Preparing for ground invasion… three circles of failure (on Oct 7): IDF

It’s been more than two weeks since the October 7 attacks, the Israeli air forces have conducted air strikes in Gaza. What’s the objective?

The objective continues to be…to destroy Hamas as a terrorist government, a terrorist entity and a terrorist military. We are dismantling their apparatus, including striking against its leadership and making sure that they can never utilize the Gaza Strip as a staging ground for attacks against Israel again….

We have conducted thousands of strikes, just over 300 in the last 24 hours. That’s representative of the last two weeks…They are in a state of disarray. They have huge command and control problems because we are striking their infrastructure. Their leadership has no idea what is going on, and the individual terrorists are being pursued, attacked and killed.

Lt Col (reservist) Peter Lerner is the international spokesperson for the IDF

There have been concerns on civilians being killed in Gaza. How do you respond to those concerns?

The optics of war are always going to be tragic, especially against a terrorist government that has established all of its assets within the realm of the civilian arena. For example, we are striking Hamas’s pre-positioned explosive drones. They position them on the rooftops of houses. So you strike that position because it is a military target, or they position their command and control positions, that communication position in high-rise buildings…

Of course, there is a huge challenge for any military or any professional military but nevertheless, we are up against the terrorist organization that is doing everything to impact negatively the people of Gaza. Our role is to try and minimize that effect.

There are reports that IDF’s preparing for the ground offensive.

We are indeed rallying our forces. We have some 300,000 reservists who have been called up. Many of them are tasked with preparing for ground operations in Gaza…there are people from the Air Force, the Navy, the Home front. It is the largest recruiting of reservists in the history of the IDF.

Some of them are reinforcing the Northern front with Lebanon, but the majority are preparing for ground operations. Those preparations include equipping, training and tasking. So it’s identifying the specific tasks for a specific unit so that they know what they’re going to be doing when they confront Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

And training includes the ability to mobilize within urban areas, the ability to operate in tunnels, all of the different types of challenges that we face in the urban arena that Hamas has established because they have turned the entire Gaza Strip as a playing ground for the terrorist activities.

We are currently in the process of around a week of asking and encouraging the people of northern Gaza to evacuate to go to the south, to try and get them out of harm’s way. Unfortunately, we have seen that Hamas is trying to discourage them. They’re trying to tell them not to go. They’re also preventing them physically by establishing checkpoints along the road, the main road going towards the south, and by doing so they’re trying to prevent the people from evacuating.

So this is how we see the operational field. Ground operation, the operational conditions will determine the time and the place of mobilization. And the government instructions, if we’re given a green light to mobilize will also determine if we mobilize. There are two conditions: operational superiority on one hand, government decision to mobilize on the other hand but the forces are currently being prepared for that.

There has been criticism of the IDF response on October 7, the intelligence failure…if you could give a sense of what happened and how is IDF going to fix that?

There will be a time for us to investigate exactly the failures. Currently, we are mostly focused on destroying Hamas and making sure it can never happen again.

I can identify three circles of failure. Obviously, the forewarning of the intelligence that did not identify the principal act or intentions of Hamas to attack Israel. The second failure would be the actual line of defence, the physical barrier that was supposed to prevent infiltration and collapsed or was destroyed in at least 20 different locations across the border and, finally, the physical line of defense forces on the ground was not sufficient to prevent a mass infiltration that took place.

As I said, we will be investigating that at a later time. The head of IDF has taken responsibility on his part; head of Shin Bet has taken responsibility on their part. And we’re obviously just at the beginning of this event, this tragic act of terrorism against our people with over 1400 people butchered, murdered and massacred, and now 222 Israelis and foreign nationals being held hostage in Gaza is a strategic change from our posture before October 7. And it calls for a strategic change afterwards. And that’s why the government has instructed us to do that change.

Will there be a commission of inquiry to fix the accountability in the October 7 attacks?

Commission of Inquiry is governed by the government, that’s not something I can comment on. Of course, the IDF will be conducting its own internal investigations.

What’s the status of the hostages? We saw two of them being released.

Well, first of all, the number is 222. That is accurate for today. But that number, as we’re seeing, is increasing almost daily and we still have about 100 people unaccounted for, and the intelligence work in order to understand, cross reference, seek and find more bodies in the field which we are finding every day, so you can rule out abduction and identify deaths…this is the challenge that we’re facing. I can’t say too much on the issue of hostages, mostly because I want to be respectful to the families of the 222 people that are in despair and concern. And their lives have been torn apart now for 17 days. And also because I don’t want to impede and jeopardize any attempts to free rescue or negotiate release. From an operational perspective, it’s at the top of our priorities. We’re doing everything we can in order to bring them home as quickly as possible.

Hamas are responsible for their well-being and Israel has demanded the international community, and the Red Cross have access to hostages. The hostages, we need to understand, include children from the age of nine months to elderly up to the age of 88. And anything in between: women, young girls, people who were enjoying a music festival, people who were in their bedrooms. So there’s a huge, huge spectrum of victims of this brutal massacre and brutal abduction who are just innocents. They need to be released.