With the passage of more than 1,000 days since the Israeli war, the Hebrew media of various orientations, with the wide participation of senior military correspondents, political analysts, and experts, devoted large areas to covering this symbolic and painful day in the Israeli conscience, as they described it.
The coverage was not merely a monitoring of numbers, but rather turned into a public trial of the Israeli strategy, and an unprecedented consensus on the existence of a huge gap between the army’s “tactical achievements” and the abject strategic and political failure to achieve the goals set by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, most notably “absolute victory.”
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Strategic failure and erosion of values
In a critical reading of the situation, the voice of the intellectual and military elites emerges, which began to warn of the moral and structural repercussions afflicting the Israeli military establishment. In this context, strategic researcher Shmuel Meir highlighted what he called “moral deterioration,” which has become a real danger to the occupation army.
Based on sober military analyses, especially what the prominent analyst Amos Hariel wrote in his summary of “The Thousand-Day War,” the systematic policy of revenge in the Gaza Strip led to the mass killing of civilians. Documented data indicate that two-thirds of the Palestinian victims (out of about 72,000) were unarmed civilians.
The writer says that this erosion of values, according to the internal Israeli reading, is no longer just criticism directed by external parties, but rather has become an internal recognition of the seriousness of military behavior that threatens the institutional identity of the army.
Brilliant tactics and miserable strategy
The central talk shows reflected a state of shocking frustration and pessimism compared to the expectations that prevailed in the first days of the war. In the “Al-Akhbar” program presented by journalist Yaakov Elon on “Knesset Channel 99,” an in-depth discussion took place that revealed the state’s inability to cash “military checks” in the Policy Bank.
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Colonel in the reserve forces, Hanoch Dauba, who fought in Gaza, bitterly stated, “A thousand days ago I was in the Gaza enclave, and I did not imagine in my imagination that we would reach this point in time and its result would be two miserable yellow lines in the north and south,” explaining that despite the massive destruction, killing, and tactical demolition of infrastructure, the strategic situation is “not good at all.”
For his part, and despite his attempt to highlight some “achievements such as weakening Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran” compared to the first night of “Kirya,” TV writer Roi Idan agreed with “Dauba” that “absolute victory” is still far away, expressing his deep concern about the return of the military and intelligence systems to “unhealthy behavioral patterns” that prevailed before the great failure, without sufficient learning from the ongoing experience.
A bitter reckoning on 7 fronts
Veteran military correspondent Alon Ben David, on Israeli Channel 13, provided a dark account of a thousand days of continuous fighting on seven fronts, a war that claimed the lives of 2,042 Israelis and injured tens of thousands physically and psychologically.
Ben David highlighted the Israeli failure to translate military strikes into a sustainable political reality through the following axes:
- Gaza Strip: Despite eliminating Hamas’ veteran leadership and controlling half of the Strip’s area, Israel failed to find an “alternative authority,” making Hamas the undisputed ruler, and it is even beginning to recover and equip itself with weapons for the next round, he claimed.
- Iranian axisDespite the strikes, the Iranian regime emerged stronger from the last battle, gained international legitimacy and its economy is recovering with oil money to destroy Israel, as the analyst states.
- Lebanese Front: Despite weakening Hezbollah and creating conditions for change, the failure to translate the military achievement into a political settlement that grants security to the people of the north means that the border towns will never return to what they were on October 6.
Ben David concluded that the government’s management of the war harmed Israel’s most important strategic assets, which are “relations with the United States,” stressing that the current strategic situation is worse than it was on the eve of October 7.
Absence of “absolute victory”
From the perspective of the right-wing media, military and security writer Hillel Biton Rosen tried on Israeli Channel 14 to justify the gap between military achievement and political goal, likening the situation to a football match in which Israel wins militarily with a score of (10-0) on every front, but loses by political standards.
Rosen acknowledged that the political goals of dismantling Hamas, expelling the population that supports it, dismantling Hezbollah, and changing the regime in Iran have not yet been achieved.
Rosen called for continuing military pressure in Lebanon and Gaza, trying to maintain confidence in the current political leadership, while emphasizing that the Israeli street still aspires to “revenge and absolute security.”
In another context, Rosen attacked former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s statements about Sinwar’s fear of him, considering them to be baseless intelligence allegations, and stressing that the period of Bennett’s government was the time when Hamas sharpened its swords for the major strike.
Normalization and new rules have evaporated
The Palestinian affairs editor at the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation, Elior Levy, painted a bleak picture of the transformations of the Middle East over the past thousand days. Levy claimed that a thousand days ago, Israel was one step away from normalization with Saudi Arabia, but the Hamas documents that were revealed proved that the rush towards this normalization was what determined the “zero hour” for the October 7 attack, and this hope evaporated under the dust of war.
On the Lebanese front, Levy described the events as a “rollercoaster of contradictions.” After the assassination of Nasrallah and the liquidation of the leadership through Operation “Assad’s Roar,” Naim Qassem (who was seen in Israel as a pale alternative) imposed the rules of the “new-old” game on Tel Aviv.
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Regarding Gaza, Levy expressed his astonishment that Hamas, a thousand days after the October 7 attack, is still being treated as a legitimate regional player with whom negotiations are conducted in Arab capitals, stressing: “This is not what normalization looks like, this is not what the collapse of the axis looks like, and this is not what absolute victory looks like.”
1000 days without answers
In an accurate diagnosis of the lack of accountability and transparency, Doron Kadosh, military correspondent for Israeli Army Radio, summarized the Israeli crisis in a list of fundamental and burning questions that are still searching for answers after 1,000 days of failure, the most prominent of which are:
- Did Prime Minister Netanyahu read the dangerous “Jericho Wall” document that reached his office in 2018 and included the detailed Hamas attack plan?
- What took place in the secret cabinet discussions throughout the years leading up to the failure?
- Why did army leaders ignore the warnings of female surveillance recruits, non-commissioned officers, and field units?
- What really happened at Shin Bet headquarters on the night of October 7? Why were his published investigations brief and inaccurate?
- What is the real role of the Mossad, the National Security Council, and the Coordinator of Government Activities in formulating “Conceptia” (the failed intelligence concept), whose leaders have not been seriously questioned to this day?
On the 1,000th anniversary, the Israeli media unanimously agree that Israel is waging a war without a clear political horizon, and that the “tactical heroics” of soldiers in the field are being wasted on the threshold of political impotence and evasion of crucial questions.
She points out that the “Thousand Day War” did not change the face of the Middle East in favor of Israel, but rather placed the Hebrew state in front of a shattered mirror that reflects the depth of its strategic crisis, its loss of security, and the erosion of its international and regional standing, without any sign of an end in sight.
