Israeli analysts criticized the Israeli government's handling of the current confrontation in the Gaza Strip and said that Israel does not have a clear strategy and needs time to start and succeed in a ground battle in the Strip, stressing that it may be the beginning of the end.
In a strong criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's behavior, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Channel 12 that Israel is at a very rare crossroads in its history, stressing that he had never felt that Israelis were facing this position.
"All the hopes, dreams, memories, forces and prayers of Israelis are concentrated in one iron fist that is about to respond to the reality facing us," he said.
Olmert attacked the current prime minister, saying, "We are all responsible, I am responsible for what happened, Yair Lapid is responsible because he was prime minister at one time and so was Naftali Bennett, but there is only one person who was never responsible and did not admit responsibility at all (referring to Netanyahu)."
Olmert does not want Netanyahu to admit responsibility, he says, but he believes that the view currently presented means that Israel will fight forever and that it will fight all the Palestinians, expel them, exterminate them and annex all their lands, while the only strong security alternative, in his opinion, "is the State of Israel, which whoever leads it must make it ready for war, and not be weak and worn out as Netanyahu did."
Ofer Shelah, a senior researcher at Israel's Institute for National Security Research, told Channel 13 that he proposes to stop the earthquake of the feet and constantly ask when the ground operation will take place because it requires a fire preparation that enables the army to maneuver as hard as possible inside a residential area that has been partially demolished, which makes the operation difficult.
"It must also master dealing with the traps set up in the area of operation, and we assume that they (the resistance) during the past two weeks have booby-trapped everything that moves in the place, and this requires good equipment," Shelah said.
Former Finance Minister Ronnie Ba-Un told Channel 12 that for 20 years Israel has not developed a strategy to deal with Hamas, adding, "Every time we shout that Hamas must be destroyed and then we come back and say we can afford it, which is not possible."
"It is true that the equation is political with a terrorist organization, and we have paid high prices, but the price this time is not possible, and I do not know if this will end or not, and if it ends, will it be the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning," he said, stressing that "we had to build a strategy to confront Hamas a while ago."
Lt. Gen. Matan Fulnai, chairman of the Leaders for Israel's Security Forum, said eliminating Hamas was "a military imperative."
"Hamas's military power can be broken, its leaders killed, or infrastructure destroyed, but it is highly empowered in Gaza and cannot be broken there by military force," he said, nor can it be eliminated ideologically.
"It's unfortunate that they (the government) are presenting this nonsense that they will not be able to achieve to the Israeli people and I don't know how they will explain this after that," Flana said.
Omer Bar-Lev, the minister of public security and former commander of the elite division, told Channel 13 that he does not trust Netanyahu in the first place or in the feisty group of ministers he surrounded himself with, including the Security and Political Affairs Cabinet (the war government) because they are inexperienced and have no other directions, as he put it.
Bar-Lev stressed that "difficult decisions must be made: what is the purpose of war? And when is it achieved? And what should we do after we achieve it?"
Military analyst Alon Ben-David told Channel 13 that the army was waiting for the political leadership's decision to go to war and that these forces could not be kept in this situation for long, but at the same time expressed his belief that the ground operation was not far away.
Finally, Avi Yascherov, an Arab affairs analyst at Channel 13, said that Israel has so far not hit Hamas's military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades.
"Even if Hamas' military wing has been hit hard, they are still there on the buses waiting for us and most of them have not been injured," he said.
He concluded that Israel has hit much of Hamas' military infrastructure, but not in a way that destroys its military arm, stressing that the army needs a long time to be able to reach them, and this will not be done without ground forces, he said.