ABC News quoted senior Israeli military officials as saying that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reluctance to sign a ceasefire agreement with the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) is pushing Israel into a potentially disastrous war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, in addition to the fact that Israel is stuck in Gaza and is losing the war, deterrence and prisoners.
Officials explained that Netanyahu is deliberately trying to undermine negotiations to release the remaining Israeli prisoners held by Hamas by insisting that the Philadelphi Corridor remain under Israeli control.
They added that Israel is stuck in Gaza and unable to achieve one of the main objectives of the war, noting that “if the Philadelphi Corridor is so important, why did we wait 8 months since the start of the war to seize it?!”
ABC quoted Israeli officials as saying, “We are concerned that Hezbollah’s arsenal, estimated at more than 100,000 rockets and missiles, could cause widespread damage throughout Israel.”
A senior Israeli official also said that the so-called Israeli hawks who are calling for war with Hezbollah do not realize how difficult it is for Israel to obtain the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) kits, which are needed to turn so-called “dumb” bombs into precision-guided weapons that use GPS coordinates to hit a target.
Israeli officials explained – according to the network – that Israel pledged to avenge the Houthis’ launch of a missile and is investigating how the Houthis were able to penetrate Israeli air defenses twice within two months, and they expected the Houthis to continue the attack regardless of the ceasefire by Hamas.
Confusion and exhaustion
For his part, former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said that Israel is struggling in a war of attrition and will not be able to win on 7 fronts, after Ya’alon had previously called on all former political and security leaders to formulate a unified demand calling for Netanyahu’s resignation and early elections.
In the middle of last month, the former head of the Operations Division in the Israeli occupation army, Major General Yisrael Ziv, said that Israel is stuck in the Gaza “swamp” and is bleeding and must get out of it as soon as possible, stressing that Netanyahu’s claims of remaining in the Philadelphi corridor are meaningless in light of the army not finding any active tunnels there.
Ziv explained in an article published on the Israeli Channel 12 website that “continuing the fighting without replacing the Hamas regime does not lead to any real results and costs soldiers their lives.”
Criticism and accusations are rising in Israel between the political and military levels, in light of repeated demonstrations by the families of prisoners demanding the conclusion of a prisoner exchange deal and attacking the government and its Prime Minister Netanyahu, who insists on what he calls achieving the goals of the war that has reached its 347th day, leaving tens of thousands of martyrs and wounded and a worsening famine looming over the besieged Strip.