Senior US officials have said that Israel has reached to the end line of the war in Gaza, and that they can never defeat Hamas.
New York Times reported this Thursday, citing senior US officials, that Israel has achieved all that it can militarily in Gaza, and continuing the war will never brig Israel victory over Hamas.
“With the Biden administration racing to get cease-fire negotiations back on track, a growing number of national security officials across the government said that the Israeli military had severely set back Hamas but would never be able to completely eliminate the group,” the report said, adding that “continued bombings are only increasing risks to civilians while the possibility of further weakening Hamas has diminished.”
Asserting that the hostage crisis is still the biggest challenge for Israel, the report also noted that according to US and Israeli officials, “Israel’s military operation has done far more damage against Hamas than U.S. officials had predicted when the war began in October. The Israeli military also asserted that it had eliminated half the leadership of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, including the top leaders Muhammad Deif and Marwan Issa.”
“But one of Israel’s biggest remaining goals — the return of the roughly 115 living and dead hostages still held in Gaza after being seized in the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks — cannot be achieved militarily,” the report said.
Bibi still believes in war!
Nearly a month ago before this report was published, the former head of US CENTCOM, Joseph L Votel expressed the same concern and noted that Hamas “has been diminished, but the goal of releasing Israel’s captives in Gaza is impossible through war and can only happen through ceasefire and exchange negotiations.”
While every voice in and out of Israel now admit that the only way to release Israeli hostages is through dialogue, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been consistently obstructing the negotiations in one way or another during recent months, claiming that Israel can completely destroy Hamas and until the, the war should go on.
“Israel’s conditions for ending the war have not changed: the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, the freeing of all hostages and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel. The notion that Israel will agree to a permanent ceasefire before these conditions are fulfilled is a non-starter,” Netanyahu said during the Jewish Shabbat speech in Tel Aviv in early June.
The war has only made Israel less safe!
Notwithstanding what Netanyahu aims to achieve through continuing the war in Gaza, Israeli officials say that the war has only made Israel more unsafe and has ironically led to an unprecedented increase in attacks against Israel by resistance groups.
A new report by Israel’s channel 12 explains tis very fact and says that “between 7 October and the current month (August), 338 resistance operations were carried out against Israelis. this marks an 82 percent surge compared to 2022 and around a nine percent jump since last year.”
