US columnist David Ignatius said on Tuesday that he heard a more ambitious strategy for Gaza from Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, a retired chief of Israeli military intelligence who now heads the country’s leading think tank, the Institute for National Security Studies.
According to an article in The Washington Post, Ignatius said that Israel knows that it’s likely to have to come back again in a few years to degrade Hamas’s military capability once more.
He added that the essence of Yadlin’s proposal is to capitalize on the extreme weakness of Hamas by letting the Palestinians go forward with a “unity government” under a reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah announced in April.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the idea, but Yadlin argues that taking a performance-based approach to this united government is the best way to move forward and break Hamas’s stranglehold on Gaza.
The core of Yadlin’s argument is that Hamas has never been weaker than now. Its own war strategy is a shambles: Its missiles aren’t hitting Israeli cities; its fighters aren’t able to sneak through tunnels and perform suicide missions or conduct kidnapping operations.
Its base in Syria is lost and its patrons in the Muslim Brotherhood have been toppled from power in Egypt.