A senior Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officer said that Tel Aviv is engaged in an overly wasteful war in Gaza. The soldier went on to estimate that Israelis could have achieved similar results against Hamas with only ten percent of the destruction inflicted upon the Strip.
Speaking with Haaretz, the IDF officer said the operations were wasteful, and the same objectives could have been accomplished with far less destruction. “Our form of combat at the moment is unusually wasteful. You could term it ’a war of cruel rich people.’ We’re attacking innumerable targets, without asking whether it’s worth attacking them, and artillery is being used in places where it’s not really obligatory,” he said.
“The fact that we are demolishing everything before entering is being manifested in the duration of the operation. If you’d asked before the war how long it would take us to conquer Gaza, the answer would’ve been that we were talking about a situation that could be accomplished in far less than four months.” The officer added, “In principle, it would be possible to arrive at similar achievements with 10 percent of the destruction we have caused.”
While Tel Aviv does not publish official numbers, some sources told Haaretz that over the past six months, Israel has “dropped tens of thousands of bombs on the Strip, along with the hundreds of thousands of shells that have been fired into the enclave.” The IDF officer described “the amount of munitions” used in Gaza as “unprecedented, and to critical eyes this is wasteful, protracted combat.”
At least 32,000 Palestinians, including 13,000 children, have been killed by the brutal onslaught. The heavy bombing of Gaza has destroyed most of the infrastructure in the Strip. The Guardian reports the widespread bombing campaign could amount to a form of ethnic cleansing called “domicide.”
The Israeli outlet +972 Magazine has also reported on the IDF’s widespread bombing campaign in Gaza. The IDF is using an AI program dubbed “The Gospel” to generate hundreds of targets per day. In an effort to cripple Palestinian society, the IDF is additionally targeting infrastructure such as banks and universities.
The officer claimed the IDF employed this tactic to reduce troop casualties but questioned the policy’s effectiveness. “Our assumption is that if we had sown less destruction, we would have sustained more casualties,” he said. “On the other hand, however, less destruction would have meant that we would be on the ground there for less time – and less time means fewer casualties.” The officer added, “We… prefer to apply force powerfully and cruelly over taking risks.”
As Israel is committed to relying heavily on munitions to fight in Gaza, Tel Aviv’s arms stockpiles are running short. Tel Aviv mainly relies on Washington for arms. However, Israel has been forced to seek other sources and fire thousands of munitions with high dud rates. Duds present a problem for Israel as an investigation by The New York Times found most of Hamas’s explosives are made from Israeli bombs which failed to denotate.
Israel’s extensive use of munitions to fight should give the White House increased leverage over Tel Aviv. President Biden, however, has refused to condition any US military aid to Israel. Last week, Congress authorized sending the annual $3.8 billion in military assistance to Tel Aviv as part of a $1.2 trillion spending bill.
