiltrators at Kibbutz Re’im on October 7, 2023. Ariel’s brother Shavit, an IDF paratrooper, also fought in the south that day and heard of his brother’s death while engaged in intense fighting in Kibbutz Holit, where he was wounded. Ariel is survived by his mother Galit, younger brothers Shavit and Adar, and his wife Yuval.

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Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everybody. Welcome to Ask Habib Anything. This episode we're going to tackle. I think the thing that is on most people's minds, the thing that worries most people right now, the question of the Gaza City operation, the expansion of Gideon's chariots or Gideon's Chariots 2 operation, possibly, whatever you want to call it.
0:21.2	The IDF has decided to call up tens of thousands of reservists.
0:24.8	The cabinet has re-approved a call-up of hundreds of thousands if the IDF needs it.
0:30.9	It's not that they're going to need it.
0:32.2	It's that these are all signals and these are all kinds of preparations for what looks to be a very significant operation in this new
0:38.8	kind of war, the taken hold kind of war rather than the raiding war that we've had before,
0:43.7	that we have talked to Major John Spencer before about.
0:49.3	I have expressed some deep concerns, frustrations, especially on the question of information
0:55.1	war on humanitarian aid, which besides the moral questions, and those are debated endlessly,
1:00.7	and I've had three episodes, I think, on it, so we're not going to rehash it now, but just
1:04.6	strategic questions. The war fighting is, to a very significant extent, seen by the enemy
1:10.3	as primarily
1:11.6	in information war at a humanitarian aid war.
1:14.6	In other words, a war where humanitarian suffering in Gaza is weaponized.
1:18.6	And just for that strategic reason, this should have been a major focus of the Israelis and a
1:23.6	lot of the terrible mistakes, and certainly what I have considered god-awful rhetoric by some Israeli officials that did not actually reflect the actual lot of the terrible mistakes, and certainly what I have considered, god-awful rhetoric by some
1:28.4	Israeli officials that did not actually reflect the actual conduct of the war in Gaza should not
1:32.8	have happened. And again, all that is besides the moral questions, which I think are important
1:38.2	and valuable. So I have had a lot of concerns about where this war is going and whether the
1:43.4	people in charge know what they're doing.
1:45.6	And luckily, fresh off of the Triggerometry podcast, so that's exactly where you should consider this podcast, right up there with them.
1:55.7	I have managed to get John Spencer to come back and to try and answer some of those questions and
	...

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