Retired Israeli general Giora Eiland believes Israel faces months of fighting in Gaza unless Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu uses the chance offered by the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar to end the war.
Since Sinwar’s death this month, Eiland has been one of a chorus of former senior army officers questioning the government’s strategy in Gaza, where earlier this month troops went back into areas of the north that had already been cleared at least twice before.
For the past three weeks, Israeli troops have been operating around Jabalia, in northern Gaza, the third time they have returned to the town and its historic refugee camp since the beginning of the war in October 2023.
Instead of the Israeli military’s preferred approach of quick decisive actions, many former security officials say the army risks being bogged down in an open-ended campaign requiring a permanent troop presence.
The Israeli government is acting in total opposition to Israel’s security concept,” Yom-Tov Samia, former head of the military’s Southern Command, told Kan public radio.
Part of the operation has involved evacuating thousands of people from the area in an effort to separate civilians from Hamas fighters.
The military says it has moved around 45,000 civilians from the area around Jabalia and killed hundreds of militants during the operation. But it has been heavily criticised for the large number of civilian casualties also reported, and faced widespread calls to get more aid supplies in to alleviate a humanitarian crisis in the area.
Eiland, a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, was the lead author of a much-discussed proposal dubbed “the generals’ plan” that would see Israel rapidly clear northern Gaza of civilians before starving out surviving Hamas fighters by cutting off their water and food supplies.
The Israeli moves this month have aroused Palestinian accusations that the military has embraced Eiland’s plan, which he envisaged as a short-term measure to take on Hamas in the north but which Palestinians see as aimed at clearing the area permanently to create a buffer zone for the military after the war.
From the outset of the war, Netanyahu declared Israel would get hostages home and dismantle Hamas as a military and governing force, and did not intend to stay in Gaza.
But his government never articulated a clear policy for the aftermath of the campaign, launched following the attack on Oct. 7, 2023 on southern Israeli communities by Hamas gunmen who killed some 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages.
The Israeli onslaught has killed nearly 43,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, and the enclave has been largely reduced to a wasteland that will require billions of dollars in international assistance to rebuild.
REUTERS
