Israeli leadership is growing increasingly divided over the best way to win the country’s devastating war against Hamas — less than a week after marking the conflict’s 100th day of battle.
During a TV interview Thursday, Gadi Eisenkot, a senior minister of the Israeli war cabinet and a former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, said a cease-fire is the only path to ensuring the safe release of the approximately 130 hostages who remain in the terror group’s clutches.
“The hostages will only return alive if there is a deal linked to a significant pause in fighting,” Eisenkot said on “Uvda,” an investigative reporting program on Israel’s Channel 12, in his first public statements since war broke out in the region Oct. 7 after Hamas’ brutal surprise attack on Israel.
Eisenkot, whose own 25-year-old son was killed battling Hamas in Gaza in December, made his remarks within hours of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejecting the White House’s calls to ease up on the country’s punishing military campaign that has laid waste to much of the region.
The war is believed to have claimed the lives of well over 1,200 Israelis and as many as 25,000 Palestinians, according to officials from Israel and the Hamas-tied health authorities.
“We will not settle for anything short of an absolute victory,” Netanyahu defiantly declared during a nationally televised news conference Thursday.
Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant have insisted that the country’s war effort will continue until the Islamist militant group is dealt a crushing defeat and that the only way to freeing the remaining hostages is through military might.
During the same speech, Netanyahu flatly rejected renewed calls by the US to consider establishing Palestinian statehood, arguing such an arrangement would provide new territory from which future attacks against Israel could be launched.
Israel “must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River,” the prime minister said, adding, “That collides with the idea of sovereignty. What can we do?
“This truth I tell to our American friends, and I put the brakes on the attempt to coerce us to a reality that would endanger the state of Israel,” he said.
Seemingly directly contradicting Netanyahu, Eisenkot said any claim that freeing the hostages can be achieved without a cease-fire is “to spread illusions.”
He also offered a sharp critique of how the war has played out, saying strategic plans for securing victory should have been made a bigger priority right from the start.
He even questioned whether Israel’s efforts to defeat the terror group have been as successful as others including Netanyahu have claimed, saying, “we haven’t yet reached a strategic achievement, or rather only partially,” he said. “We did not bring down Hamas.”
Israel began its extended military campaign against Hamas after the terror group launched a large-scale surprise missile attack in the country Oct. 7 in which approximately 1,200 Israelis were killed.
Hamas also seized around 240 hostages in the attack, including women and children, of whom 105 were released during a multiday cease-fire deal last November.