It is quite inconceivable that even yesterday, more than one day after the launching of the surprise murderous and barbaric attack by the Hamas savages, the IDF and the security forces have not yet succeeded in gaining full control of the area under attack inside Israel's terrain, and the fighting continued at a number of locations throughout the day.
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Due to the tremendous chaos, there is still no clear picture of the overall situation even for the army's top brass, but it is as plain as day that hundreds of civilians were massacred and slaughtered, and dozens of soldiers, commanders, including some senior officers, fell in combat. Having said that, the most shocking and heartbreaking issue is that dozens and dozens of men, women, children, the elderly, male and female soldiers were brutally abducted and dragged off into the heart of the Gaza Strip, without the IDF, in all its might, succeeding in foreseeing this, stopping this infiltration or overpowering the terrorists.
Numerous commissions of inquiry will be established and reams will surely be written about this horrendous fiasco, dealing with all aspects of the lack of any intelligence warning, the collapse of the conception and the untenable way in which the IDF Gaza Division's defensive array simply crumbled and disintegrated. Yet, there can be no doubt that these events, which the IDF insists on calling Operation "Swords of Iron", will have far-reaching ramifications.
Just as it took a long time for the chief of staff and the IDF senior command to grasp that they were in the midst of an unprecedentedly severe incident when faced with the thousands of reservists who declared that they would refuse to turn up for reserve duty in light of the government's legislation, this time too, the IDF top brass failed to comprehend the enormity of the incident, and the public still awaits an appropriately severe response.
We need a victory, not a "victory photo"
After the IDF began to recover from the original shock, it began to publish clips of buildings targeted during the hundreds of IAF strikes in the Gaza Strip, but the truth is that when there are hundreds of murdered and abducted Israeli civilians and soldiers, nobody is really interested in another Hamas target or empty HQ that has been hit by air strikes. As of yesterday, the objectives of the war that had been declared were still extremely vague. The IDF Spokesperson was asked what the objectives of the war are and his answer was that the policymakers would determine (and I stress, using the future tense) the objectives, and that in the meantime the key objective is to regain full control of the Gaza belt communities and to "exact a heavy price" from Hamas.
If the State of Israel desires to remain around in the long-term future then it can no longer make do with an extremely abstract and undefined objective as "exacting a heavy price from Hamas." As in all its past operations in the Gaza Strip too, the IDF has always bragged about the "heavy" price exacted from Hamas. And now we are no longer talking about an "operation" but a war. And this is not just any old war but a war to defend our home, and it is no exaggeration to even call it an existential war. As if Israel, which possesses the strongest army in the Middle East, fails to wield the full extent of its military might against the Gaza Strip immediately, then Hezbollah, Iran and the rest of our bitter enemies will waste no time in jumping on the bandwagon and exploiting this golden opportunity.
The only way to continue to survive in our rough neighborhood here in the Middle East is to erect a formidable "Iron Wall", as in the famous article written by the Revisionist leader Jabotinsky, and to show the murderous terrorist organization in Gaza that the "boss has gone mad". In view of this murderous assault, the policymakers must decide to immediately topple the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip and to remove all terrorists and weapons from it. In a war of life and death we no longer have the luxury of adhering to the familiar standards of past operations. On this occasion, we really cannot just make do with a "victory photo" for the sake of public relations, as nothing will be able to compare with the horrific opening blow delivered by Hamas. There is no choice, this time, we need nothing less than a decisive victory that cannot be disputed, one that will be remembered for generations to come. If we genuinely desire to survive then this is genuinely the only viable option.
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