BBC News:
Israel’s leaders have declared that Hamas will be wiped off the face of the Earth and Gaza will never go back to what it was.
“Every Hamas member is a dead man,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said after fighters from the militant group killed 1,300 people in a brutal attack on Israel.
The goal of Operation Swords of Iron appears far more ambitious than anything the military has planned in Gaza before. But is that a realistic military mission, and how can its commanders possibly fulfil it?
A ground invasion of the Gaza Strip involves house-to-house urban fighting and carries immense risks to the civilian population. Air strikes have already claimed hundreds of lives, and more than 400,000 people have fled their homes.
The military has the added task of rescuing at least 150 hostages, held in unknown locations across Gaza.
Herzi Halevi, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), has vowed to “dismantle” Hamas, and has singled out its political head in Gaza. But is there an ultimate vision for how Gaza will look after 16 years of Hamas’s violent rule?
“I don’t think Israel can dismantle every Hamas member, because it’s an idea of extremist Islam,” says military analyst Amir Bar Shalom of Israel’s Army Radio. “But you can weaken it as much as you can so it has no operational capabilities.”
That might be a more realistic objective. Israel has fought four wars with Hamas, and every attempt to halt its rocket attacks has failed.
Spokesman Lt Col Jonathan Conricus said by the end of this war Hamas should no longer have the military capacity to “threaten or kill Israeli civilians”.
