adminA SENIOR army intelligence official has admitted that Israel underestimated the tenacity of Gaza militants and did not expect a 50-day conflict to last so long, but he insisted they were soundly beaten.
The conflict, which ended with a ceasefire last week, killed more than 2,100 Palestinians, as well as 66 soldiers and six civilians on the Israeli side, in the bloodiest battle between the Jewish state and Gaza militants for years.
“If you’d asked me two months ago, I wouldn’t assess that it’s going to take us 50 days,” the official told journalists in English at a briefing in Tel Aviv late yesterday.
“We thought it’s going to take them a shorter time to understand what happened, and we are mistaken here. It’s a tactical assessment mistake, but it’s a mistake,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
He said the training of some Hamas militants had impressed him, but that there were no “surprises” for Israeli forces.
“They were in pretty good shape and pretty well trained,” he said of amphibious commando-style raids by Hamas militants on Israeli shores.
“You can see for sure they were trained outside of the Gaza Strip,” the official said, but added “we haven’t seen anything that has surprised us” militarily.
But the official said Hamas, the main power in Gaza, and Islamic Jihad, the next biggest militant group, were soundly beaten.
“We think they are in very bad shape,” he said, pointing out that two-thirds of the militants’ rocket stores had been wiped out and several hundred of them killed.
Hamas and Israel agreed an Egyptian-mediated ceasefire on August 26, with both sides hailing it as a victory. The UN says some 70 percent of Palestinian fatalities were civilians.
Meanwhile, an Israeli military intelligence official says 341 of the individuals killed in Gaza during the Israel Defense Forces’ air and ground offensive have been identified as Hamas militants, the New York Times reports. The same official estimates that approximately 16,000 individuals in total fight for Hamas.
Militants are also believed to still possess 3,000 rockets out of some 10,000 they were throught to have before the outbreak of violence. From the Times:
On the contentious issue of Palestinian casualties, Israeli intelligence says it has confirmed the deaths of 341 Hamas operatives, 182 members of Islamic Jihad and 93 other militants who belonged to smaller groups or whose affiliation is not yet known. Another 706 of the 2,127 Palestinians killed have so far been identified by Israel as civilians, while 805 more casualties — 38 percent of the total — are listed as “unknown,” not yet categorized by Israel as either civilians or combatants. The United Nations and other monitoring groups say up to three-quarters of the Palestinians killed were civilians.
Israel bombarded Gaza by air for fifty days, and a ground invasion lasted from July 17 to August 5. IDF operations killed several top Hamas commanders and reportedly destroyed many of the tunnels used by militants to transport personnel and weapons.. — AFP.
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