An Israeli military analyst said that there are reasons that prevent the army from leveling Gaza to the ground through aerial bombardment, the most important of which is its urgent need for intelligence information in addition to other difficulties.
In an article published by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth – yesterday, Thursday – Yoav Zeitoun enumerated five reasons that he said prevented the question from being achieved: “Why is the Gaza Strip not leveled from the ground from the air instead of exposing the army’s infantry fighters to danger during battles in the narrow streets?”
According to Zaitoun, this question arose the day after the Israeli army announced – in two separate statements – the killing of 10 soldiers, including 6 officers, in battles in the northern Gaza Strip.
The day before yesterday, the occupation army allowed the publication of the names of 9 officers and soldiers from the Golani Brigade – which is considered the elite brigade in the army – who were killed in an ambush set up by the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military arm of the Hamas movement, in the Al-Shujaiya neighborhood (north of the Gaza Strip) during battles that took place on Tuesday afternoon.
The following are the reasons presented by the Israeli military analyst:
- The huge number of goals.
- The urgent need for intelligence information following the killing of many Israeli soldiers.
- The basic desire is to eliminate Hamas fighters.
- There are tens of thousands of Hamas fighters and large quantities of their weapons inside hundreds of hidden combat craters (referring to tunnels) in buildings in many neighborhoods of the Strip, making close combat between the army and Hamas members inevitable.
- The Israeli army realizes that it cannot attack every suspicious house or well in the Gaza Strip because of the army of “brutal terrorists” in these places (referring to Hamas fighters), as Zeitoun described it.
The same newspaper described the battle – which took place in the Shujaiya neighborhood between the Israeli army and Hamas fighters – as dangerous and lasted for more than two hours.
For its part, the Kan channel, affiliated with the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation, said in its commentary on the battle of Shuja’iya: We see that after yesterday’s battle, that neighborhood still represents a solid nucleus for the Hamas resistance force that still exists in the north of the Gaza Strip.
Since the beginning of the ground war in the Gaza Strip on October 27, the number of Israeli officers and soldiers killed has reached 116, in addition to 648 wounded, according to the occupation army’s data on its website.
Since last October 7, the Israeli army has been waging a devastating war on Gaza that, as of Thursday, has left 18,787 dead, 50,897 injured, most of them children and women, massive destruction of infrastructure, and an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe, according to Palestinian and UN sources.