Israel-Hamas war: hard experience says a land war won't go well – and faltering international support suggests the world knows it

For the past four decades, Israel’s experience of fighting paramilitary militias has been grim.

Its last major operation was in southern Lebanon, which started with Operation Peace for Galilee in 1982. While initially successful, the subsequent occupation of southern Lebanon led directly to the rise of the Hezbollah Shia militias, persistent losses for the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), a withdrawal to a nine-mile security zone within three years and from Lebanon as a whole in 2000.

In 2006 Israeli military units went back into Lebanon to counter Hezbollah rockets but ended with exhausted troops withdrawing in some disarray and the IDF resorting to a massive air war that did huge damage to the infrastructure of much of the country.