There are many things that I am not. One of the things that I am not is a professional military strategist. Come to think of it, I am not even an amateur military strategist. But I do have a degree of common sense.

The figures I have seen show that over the last five days, 1200 Israelis have been killed, thousands of others injured, and about 150 taken hostage. Since then, Israel has pounded – and continues to pound – Gaza from the air, and has stopped any deliveries of water, electricity or anything else into Gaza. At this point, it also appears that the death and injury totals in Gaza have exceeded those in Israel.

It has been reported that Israel now has 300,000 troops at or near the Gaza border and that a house to house land invasion is coming soon. My advice is to forget about any land invasion at this time.

Why? Because Israel already has 1200 dead and thousands more injured. I would assume that any land attack would most likely lead to the death of the hostages, and to the death and serious injuries of hundreds or thousands more Israeli soldiers. And to what end?

Now, because I am not a military strategist, I have no idea what is in the minds of Israel’s military leaders. They may know something that I don’t know (gee, I hope so), but what could it be that makes it worth putting so many more Israeli lives at risk? What do they hope to accomplish?

During the Vietnam War, the Vietcong had an entire network of tunnels throughout the country. A friend of mine who was an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army learned, decades after he was stationed in rural Vietnam at an American base dedicated to routing out the Vietcong, that the very Vietcong he was trying to find were, in fact, right under him in a group of tunnels, where they were listening to everything the Americans were saying. Who knew?

We are told that Hamas has built tunnels under much of Gaza, and especially under Gaza City. We are told that hostages may have been hidden throughout the Strip in various of those tunnels. If the hostages are hidden away in the tunnels, shouldn’t you assume that many Hamas leaders would be similarly out of sight in these tunnels? And if both the hostages and Hamas personnel are beneath the streets, you can quickly see that house to house combat won’t take you where you need to go. You need to go into the deep tunnels – and how do you do that? And do you really want your army in deep tunnels that are unknown to you, but perfectly known to your enemy? So why wouldn’t you think that Israeli soldiers entering tunnels would easily be ambushed and the hostages immediately murdered?

So what should the end game be in Gaza? No one seems interested in re-occupation. Starvation of 2,000,000 people from isolation doesn’t seem like the way to go. And you have 150 hostages to worry about.

Can the Gaza problem be solved militarily, or does it have to solved politically? And, if you need to solve it politically, how do you do that? How, as some Israeli officials have said, do you “destroy Hamas”? First, apparently some of the top Hamas officials aren’t in Gaza now, but are in places like Doha and Beirut. Is Israel going after them there? Second, even if these leaders could be neutralized, aren’t there people in Gaza ready to replace them?

In World War II, Germany’s Nazi government was ended when they admitted defeat and gave up. I don’t see Hamas doing that, do you? And, after they gave up, there was another group of Germans ready to form a new government on totally different terms. If that group exists in Gaza, I haven’t heard of them. So barring military occupation (whether by Israel or by some sort of coalition), how would you bring about a change of government? And especially, how could you bring about a change to a government which would be willing to work out a peace with Israel? Of course, one possibility would be to turn Gaza over to the Palestinian Authority, and unite its government with the West Bank government. But, in the opinion of almost everyone, the PA is very unpopular in the West Bank. And who is more popular in the West Bank? You guessed it – Hamas.

So, everything is beyond complicated. And the instability of the Israeli government makes things even harder. Yes, there has been an announcement of a limited “unity government”, but “unity” does not mean “unified”; it just means that additional voices have been added to the cacophony of an already motley crew.

So what do you think should happen next. Are any of you a military strategist? I didn’t think so.