18 March 2024; MEMO: Israel has lost its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, a former Israeli military commander said yesterday.
“You can’t lie to many people for a long time,” Yitzhak Brick, a former major general, said in an article in Maariv newspaper, according to Anadolu.
“What is happening in the Gaza Strip and against Hezbollah in Lebanon will blow up in our faces sooner or later,” he warned.
Brick said the Israeli home front “is not prepared for a regional war, which will be thousands of times more difficult and serious than the war in the Gaza Strip.”
“Every day our soldiers are killed and seriously injured by traps and explosives when they enter booby-trapped homes without any inspection, and do not take appropriate measures before entering,” he said.
The former military commander criticised Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, saying he is “detached” from reality.
“He lost control of the ground a long time ago, but he started appointing colonels and lieutenant colonels in his likeness,” he said.
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“This is the most serious scandal since the establishment of the army,” he said. “We have already lost the war with Hamas, and we are also losing our allies in the world at a dizzying rate.”
Brick said if the political and military levels continue in this manner, “we will find ourselves in a much worse situation than before the attack on the Gaza Strip.”
Israel has said it refuses to halt its war on Gaza until the return of more than 130 prisoners of war held in Gaza and the complete destruction of Hamas.
“If we fail to return some of the abductees alive, this war will enter the public consciousness as the worst failure in Israel’s wars since the founding of the state, both from the terrible blow we suffered from Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023 and from the agonising failure in the fighting in the Gaza Strip,” Brick said.
Since the beginning of the ground attack on Gaza on 27 October, the Israeli occupation army has faced fierce resistance from Palestinian factions.
According to army data, 591 Israeli officers and soldiers have been killed since 7 October, including 249 since the ground invasion of Gaza, while 3,079 others had been wounded, but the Palestinian resistance has said “the number is much higher and the Israeli army is deliberately underreporting its losses.”
