Who Won the Gaza War?

As veteran Gaza watchers assess the battle, one of the most authoritative Israeli experts — Yaakov Amidror, former IDF major general and national security advisor to Binyamin Netanyahu, now a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies — says that talk of winning the war is misplaced.

“The purpose of all the Gaza operations over the past 15 years has been to hurt Hamas and restore quiet to people living in the south — not to topple the terror groups or conquer the Strip,” says Amidror in a special interview with Mishpacha. “Israel didn’t embark on Operation Guardian of the Walls with the goal of winning. The goal was to inflict maximum damage on Hamas’s military capabilities, in hopes of establishing deterrence.”

But even as Israel tries to make Hamas think twice about starting up again, Amidror is unequivocal on one point: he says Israel should never forget that the thorn in its side to the south is nothing compared to the Iranian stake aimed at its heart from the north.

Did the Israel Air Force’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip not achieve its goals?

“Deterrence is individual matter. Every person decides for himself whether he’s deterred or not. For example, the Six Day War is considered Israel’s most successful war. But just three years later, there was the War of Attrition, and six years later, Israel found itself in the Yom Kippur War. So where was the deterrence?