The current action has been named the “forever war” by many
The uncertainty about the current war is due to a large degree to the nature of the war, which is mainly centered on fighting taking place deep underground. In conventional warfare involving troops on the ground, civilians far removed from the front can at least post large maps of the battlefield on the wall and place pins on the map to mark the progress of the respective sides. Nothing of that kind is possible with respect to the current fighting.
Days and weeks pass in which there is little reporting from the battle front, unless a group of Israeli soldiers is killed in action. Only then do we learn in what kinds of activities they were engaged. Needless to say, dribs and drabs of information generated by tragic events hardly does much to increase optimism.
And even when the public is told that 40% to 50% of Hamas’s tunnel network has been destroyed, or that 80% of the tunnels between Egypt and the Philadelphia Corridor on the Gaza side of the border have been rendered inoperative, it does not know how to evaluate the significance of that information in terms of the announced goal of the war of destroying Hamas.
How can those statistics, some of which are contradicted by other sources, be reconciled with the statement of the IDF’s chief spokesman, Admiral Daniel Hagari, two weeks ago, that it is impossible to defeat Hamas, or with the intercepted emails of Yahya Sinwar, in which he claims that “we have Israel exactly where we want her”?
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