Israeli military analyst: According to army estimates it will take 5 to 10 years to cleanse Hamas’ military infrastructure in Gaza
Israeli military analyst Yoav Zeitoun said that there are estimates in the army that clearing the Gaza Strip of Hamas’ military infrastructure will take 5 to 10 years of ground fighting.
The Israeli military analyst published a post on his official X account, in which he presented 9 points that shed light on the army’s estimates.
In the first point, he said that the civilian rule of Hamas must be replaced and not weakened according to the current government’s policy, which still feeds Hamas as an asset.
On the second point, the military analyst stressed that any other alternative means an eternal war on the ground in Gaza, ranging between chaos in the Strip and weak Hamas rule.
As for the third point, he stressed the necessity for these estimates to be consistent with the reality on the ground and not the deadly bomb that fell in Jabaliya and killed Battalion 401 in a medium-sized area, where the Israeli army operated on the ground twice in a maneuver in December 2023 and in May 2024.
Fourth, the anti-tank missile that was fired two weeks ago in the northern Gaza Strip, where Hamas fighters are hiding in an undiscovered tunnel in the area that the Israeli army has already plowed and is not far from the border.
In the fifth point, according to an Israeli officers in Jabaliya, “We found combat tunnels that we destroyed and Hamas partially restored them”.
“There are those in the Israeli army who are upset by the cowardice and procrastination of the political level,” Zeitoun adds, quoting the officers.
“Let them establish settlements in Gaza, establish a military government, let them bring in another Palestinian government, start with something at the present time that doesn’t translate any achievement of the Israeli army in the field into a strategy or any political action”.
In his sixth point, he referred to the largest area in the cities of the Gaza Strip, Khan Yunis, through which the Israeli army has not passed for more than 6 months.
He asked (point 7) what awaits the soldiers who will storm it again one day, and then when they raid it again and again next year and the year after that?
In the context (point 8), he pointed out that there are one and a half million displaced people in Khan Yunis and its suburbs, and in Jabaliya there are thousands of other Gaza residents who won’t leave this time, some under pressure from Hamas and others because they are fed up, which leads to the continuation of military action for several months.
At the end of his blog post (Point 9), the military analyst stressed that the army realizes that it cannot harass the people of Gaza in this way for years.
He stressed that its necessary to take into account the scenarios of a popular uprising that will reach at some point the fixed battalions of the Israeli forces in the Netzarim Corridor and the Philadelphi Axis, noting that this happened twice in the distant past.
