Posted on 04/16/25
| News Source: JPost
The IDF said on Wednesday that there is no timeline for concluding the Israel-Hamas War.
Pressed over and over again, IDF sources said their focus was to pressure Hamas into a hostage deal and to try to defeat it completely, but provided no concrete method or time frame for achieving this.
They also didn’t explain why the current renewed invasion would eliminate the terror group after nearly 18 months of fighting have not.
All questions about whether Israel needs a permanent security perimeter, who will run Gaza instead of Hamas, and how diplomacy will ensure that military achievements are held in the long term, were deferred to the political echelon, when it is well-known that currently the government has no operative plan.
Although the government still talks about Trump’s plan of expelling all two million-plus Palestinians from Gaza, there has been no substantive progress (though many statistically small efforts are underway) for three months – either because most Palestinians do not want to leave or because no country will take them in large numbers.
IDF troops operating in the Gaza Strip, October 6, 2024. (credit: IDF SPOKESPERSON UNIT)
Rather, the military takes pride in the fact that during the current renewed invasion, Hamas police could not even try to stop the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing from northern to southern Gaza, which they had previously tried.
The IDF said that Hamas’s police’s failure stems from the terror group’s loss of legitimacy now that civilians have seen that it couldn’t prevent the IDF from destroying much of Gaza, nor from reactivating the war.
Beyond that global trend, the military said on Wednesday it has attacked 1,200 targets and killed 350 Hamas fighters since renewed hostilities on March 18-19, numbers that are up from 1,000 targets and 300 fighters last week.
Further, the IDF said that it has killed 40 new top- and mid-level commanders, which in places like Shejaia means that the battalion “commander” there is now the fifth man in that position since the war started.
It revealed that prior Shejaia commanders were killed in early and mid-December 2023, on March 18 of this year, and this past Sunday.
According to the IDF, even if Hamas replaces all of its commanders, its quality has dropped dramatically and is partially why the terror group has failed to resist the IDF at all over the past month.