Highly placed Israelis are having qualms about the war in Gaza. From Seymour Hersh at seymourhersh.substack.com:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in Tel Aviv on Thursday. / Photo by Israeli Government Press Office/Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images.
Thousands of Hamas fighters are now facing a deadly shootout with the Israeli army as the disastrous war their leaders triggered is in its tenth week. Now out of their tunnels, those men are trying to cope with the increasing winter chill and heavy rains. There is little shelter for them, or for the bedraggled surviving citizens of Gaza, from the elements and from Israeli bullets and bombs.
War is hell, too, for Israeli troops, who are on the hunt, now engaged in house-to-house and rubble-to-rubble searches for Hamas fighters, who will be far more willing to engage in one-on-one shootouts in the south of Gaza than in the earlier days of mass bombing in Gaza City. Future historians will make their judgment on the stunning ratio of dead Palestinians in Gaza to the Israeli combat dead. Israel’s military leaders now assess that the majority of Hamas fighters will be dead, will be captured, or will have deserted by the end of January. But then what? If the religious zealots who now dominate the government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have a day-after plan, it is not known. What does the end of fighting mean for the surviving citizens of Gaza?
The only sure thing is that the astonishing number of innocent civilians of Gaza killed or maimed by Israeli bombs has left a stain on Israel’s international reputation that cannot be ignored. The disparity, as a former Israeli military officer told me this week, “is something that Israelis will have to think about. I support the war,” the official added, “but the balance is not right.”
