MIN. GALLANT: The goals are the goals for the war. That means that the – by the end of the war, as long as it takes, we need to make sure that we have our hostages back, that we eliminate the Hamas abilities, and that’s include destroying Hamas military capability and its ability to govern in Gaza.
And it have certain power matters, including the amount of battalion – battalions that we need to dismantle and the chain of command and the supreme military leadership and so forth and so on.
The phases are the technique which is part of the plan that we have to deploy in the area in order to achieve our goals. And as Secretary Austin said, this is only the – the way that we shape our plan in order to achieve the goals.
And as it happened in the battlefield, the circumstances are changing. You change your efforts and you do something different in a different phase. And the intensity in the first phase is given, but in other phases, we will concentrate on certain issue. For instance, the engaging and – detecting the supreme leadership of Hamas and others.
So all in all, there is no – there is no clock that is running, and we have to obey a certain day, but we need to get to a different performances on the ground before we move to the next phase. And I believe that we will find a proper time to do so.
And the most important issue, as I mentioned in the beginning – we will – we will prevail, we will dismantle Hamas. Otherwise, we will not be able to exist and live in the way we want to live in this region. Because there is a price to deterrence and they need to know that if they kill or kidnap 1,500 people, including kids and women, this is the end of Hamas.
tl:dr: “no, we dont’ have any kind of strategic victory. we have no fucking clue about anything except killing Arabs”.
And the most important issue, as I mentioned in the beginning – we will – we will prevail, we will dismantle Hamas.
American War on Terror logic applied to your next door neighbor.
Just gonna keep bombing and shooting until people stop feeling scared.
Only… they’ll never stop feeling scared, because the fear is the product of propaganda rather than material condition.
The question is in reference to a public statement Austin made a few weeks ago, where he said that indiscriminately killing civilians may lead to a “tactical victory” but in the long term it results in a “strategic defeat”.
Basically admitting that asides from it being awful on moral grounds it’s a bad idea strategically too.
Because there is a price to deterrence and they need to know that if they kill or kidnap 1,500 people, including kids and women, this is the end of Hamas.
You just know the end of that sentence was going to be “we will kill twenty times as many in return” but halfway through he realized he was speaking in English instead of Hebrew.
The shape of our plan is the shape of the phase that determines the plan for our goals
