Galant: Netanyahu government ignored Hamas tunnel threat

Yoav Galant, a former IDF general running for Knesset with the centrist Kulanu party, charged Saturday that the government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu largely ignored the tunnel threat posed by Hamas in the Gaza Strip until Operation Protective Edge last summer.

Some 30 tunnels dug under the Gaza Strip leading into Israeli territory were exposed and demolished during the war. One led into a kibbutz dining hall, another into a kindergarten in communities bordering the Palestinian enclave. Some of the tunnels were also used to ambush and attack IDF soldiers during the war.

“When there are tunnels, the government knows about it and the defense minister knows about it and no one did anything, and that’s unacceptable,” Galant said at a cultural event in Beersheba, according to Ynet.

“Thirty-something tunnels are not built in a day. After Operation Cast Lead [in 2008-2009], there were no tunnels. This is negligence. The State of Israel essentially allowed 30 tunnels [to be built] and to me, this is unacceptable,” he said.

Galant, a former candidate for IDF chief of staff, said that the next round of violence with Hamas will likely occur over the next four years and that the Israeli public is being misled on the situation in the Gaza Strip.

“The public thinks it’s [a choice between] a long, expensive war [and with minimal deaths on our side ] but with largely ineffectual results or rivers of blood,” he said.

Galant, who was head of the Southern Command during Cast Lead, said he “forced Hamas to fight soldiers, not civilians” during that conflict and did so in less than half the time it took to conclude Protective Edge, and without the protection of the Iron Dome anti-missile system.

“The public must decide who will lead the next round. Someone who has brought victory in the past and can do it again in the future or someone who reached a stalemate [with Hamas],” he said.

Galant has in the past run into some trouble for his sharp statements during this election campaign. Last month, he appeared to backpedal after he implied that an alleged Israeli attack on Hezbollah and Iranian personnel on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights in January was ordered out of political considerations and not just due to security concerns.

Amos Yadlin, a retired general on the center-left Zionist Union list, also speaking at the cultural event Saturday took aim at Netanyahu for his controversial speech to Congress on Iran last week, charging that Israel was not under an existential threat.

Dismissing comparisons between the period leading up to the Holocaust and present day, Yadlin said Israel now “has an army, and allies like the United States. Iran must be stopped in other ways.”

Yadlin said Netanyahu’s insistence to speak to Congress over the objections — and fury — of the White House was “not smart.”

“It was done for the sake of internal politics,” he said.

Yadlin also criticized Netanyahu for the 50-day summer war with Hamas and for approving the release of hundreds of convicted Palestinian murderers, a reference to the 2011 Shalit deal (in which 1,027 Palestinians were released in exchange for Gilad Shalit who was held captive by Hamas for five years) and the release of some 80 prisoners in late 2013 and early 2014 as a gesture to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the framework of peace talks.

Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, who was also at the event in Beersheba, rejected the two military men’s criticism over the handling of Operation Protective Edge

“Defense is a complicated matter. It’s not the time for slogans and this isn’t child’s play. The use of military force has a price,” said Ya’alon.

“We handled the operation responsibly,” he asserted.

Meanwhile, the Iran-backed Islamic Jihad group said it was preparing for the next conflict with Israel.

Six months ago, the Palestinian terrorist group emerged battered and bruised from the 50-day conflict with Israel, where it fought alongside fellow Islamist movement Hamas, which controls Gaza.

Islamic Jihad’s armed wing the Al-Quds Brigades lost 123 men, but fired 3,249 rockets at the Jewish state, it says, including Iranian-made Fajr 5 missiles which reached Tel Aviv and even northern Israel.

“We’re at our highest level of alert to counter any attack. We’re used to the occupation (Israel) breaking its ceasefires,” senior commander Abu al-Bara told AFP from one of the group’s tunnels.

“What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. We’re gathering all our strength since it’s a war that never ends. We’re ready to go to another level against the Zionist occupation and carry out actions we’ve never done before,” he said, without elaborating.

Israel launched Operation Protective Edge on July 8 to stop Hamas and other groups’ indiscriminate rocket fire on Israeli cities and to destroy the terror tunnels that infiltrate into Israeli territory.

During the operation, Hamas rejected a number of ceasefire proposals and violated a number of those that were agreed to.

Israel lost 66 soldiers and six civilians, and a Thai agricultural worker, in the month-long conflict while the Palestinian death toll surpassed 2,100, according to Hamas officials in Gaza. Israel said half of the Gaza dead were gunmen and blamed Hamas for all civilian deaths because it operated against Israel from residential areas, placing Gazans in harm’s way.

Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other groups launched over 3,000 rockets indiscriminately at Israeli cities.

The war ended on August 26 with a fragile Hamas-Israel ceasefire brokered by Egypt.

AFP contributed to this report.