The Israeli media has focused its discussions in the last few hours on the failure of the Israeli army’s operations on the Philadelphi corridor to recover the detainees, and on the fate of the prisoner exchange deal.
Kan 13 military affairs analyst Alon Ben David said the Israeli army refutes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claims that the Philadelphi Corridor is the place from which weapons and ammunition flow to the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas).
The army says it has discovered 9 tunnels crossing the border from the Gaza Strip into Egypt. These tunnels were closed on the Egyptian side months and years ago, which means that there was practically no flow of weapons and combat equipment through the Philadelphi Corridor.
Regarding the Israeli army’s announcement that it had defeated the Rafah Brigade, Ronen Manelis, the former spokesman for the Israeli army, mocked this announcement and wondered how it could have been defeated without the army forces carrying out operations in most of the area under the Rafah Brigade, noting that the army only operated in the Tel al-Sultan neighborhood and the Philadelphi axis.
In a discussion on Channel 12, Manelis stressed that the Rafah Brigade was not defeated, and said, “If it was really defeated, where are the kidnapped people being held there?” referring to the Israeli prisoners in Gaza.
In the context of the criticism directed by former security officials at Netanyahu due to the Gaza war, Moshe Ya’alon, the former Minister of Defense and Chief of Staff, said, “Israel is a small country and we cannot eliminate its Arab, Iranian and other enemies.”
He called for the departure of Netanyahu’s government, saying, “This government must disappear from existence as quickly as possible,” in order to save the State of Israel from “the destruction of the Third Temple.”
Changing the goals of the war
As for Amos Yadlin, the former head of the Military Intelligence Division, he called for changing the objectives of the war if a deal could not be reached, and he believed that “the war that Israel is being dragged into is more dangerous in the north, where Iran, Syria and Yemen are.”
During a discussion session on Channel 12, he called on the government to hold a meeting to change the goals of the war, saying, “It is not logical that Hezbollah has forced Israeli citizens to flee for 11 months.”
Regarding what Channel 11 described as the dramatic plan that the army is studying in an attempt to defeat Hamas, the political affairs correspondent for the same channel, Michael Shems, confirmed that at the beginning of this month, Major General (res.) Giora Eiland, former head of the army’s operations division, presented a plan that, in his opinion, would lead to victory over Hamas.
He pointed out that there are leaders in the army who are considering adopting this plan in its entirety or in parts, and “if it is approved, hundreds of thousands of Gazans will be forced to evacuate their homes in the northern Gaza Strip, which will be turned into a closed military zone.”