Yossi Cohen said that Israel will have to pay a heavy price to recover its prisoners (Reuters)
The former head of the Israeli Foreign Intelligence Service (Mossad), Yossi Cohen, said that Israel will need 5 years after the war to recover.
The Israeli Broadcasting Corporation quoted Cohen as saying, "Israel will have to pay a heavy price to recover the hostages."
At the end of last December, Cohen said that the Gaza Strip had prepared itself in an unusual way in the last decades of this war in particular.
He admitted that the Palestinian resistance outperformed the Israeli occupation army in the Gaza Strip through the tunnels, which is considered an underground city with deep and long hideouts, with a logistical preparation that allows for much greater underground life than we thought.
Regarding northern Israel, he said that we must continue to give a chance for a political settlement and avoid opening a second front when Hezbollah is prepared and ready for war, and Cohen does not believe that the Israeli army is prepared to deal with two war zones at the same time.
On October 7, the Palestinian resistance, led by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, which included a land, sea and air attack and the infiltration of resistance members into several Israeli military sites and settlements in the Gaza Strip in response to the Israeli attacks on holy sites and Palestinians.
During the operation and its aftermath, the resistance killed and wounded thousands of Israelis. It also captured at least 239 people in the attack, of whom about 136 are still detained by the resistance in Gaza.
Since last October 7, the Israeli army has been waging a devastating war on Gaza that, as of Saturday, left 27,238 martyrs and 66,452 injured, most of them children and women, according to the Palestinian authorities, and caused massive destruction and an unprecedented humanitarian disaster, according to the United Nations.
Source: Al Jazeera + Israeli press