MIN. GALLANT: The goals are the goals for the war. That means that the -- by the end of the war, as long as it takes, we need to make sure that we have our hostages back, that we eliminate the Hamas abilities, and that's include destroying Hamas military capability and its ability to govern in Gaza.
And it have certain power matters, including the amount of battalion -- battalions that we need to dismantle and the chain of command and the supreme military leadership and so forth and so on.
The phases are the technique which is part of the plan that we have to deploy in the area in order to achieve our goals. And as Secretary Austin said, this is only the -- the way that we shape our plan in order to achieve the goals.
And as it happened in the battlefield, the circumstances are changing. You change your efforts and you do something different in a different phase. And the intensity in the first phase is given, but in other phases, we will concentrate on certain issue. For instance, the engaging and -- detecting the supreme leadership of Hamas and others.
So all in all, there is no -- there is no clock that is running, and we have to obey a certain day, but we need to get to a different performances on the ground before we move to the next phase. And I believe that we will find a proper time to do so.
And the most important issue, as I mentioned in the beginning -- we will -- we will prevail, we will dismantle Hamas. Otherwise, we will not be able to exist and live in the way we want to live in this region. Because there is a price to deterrence and they need to know that if they kill or kidnap 1,500 people, including kids and women, this is the end of Hamas.
tl:dr: "no, we dont' have any kind of strategic victory. we have no fucking clue about anything except killing Arabs".
Hamas, itself, filled in the role of militant opposition that Arafat's PLO had left behind.
But that militant role is two-sided. Yes, it becomes a natural relief valve for young frustrated and abused Palestinian citizens. But it also becomes a shooting gallery for the IDF. Palestinians are kettled to the point of an explosion and the Israelis use the pressure to continue justification for their own militant oppression. Israeli citizens are sheep-dogged into compliance with increasingly radical and dictatorial state leadership under the theory that any cease-fire on their end would result in their annihilation.
But this sets up a paradox for the Israelis, in turn, because its very difficult to convince people that the Palestinians are rabid dogs while simultaneously advocating for new settlements deeper into Palestinian territory. So Palestine must be portrayed as both strong (necessitating the IDF) and weak (guaranteeing the impotency of rocket attacks and marches and break outs).
Israeli leadership is on the third generation of drinking-their-own-koolaid. This isn't just going after the Top Guy. We're at the point that people have bought in on a defensive genocide. This means butchering all 2M of Hamas's most dedicated fighters in Gaza, and likely turning to purge the West Bank after that. And then? Perhaps on to waging war into Jordan, to quash the 3M Palestinians there. Egypt - an erstwhile ally of Israel for decades - needs to get back into the game and purge their own Palestinian populations. And even that won't be enough, I'm sure.