IDF chief: Long-term calm in Gaza requires ‘carrots’

Israel achieved a decisive victory in this summer’s hostilities with Hamas, but maintaining a long-term ceasefire depends on improving the day-to-day conditions and economic conditions of Gaza residents, IDF Chief of Staff  Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz said.

“Hamas, in its present condition, will not be quick to allow the security situation with us to deteriorate again,” he told Haaretz in an interview published Thursday.

Hamas’s ability to fight Israel has suffered a blow, and the organization lost “resources, tunnels, rockets,” he added.

However, keeping the peace with Gaza will require “carrots,” Gantz said. The joint Israel-UN-Palestinian Authority oversight program to bring more goods into the Strip, established after the open-ended ceasefire that ended the hostilities, should be continued but in a “sane manner.”

“The Gaza Strip must be permitted to import goods,” he said. “In the end, there are 1.8 million people, surrounded by Egypt and Israel. These people need to live.”

The IDF head added that he was always in favor of “hope in the face of fear. This is the key, in my eyes, to success.”

Gantz said that in the IDF’s assessment, there was a slim chance of another round of hostilities breaking out in 2015, but noted that even though “our enemies have other challenges” and that “both Hezbollah and Hamas don’t want to start a war with us right now,” the security situation could still worsen because of fallout from “isolated events” of violence emanating from the Strip.

In a separate interview with Yedioth Ahronoth, Gantz defended the IDF’s performance during Operation Protective Edge, noting that the strategic objectives of the operation were not “the occupation of Gaza or the collapse of Hamas.”

Some politicians called for the occupation of the Strip and panned the IDF as not creative enough in its tactics, Gantz continued, but he dismissed the critics as people “without responsibility for anything, except for holding a meeting.”