Israel’s leadership is increasingly divided over how best to win the country’s devastating war against Hamas — less than a week after marking the conflict’s 100th day of fighting.
During a TV interview Thursday, Gadi Eisenkot, a senior Israeli war cabinet minister and former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, said a ceasefire was the only way to ensure the safe release of about 130 hostages who remain in the clutches of the terror group.
“The hostages will only come back to life if there is an agreement linked to a significant pause in the fighting,” Eisenkot said on “Uvda,” an investigative reporting program on Israel’s Channel 12, in his first public statement since war broke out in the region Oct. 7 after a surprise attack brutal Hamas on Israel.
Eisenkot, whose own 25-year-old son was killed fighting Hamas in Gaza in December, made his remarks hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected White House calls to ease the country’s punishing military campaign that has been wasteful. this region.
The war is believed to have claimed the lives of more than 1,200 Israelis and 25,000 Palestinians, according to Israeli officials and health authorities linked to Hamas.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has faced growing calls to scale back his country’s war with Hamas. ABIR SULTAN/POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
“We will not be satisfied with an absolute victory,” Netanyahu emphatically declared during a nationally televised press conference on Thursday.
Netanyahu and Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant have insisted that the country’s war effort will continue until the Islamic militant group suffers a crushing defeat and that the only way to free the remaining hostages is through military force.
During the same speech, Netanyahu flatly rejected renewed calls by the US to consider the creation of a Palestinian state, arguing that such an arrangement would provide new territory from which future attacks on Israel could be launched.
Netanyahu argued that the only way to free the roughly 130 hostages still in Gaza was through military force, which Israel’s war cabinet member Gadi Eisenkot dismissed as “spreading illusions.” ABIR SULTAN/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock Gadi Eisenkot, a senior Israeli war cabinet minister and former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, said a ceasefire was the only way to ensure the safe release of the 130 hostages still being held by Hamas. Getty Images
Israel “must have security control over the entire region west of the Jordan River,” the prime minister said, adding, “That clashes with the idea of sovereignty. What can we do?
“I told this truth to our American friends, and I stopped trying to force us to a reality that would harm the state of Israel,” he said.
Appearing to be in direct opposition to Netanyahu, Eisenkot said any claim that freeing the hostages could be achieved without a ceasefire was “to spread an illusion.”
He also offered a sharp critique of how the war had been fought, saying a strategic plan to secure victory should have been a greater priority from the start.
A man in Gaza mourns the death of a loved one killed in an airstrike in Rafah. Getty Images
He even questioned whether Israel’s efforts to defeat the terrorist group were successful as claimed by others including Netanyahu, saying, “we have not yet achieved a strategic achievement, or rather only partially,” he said. “We did not topple Hamas.”
Israel began its extended military campaign against Hamas after the terrorist group launched a large-scale surprise missile attack on the country on October 7 in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed.
Hamas also seized about 240 hostages in the attack, including women and children, of whom 105 were released during a multi-day ceasefire agreement last November.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
