TLDR: the only "simple" solution was not to go in and leave Hamas in power after 10/7.
Everything else was going to be a mess and if you want certainties, go look at other answers. There were never any clean solutions available (no, choosing the weeks after 10/7 to "see the light" and negotiate a hithertho avoided settlement with its very perpetrators is not a "solution" in a democracy. No government would survive that, let alone Israel's unstable coalition system).
First things first: the 10/7 attack was a set of large scale, deliberate, atrocities knowingly perpetrated by Hamas against civilians, at close range. With that out of the way, this answer focuses on analyzing Hamas tactics as an irregular, guerrilla, military force, albeit a ruthless one.
Second : let's establish what Gaza is not and what makes it unique.
this makes this question hard to answer, but should also instill a healthy skepticism towards cookie-cutter comparisons
Gaza is not a traditional guerrilla zone of action, with a local population facing off against a more industrialized, but remote, state's military that can leave. Unlike Vietnam or Afghanistan (80-89,01-21), the Israelis are stuck in the immediate vicinity and Hamas is on the record as wanting them out of Israel.
Gaza is not Fallujah or Mosul either in the sense that 2M people are concentrated in 345km2 and they have nowhere else, in their country, they can be evacuated to. This is exclusively an urban operation, with civilians stuck in place. Evacuating civilians is the first thing a military concerned about the civilian losses, whether for humanitarian or PR reasons, would aim to do. Makes the operation easier.
Gaza is not Ukraine wrt refugees. Candidate host countries, whether regional or Western, are understandably wary of letting masses of Gazans in. The same host countries may reasonably doubt that those refugees will ever be let back in by Israel and may not want to assist Israel in long term expulsions. Finally, Western countries, while not "helpful" to Israel by taking in refugees are not engaged in the same course of action as they are with Russia.
Gaza is not, and should not be expected to be, a clean and conventional war with deliberate separation of civilians from combatants. Wars run the gamut from Mosul's ISIS first herding civilians into buildings at gunpoint and then opening fire. To civilians tearfully waving off GIs on D-day to fight the Nazis far away. In between however, you have Mao's "the guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea". Guerrilla wars have always been about, if not human shields, at least blending in with the population. The many guerrilla wars lost by the West have all faced this pattern. Where exactly Hamas sits on that continuum is a matter of opinion but they would be foolish, as a guerrilla force, to engage in open battle with the IDF.
The IDF is not "the coalition" in Mosul. There are no convenient locals to bear the brunt of the dirty infantry work while plentiful smart ammo can be used by the militaries of thier allied industrial states. States that are not themselves at risk of any attacks for which they need to conserve said ammo. The timeline is also hyper-compressed. They are also not like NATO's enlisted professionals in Afghanistan, people who either come from traditional military families or from underprivileged background and whose losses are thus somewhat abstract for the larger Western civilian populations. No, the IDF are conscripts and reservists, in a small country where their losses will be keenly felt.
Unlike Northern Ireland or Spain, or even Peru with Shining Path, Gaza is not an area where the threat can be managed with a police, rather than military approach. Gaza is a separate "country", under the control of Hamas. That its status as a country and the treatment of Gaza's residents by Israel is controversial (that's putting it lightly) at the best of times does not alter the 2 previous sentences.
So, what did Israel probably take inspiration from?
Grozny
Grozny 1, 94-95 is justly infamous for things a competent military should not do. Russia split up its forces, was overconfident and left their tanks to operate on their own. It was a bloodbath and it is clear the IDF is not operating their armor in the same way.
Grozny 2, 99-00 involved Russia basically leveling the city at a distance with artillery. Gaza looks disturbingly similar.
In the same vein, the 2006 Lebanon War showed the vulnerabilities of IDF armor and Israel is clearly taking no chances.
Mosul 2016-2017
First let's start out with a casualty screenshot lifted from wikipedia.
This was a long planned assault, against a city where ISIS presumably didn't get much goodwill from the population it terrorized. The coalition could be expected to be generally benevolent towards Mosul's residents and great care was taken to maximize the amount of people that could be coaxed out of the city in advance.
sidebar - civilian casualties
Since we are on that subject, and since it would be a grave omission not to mention the contentious subject of IDF restraint wrt civilian lives and protected areas like hospitals and schools...
Denying food and life necessities to civilians is against the Geneva conventions. That it would greatly facilitate operations against enemies that could not commandeer some of those supplies does not change that fact.
Claims about IDF behavior run from the pure evil end of the spectrum: "genocide!" to the pure good : "the IDF is more careful than any army in the world wrt civilians", as a commenter once claimed here.
The subject is certainly contentious and can't be just waved away.
Israel’s military campaign in Gaza is among the most destructive in history, experts say
In just over two months, the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria's Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine's Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. It has killed more civilians than the U.S.-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against the Islamic State group.
My opinion is that I have no real way to know. The IDF is operating under extremely challenging and fluid conditions, where false flags, fake surrenders, un-uniformed enemies and suicide bombs are probably common occurrences. We can certainly expect them to privilege long distance fires over taking direct infantry casualties. Are these casualty counts reflective of deliberate neglect for civilian welfare? Or the result of the afore-mentioned unique challenges that mean that combat operations will take place in crowded areas?
The IDF, while quite possibly not exercising sufficient oversight on revengeful field units and while also quite possibly too accepting of "collateral damage" also has a vested interest in keeping Israel looking clean enough to finish the Gaza operation on its own terms.
For Hamas it seems clear that defeating the IDF in the field is not feasible. Rather, their chief hope is that the IDF will be called off, as it has in the past, due to international revulsion at civilian losses. If you accept Hamas as a ruthless and competent, adversary they quite possibly don't want to minimize civilian casualties.
If you take any one unit from either side, it would probably know of some alleged war crimes from the other side, as well as possibly some from its own personnel. What it would not know about would be possible war crimes from its own side in other units.
At the end of the day, everyone very opinionated about who is in the wrong vs who in the good this has my bullshit meter blinking red. The only thing we know for sure is a lot of people are dying.
NATO's example.
In a guerrilla situation, everyone you kill has a cousin or brother that you risk will join the guerrillas when you kill them. So you want to kill whom you need to, but every death also carries a cost to your goal of pacifying the overall population. You may save a soldier's life today, by bombing an apartment block with a sniper in it. But if your soldiers are still getting shot from the surrounding blocks 10 years later, the calculus is less obvious than it seems at first.
So, as stated in another answer, the IDF might be better off to take the, relative, restraint of NATO forces in Afghanistan as an example. Rather than the model displayed in Afghanistan 80-89 or in a certain "special military operation". However, bear in mind that the average Gazan is certainly more hostile towards the IDF than the average Afghan was towards NATO.
Back to Mosul
Mosul is about the closest equivalent we'll find to Gaza. There were a lot of "could have done better" is the post-action assessments of civilian losses. Flip side: the tactics used by ISIS also underscore why it is easy to assume negligence when civilians are killed, if you don't know the specifics (no, I am not claiming to know Hamas behaves same way towards Gazans).
I found an interesting passage researching this answer in Five Operational Lessons from the Battle for Mosul.
It's worth quoting in its entirety because of the last paragraph. Gazan civilians have been under Hamas rule for almost 20 years and, unlike Mosul residents' attitude towards other Iraqis, additionally have very valid reasons to dislike Israel. Their collaboration can certainly be coerced or they can be outright sympathetic. They are still civilians, until they take up arms.
IS used Mosul’s civilians to extend its operational reach—both in duration and distance. In 2014, IS seized Mosul and large portions of Iraq using a small military force enabled by population support. Sympathetic individuals, Baath-affiliated groups, and captured government facilities provided information, sustainment, and even combat power to allow the IS attack to seize and then consolidate gains further and faster than anyone anticipated.57 During the two years IS occupied Mosul, it invested significant resources and manpower to control the population’s attitudes, beliefs, and actions through a combination of intimidation and incentives because IS would need population support to sustain its defense of Mosul.
When the coalition attacked in strength, IS’s regular military force consisted almost entirely of light infantry maneuver and short-range fires capabilities. All other warfighting functions were performed by civilians—local and foreign—contributing population support within Mosul’s DUE.58 Mission command was facilitated by civilian couriers who provided assured communications. Intelligence came from civilian human and open-source intelligence analysis. Civilians dug communications tunnels and trenches, drove bulldozers to build berms, and served as mobile protection platforms to deter coalition strikes. Civilian households distributed all classes of supply to small units and provided medical support, and civilian labor manufactured weapons including precision UAS-IEDs, vehicle-borne IEDs, and suicide vest IEDs from commercial off-the-shelf components.
Exit interviews with refugees indicate that much of this population support may have been involuntary, yet their physical contribution to IS’s war effort was critical to the duration and effectiveness of IS’s operational reach. IS harnessed the hundreds of thousands of civilians in Mosul’s economic footprint to produce and distribute supplies with minimal manpower, providing an extremely favorable tooth-to-tail ratio that allowed them to project more combat power further than a similar conventionally organized and sustained force. On the opposite side, the same civilian population did comparatively little to enhance coalition operations. Once liberated by the legitimate government, civilians escaped to safety and the coalition expended resources and combat power to secure and sustain the civilians: soldiers distributed supplies, provided medical care, and constructed shelters, adding to a net reduction in coalition operational reach.
What Israel could take as inspiration in the future
Northern Ireland
Concrete Hell: Urban Warfare From Stalingrad to Iraq unexpectedly covered The Troubles in Northern Ireland, which the author considered relevant to discussing urban warfare.
What he did not cover, but is also relevant is how the Good Friday Agreements managed to stop the conflict after the military component of the insurgency had been contained (with the help of some distinctly terrorist-ey behavior from pro-UK loyalists). The UK had a strict policy of not negotiating with terrorists, yet peace quickly took hold once they did.
Yom Kippur 1973
Paradoxically, not a few historians credit the gain in prestige by the Egyptians from their much better performance at the outset of the conflict to allowing them the confidence - with considerable cajoling, prodding and bribery - to engage in a peace process with Israel.
By restoring pride to Egypt and a sense of proportion to Israel, it opened the way to the Camp David peace agreement in 1979. Fifteen years later, Israel signed a peace agreement with Jordan. In the ensuing years, the Jewish state would weave discreet economic and political ties with other Arab countries, from Morocco to the Gulf states, as demonization [of Israel by the Arab states] began to give way to realpolitik.
If Israel does manage to remove Hamas from power, it should look at those as examples it could follow and enter genuine negotiations from a position of strength. And so should the Palestinians.
