From the Liveblog of
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
If asked, IDF would have pulled the Hamas leaders out by their ears, says senior officer
Hamas “crawled to Egypt” to beg for a ceasefire, the deputy commander of the Nahal Brigade, Ori Shechter tells Army Radio, branding Operation Protective Edge an “overwhelming defeat for Hamas.”
Lt.-Col. Shechter (res.) rejected the notion that Israel should feel the war marked a missed opportunity, and said “it will take years for Hamas to recover.” He predicts “four or five years of quiet.”
He notes that Hamas’s list of demands has been forgotten. “They went to Egypt and we [the Israeli negotiators] weren’t even there.”
“The IDF won big time in Gaza,” he says. “Stop staying we lost. We won.”
Hamas has used most of its rockets and will have a hard time getting more, he says, given the changed regime in Egypt. And the “strategic tunnel threat,” which it spent seven years building, has been demolished. “I’m not saying there isn’t a tunnel somewhere we missed,” he says, “but we’ll be able to take care of a single attack.” If Hamas had been able to carry out the “strategic attack” it planned through the tunnels, “it would have taken us a long time to recover.”
Shechter says the IDF returned to its proper role of “protecting the people, rather than the other way around,” noting the 64 IDF fatalities and 3 civilian fatalities.
He also says the IDF lost lots of officers and commanders “because our officers are at the front of our forces, while theirs hide away…. That’s a difference of morality.”
Had the IDF been ordered to go get the Hamas leaders, “we would have gone to Shifa [hospital] and pulled them out by their ears,” he says. But he notes that there are all kinds of political considerations which directed what the IDF was told to do and not to do. “Every mission that we were asked to carry out, we completed, successfully and decisively.”
He says Israel has a great army “and we’re a great people,” hailing the sense of national unity, the turnouts of thousands “at funerals for soldiers people didn’t even know,” and the “bravery” shown by the fighting forces.
The Times of Israel Community.