OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)
Israeli army figures have expressed their frustration with the military operations in the Gaza Strip, stressing that the Hamas Movement is able to regain its strength.
“There is something frustrating in all these operations. This is like a Sisyphus complex that pushes a rock to the top of the mountain and then it rolls back down,” Giora Eiland, a retired major general, told Israel’s Channel 13.
“Hamas’s ability to rise again is high. After our withdrawal from a neighborhood for several days or week, they (Hamas’s fighters) resume their activity in that area anew,” he said.
Another retired officer called Israel Ziv, former head of the army’s operations directorate, also criticized the performance of the Israeli army in Gaza. “There is no one major victory and there is still no military decisiveness. Rafah will join the list of those areas, such as Shuja’iya and other neighborhoods, where the army had to enter once again to consolidate its achievements.”
“We thought that Rafah, as a lever of pressure, would lead to a deal to release the captives, but the military pressure we had planned did not bring about a deal, at least not yet,” Ziv told Israel’s Channel 12.
He pointed out that Israel is at a standstill in Gaza while there is a major escalation in the north that could lead to war, warning that Hezbollah’s missiles and projectiles pose a real threat to Israel and that the Iranians, the group’s ally, would not stand idly by.
For his part, lieutenant colonel Ivri Elbaz, commander of the Israeli 12th Brigade, said on Saturday that dismantling Hamas’s military capabilities in the southern Gaza city of Rafah could take at least two more years, Al-Jazeera satellite channel reported.
Elbaz reportedly emphasized the complexity of the mission to eliminate the Hamas military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, describing it as challenging and requiring sustained military pressure over time.
He noted that Hamas conducts guerrilla warfare in Rafah through decentralized groups, which adds to the difficulty of the operations.
On June 19, Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari said in an interview with Israel’s Channel 13 that “whoever thinks it is possible to destroy Hamas is mistaken.”
Recently, Israeli agriculture minister Avi Dichter also acknowledged that completely neutralizing Hamas’s control over Gaza remains a distant objective.
