Israeli officials admitted this Tuesday that Tel Aviv is many months away for achieving the main goal of the Gaza war, which is destroying Hamas.
As the war between Hamas and Israel is still ongoing after nearly four months, Israeli military intelligence officer are now estimating that Tel Aviv still has a long way ahead to achieve its stated goal of totally dismantling and destroying Hamas, which can take several more months.
Addressing this very concern of Israel, Bloomberg said in a report on this Tuesday that according to the words of Israeli intelligence officers, “Israel is still many months away from achieving its goals, which include capturing or destroying munitions and weapons, and rendering Hamas military bases and tunnels inoperative,” adding that accomplishing such goals “will take all of 2024 — and perhaps longer.”
So far, for example, Israel has been able to destroy only 20% of Hamas underground tunnels in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war with Hamas on October 7. This is while flooding Hamas tunnels has been one of the most prominent and most urgent goals of the Israeli military.
This failure has led the Israeli decision-makers to add even more fuel to the already huge fire of the war and decide to deploy more troops to the Palestinian lands.
According to the words of Yaakov Amidror, Israel’s former national security adviser, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is now planning to deploy troops into Gaza for quick raids over the coming months. “The whole of the coming year will be dedicated to low-intensity cleaning out of Gaza, and if it takes another six months into 2025, we can do it,” Amidror said.
All these official statements from Israeli officials as well as the recent developments in the IDF’s war strategies show one thing very clearly that Israel has no plan to accept any peace proposal, be it from Egypt, the UK, or any other country in the world.
Israel’s thrust for continuing the war became even more apparent when the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed at a press conference this Saturday that he plans to roughly double Israel’s defense budget this year, saying it will stay high for decades.
Is Israel lying about war figures?
While every fact on the ground suggests that Israel is telling the truth about admitting its failure in the war so far, it has not always been so honest, especially when it comes to war figures. For instance, Israeli official sources claim that since October 7 up until this week, the IDF has killed 9,000 Hamas fighters. This figure, however, seems to be an overestimate.
On the other hand, figures from the Gaza Health Ministry say that exactly during the same time period, more than 26,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli bombing, but that the figure includes some 18,000 women and children and 8,000 adult males.
Considering the fact that both the US and Israeli intelligence have acknowledged the Gaza Health Ministry numbers are likely accurate, it turns out that Israeli figures are false because if the count of 9,000 Hamas fighters was correct, this would be larger than all the adult males killed in Palestine according to the Health Ministry numbers.
Israeli military officials have also acknowledged that 220 of the IDF soldiers have been killed during the ground campaign in Gaza, but even this number has been reported by many high-profile media to be underestimated, and that the number is much higher.
