After over three weeks of heavy air strikes, Israeli ground forces have entered Gaza. Observers of Israel’s military strategy, including former commanders and combat veterans, say the approach taken is unlike previous assaults on Gaza, in 2008, 2014 and 2021.

Backed by helicopters and drones, dozens of tanks and armoured personnel carriers have pushed into the semi-rural area to the north of Gaza City but have proceeded slowly.

“It’s inch by inch, metre by metre, trying to avoid casualties and trying to kill as much as possible Hamas terrorists,” Amos Yadlin, former chief of Israel's military intelligence, told reporters.

The slow attack was aimed at securing Israeli forces’ flanks and the army also hoped they could bait Hamas militants to come out of tunnels or denser urban areas and engage Israeli forces in open areas where they could be more easily killed, said another former senior Israel military commander, who declined to be named.

Israeli forces have not yet confronted Hamas’ deep network of tunnels head-on, but have engaged with militants at entrances to the vast underground network.

On Oct. 29, the Israeli military said its forces operating adjacent to the Erez crossing confronted and killed “a number of terrorists exiting the shaft of a tunnel in the Gaza Strip”.

Security sources describe Gaza’s tunnel network as an underground city which includes rocket launching sites, command centres and attack paths targeting Israel forces.

Omri Attar, a reserve major in a special operations brigade, said ground troops were also trained to locate and seal off the openings to tunnels and other special units within the Combat Engineering Corps would deal with any fighting inside the tunnels.

Ben Milch, who was an Israeli commander in 2014 with the Combat Engineering Corps and tasked with destroying tunnels, said their mission at that time was not to go more than two kilometres into the network.

Although the military has refused to say exactly where troops are operating, images on social media appear to show Israeli tanks on the road south of Gaza City. This line may threaten Salah Ad Deen Road, the main transport artery that runs the length of the Gaza Strip. Cutting it off would effectively split Gaza in two and isolate Gaza City from the south.

The tanks met resistance on the road, according to militants and residents. The Israeli military said it would not detail the positions of their forces.

The Israeli Prime Minister on Saturday vowed to “destroy the enemy above ground and below ground” but stopped short of calling the ground incursion a full scale invasion.

In the three weeks since Hamas killed 1,400 people and took more than 200 hostages during an attack on Israel, retaliatory air strikes have pulverized large swathes of Gaza, killing more than 8,000 people including more than 3,000 children, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, and cutting off most supplies of food, medicine and fuel.

The aerial bombardment of Gaza, which has caused extensive damage across the enclave, has continued with no signs of stopping.

Those bombardments and initial actions by the special forces units followed by broader incursions by ground troops in the past two days are aimed at keeping up the pressure on Hamas, while also keeping the door open for a deal over the hostages held by Hamas.

“The offensive activity will continue with determination and intensify according to the phases of the war and its goals,” Israeli military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told a regular briefing on Monday.