Israel-Hamas War, July 11, 2024

  • Current situation: The war continues in Gaza, near the Israel-Lebanon border, on the Golan Heights. Incidents continue on the West Bank. 120 Israeli hostages, alive or not, remain in Gaza.
  • Hostage release deal: Still being negotiated. Hamas wants to survive without Israeli troops in Gaza. Israel wants its hostages back and to retain the Philadelphi strip in the Gaza-Egypt border.
  • Haredi troops? There is much debate in the Israeli Cabinet and in Israel about whether some Haredi ultra orthodox Jews should be called up to the DF. The current plan is to call up some Haredim that pay tax, implying they work more than study Torah. Comment: There are some Haredis serving in the IDF – in the Zaka recovery unit, in cyber units and elsewhere. It is wrong to generalize. Tax evasion is to be expected now.
  • IDF investigation: An IDF report on its performance at Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7-8 was published today. The IDF admits it abandoned civilians for many hours and the few soldiers in the area withdrew to regroup when it should have continued the combat. The report did not address the obvious intelligence and back-up failures – they may be addressed in future reports. The IDF admitted the IDF had never trained for such an event.
  • Who’s responsible? After publication of the IDF report, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that he and PM Netanyahu should be investigated.
  • Comment on the IDF report: there will soon be a question whether the IDF was wrong to redeploy troops from the South to the West Bank, or whether extremist settlors contributed by attacking West Bank Arabs, or whether the IDF should have retained/called up more troops and helicopter crews across Israel. Israelis know from their IDF service that even if there were intelligence failures, it is critical to send troops immediately to head off all border infiltrations. This standard back-up measure was clearly lacking on October 7.

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