IDF chief: Look for instability on all Israel fronts

It’s hard not to take notice of Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz’s good mood. The 50-day Gaza war, which the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff says Israel “absolutely” won, is in the rearview mirror. But Gantz still has plenty to worry about.

On a tour of Tel Hezka in the Golan Heights for the 41st anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, he reports the Israel-Syria border “is just one of the fronts” the defense establishment is concerned about at the start of this Jewish calendar year.

In the following interview with Israel Hayom, Gantz looks back on Operation Protective Edge and ahead to the developing situation on the northern front.

Did Israel win the summer war with Hamas?

“Absolutely [we won], yes. … We made great gains in terms of combating the terror tunnels and fire power. They still have some capability—about 20-30 percent of their short-range rockets—but they sustained a debilitating blow to their fighters, their commanders, their manufacturing facilities, their command centers, and their combat capabilities. And after all that, those guys came to Cairo, defying Qatar, and accepted an open-ended cease-fire agreement with no time limit, and they didn’t get any of the conditions they demanded. I wouldn’t call that losing.”

Many people believe Israel was taken by surprise this summer by the revelation of Hamas’s terror tunnels. Do you believe Israel will not be taken by surprise again the way it was during the 1973 Yom Kippur War?

“We don’t think and we don’t say that the failures of the Yom Kippur War will never be repeated. But I do think that our intelligence abilities are at an extremely high level, with a lot of information and know-how and better access than ever to the intelligence consumers from the strategic level all the way to the operational level in the field. But still, intelligence is not infallible, and it probably never will be.”

If you could go back to July 7, the day the war began, what would you do differently?