National Unity party leader Benny Gantz on Tuesday said that the IDF can destroy Hezbollah’s military capabilities in a mere matter of days.
Gantz said that a major challenge for Israel is to “return the southern and northern residents back to their homes, even at the price of escalation.” The former minister made these comments at the Herzliya Conference.
He said that he had heard the reports about the Hezbollah threat to bring down Israel’s electrical grid, responding that “we can bring Lebanon completely into the dark, and take apart Hezbollah’s power in days.”
The former senior minister and IDF chief said the price to “Israel will be heavy. We need to back up our institutions. We need to be ready for major incidents of harm [ to the public]. We should try to avoid it, but if we need to do it, we cannot be deterred from it.”
“We cannot let Hezbollah keep threats close to the northern border,” and “we need to get the [northern] residents back by September 1,” he stated.
Forming a team
Another challenge for Israel, which Gantz discussed, was building a regional and global alliance against Iran.
“We still have the opportunity of normalization with the Saudis and other states, to build what we started to build, the Middle East air defense, to form a stranglehold on the Iranian axis,” he said.
Next, he said Israel must work hard with the US “to build up Israel’s defenses and to be ready for ‘the Judgment Day’ of stopping Iranian nuclear weapons.”
The day after
A third challenge he discussed was the long-term conflict with Hamas, including the need for a political plan to replace the terror group’s management of Gaza.
He pushed hard for a hostage deal, even at the cost of ending the war for now.
Gantz noted that the US only killed Osama Bin Laden of al-Qaeda in 2011, 10 years after Bin Laden sent his underlings to destroy the Twin Towers in New York.
His point was that even a long ceasefire would in no way mean that Israel would allow Gaza Chief Yahya Sinwar to live out his days without killing him.
Rather, he said it was clear that Hamas would continue to promote terror, and their actions would give Israel the later excuse to eliminate him and other top Hamas leaders.
In any event, he said it would take years to replace Hamas at a governance level but credited the IDF with destroying Hamas’s existing military capacities.
Last, Gantz praised the High Court of Justice ruling that ordered all Haredim to join the IDF.
He expressed disappointment that the political class had not handled the issue earlier and had passed the ball over and over again to the court.
Further, he suggested that now the political class must create mechanisms for integrating Haredim into the IDF in much higher numbers.
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