Israeli writer: “Israel started the war while it was defeated...”

According to Israeli army data, thousands of Hamas members were eliminated in these areas, and thousands of them remained alive. This means that the moment the Israeli army leaves those areas, they will return to them and begin to restore their capabilities.

As the Israeli war against the Gaza Strip passed its hundredth day, a phase of free conclusions began based on pre-programmed ideas and ideology in most of the analyzes of Israeli political and security commentators, and at its core emerged the recognition of the intractability and even impossibility of eliminating the Palestinian resistance, primarily the Hamas movement. Most of them were preoccupied with explaining the Israeli government’s withdrawal, at the urging of its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, from making decisions regarding the political outcomes that the battles should lead to, towards insisting only on the continuation of the war.

According to what a former general indicated, this insistence, from a political standpoint, is the safest path for the current government coalition, and any deviation from it would threaten this coalition with a resounding fall and the end of Netanyahu’s era and perhaps the Israeli extreme right. According to this general, the former head of the Military Intelligence Division (Aman) and the current director general of the National Security Research Institute, Tamir Hayman, this path does not lead to any stable final situation, nor does it guarantee the achievement of the war goals that Israel aspires to, nor a radical change in National security balance.

Such certainty applies to some analyzes of Netanyahu’s mouthpiece newspaper, “Israel Hayom,” whose military analyst, Yoav Limor, wrote a text that could be considered parallel to the official Israeli narrative. He began by saying that from the point of view of the professional military analyst, it is necessary to pronounce the fact that Israel is still far away from achieving the goals it set for itself, and it is not clear whether it can achieve them in light of the new circumstances.

In his opinion, it is true that the Israeli army announced that it took control of the northern Gaza Strip, but what is gradually becoming clear is that the existing reality is more complex than what the military establishment is promoting. According to the Israeli army, thousands of Hamas members were eliminated in these areas, and thousands of them remained alive. This means that the moment the Israeli army leaves those areas, they will return to them and begin to restore their capabilities. The indication of this is that the threat in the northern Gaza Strip has not been removed, as was pledged when the war was declared.

The political and security leadership has made many promises since October 7, and is facing great difficulties in fulfilling them. Hamas is moving further and further away from defeat, and the return of the kidnapped persons detained in Gaza does not appear to be on the horizon, and there is no evidence that military pressure has advanced their cause, as political and military leaders claim. There is no alternative way for Israel to release the kidnapped people other than reaching an exchange deal that also includes a political settlement, for the first time in the history of such deals that were now being implemented without any political conditions. Limor asserted that Israel began the war with defeat, but despite that, it remained too boastful to the point of not admitting this at an early stage, which led to lowering expectations.

Regarding the question of defeat and victory, there are Israeli texts that are equal to, if not superior to, what was stated above, as in the text of the commentator in the newspaper “Yedioth Ahronoth”, Nahum Barnea, who affirmed that after a hundred days of failure and devastation, one should not escape from reality as it is: That Israel is the losing party. Likewise, historian Ofri Ilani wrote in the Haaretz newspaper, who saw that the failure of October 7 could lead Israel towards profound renewal and radical reforms, but this remains subject to an indispensable and unfulfilled condition, which is that Israel acknowledges that it has been defeated. It has not been achieved for several reasons, the first of which is that those responsible for the failure, led by Netanyahu, are still in power, and the second is that Israel has decided to wage a war with no end in sight. Instead of admitting failure, it was drawn into an aggression that did not limit itself to any limits and did not involve any self-restraint.