or even when Montgomery & Patton took on Rommel's Tanks in North Africa.
Big armies don't meet up on empty swaths of land to duke it out mano a mano anymore. Soldiers don't wear uniforms with insignias showing their rank, and if captured may have a name to give out under interrogation, but probably no rank and serial number on a dogtag.
Armies of people in places that are defacto occupied and controlled by another state are like the French Resistance fighters during WWII. They are made up of the people who live in those places, and those people include men, women and children. Regardless of age or gender, just about anyone above the age of 8 or so is enlisted in the fight against oppression. Boys particularly by the age of 12 are already carrying a rifle, and all those clothes Muslim girls wear can hide a whole heck of a lot of C-4. The battlefields aren't open farmland or desert sands, they're not even forests and jungles. They are cities, towns and villages where people live, at least until the Death from Above comes raining down on them.
For the Israelis, or the FSoA or any state wishing to take populated places under their military control, they either have to go in and do house-to-house searches with commandos, or they have to bomb them into submission. The first method takes a lot of soldiers and they suffer a lot of casualties, if they are even able to accomplish the task. Method 2 takes few soldiers, incurs nearly zero of their own casualties and is pretty effective as long as they kill everybody in the village. "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." As of yet, there are no bombs smart enough to just kill the adults and leave the children standing. Perhaps AI will fix this problem.
The other method less viually arresting but probably even more effective is another the Israelis are using, shutting off the water and power to the city. This creates the "Humanitarian Crisis", forcing everyone to leave the place and be herded into refugee camps, where the oppressor can pick out all the men and label them as terrorists. So they don't leave, and neither do their families. Then the Red Cross tries to get bottled water and food into the war zone.
Bottom line here, Israel wants this territory. Unlike many places, their birthrate is actually above replacement. That means the Palestinians living there gotta go. All of them. Men, Women & Children. One way or the other.
RE