National security expert: Four essential moves to secure victory over Hamas

IDF Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland’s list includes: No Gazans behind the Yellow Line, where the IDF will stay until Hamas is fully disarmed, and tough sanctions for every cease-fire violation.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

One of Israel’s foremost national security experts outlined four necessary actions that would ensure the war in Gaza ends in a Hamas defeat in a Walla article Monday.

IDF Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland wrote that Israel should have already evacuated all Gazans from behind the Yellow Line, to which the IDF withdrew 10 days ago upon Hamas’ agreement to the 20-point American peace plan.

“The No. 1 principle of 21^st-century wars,” he wrote, is that “military control of territory that contains a hostile population has more disadvantages than advantages. When there is a hostile population, there will always be terrorists among them, and when there are terrorists in close proximity and in high friction with our forces, there will also be many attempted attacks.”

This has already been proven the case, as IDF troops have come under fire several times from terrorists emerging from tunnel shafts near them, so far killing two soldiers and wounding three.

The second necessary step is to respond to every violation of the agreement with severe sanctions.

These, he argued without going into detail, should be civilian in nature rather than military, as they are “more painful.”

So far, the IDF has only responded to Hamas assaults by targeting military sites and terror tunnels.

The IDF must also prepare its positions on the Yellow Line as if they were now markers of a new, permanent border, according to Eiland.

“Human life is worth nothing” to Arab leaders, he noted, “but land is forever sacred. The more Hamas feels that avoiding moving to Phase II of the agreement will perpetuate the loss of the eastern half of the Gaza Strip, the better.”

In Phase II, Hamas is supposed to hand over all its weapons to the international force that will oversee Gazan security for the foreseeable future.

Several of Hamas’ top officials have already declared that the terror group would never hand in its weapons to any authority short of a Palestinian state.

These military outposts, he added, must be built with combat positions that can be manned even during a massive rocket attack – unlike the IDF bases on the Gazan border before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas invasion.

The fourth requirement is political in nature rather than military.

Jerusalem must remain firm in the face of any and all international pressure to withdraw from the Yellow Line before Phase II is completely implemented, he wrote, including that of the United States.

Eiland is a former head of the Israeli National Security Council and senior research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies, and the lead author of the “Generals’ Plan,” which proposed a year ago evacuating all of northern Gaza of civilians and placing a full blockade on the area to force Hamas to surrender without needlessly losing Israeli soldiers in battle.