IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir on Sunday night promised that the military would ensure that "the Gaza Strip will not constitute a threat again to the State of Israel."
“The military pressure we have exerted over the past two years, together with the complementary political move, constitutes a victory over Hamas,” Zamir said.
Zamir also promised that the military would ensure that "the Gaza Strip will not constitute a threat again to the State of Israel."
Zamir said that anytime Hamas raised its head, the IDF would be there to prevent it from reestablishing itself as a threat to the Jewish state.
He said that the IDF's "actions would speak for themselves."
IDF chief says military pressure defeated Hamas
The IDF chief said nothing directly about disarming Hamas, focusing instead on returning the Israeli hostages from the captivity of Hamas, on the IDF's partial withdrawal from Gaza, and on the general presumption that the military had learned lessons from October 7, 2023, in order to keep Israel safe from Hamas in the future.
Earlier Sunday, Defense Minister Israel Katz issued a bizarre statement saying that the disarmament of Hamas would come through a vague process carried out by either Israel or an international peacekeeping force, with the manifestation of disarmament being reflected by eliminating Hamas's tunnels.
At press time, Katz had not expected that destroying more tunnels in Gaza would disarm Hamas.
Other top defense sources suggested that the two goals were not contradictory, but also did not explain whether destroying tunnels would be sufficient as compared to the goal of truly disarming Hamas.
During the 2014 Israel-Hamas conflict, initial statements by top Israeli officials also talked about dealing Hamas a much greater blow. Eventually, they evolved into having a goal of destroying Hamas's attack tunnels and main strategic tunnels in areas of Gaza where IDF troops had entered.