Blue and White candidate Gabi Ashkenazi, ex-IDF chief of staff, also said that the only way to remove the Iranians from Syria is to threaten Bashar Assad’s rule.
In order to restore deterrence with Hamas, the IDF must kill Hamas soldiers and not just attack empty buildings, former IDF chief-of-staff and Blue and White candidate Gabi Ashkenazi said at the Maariv Security Conference in Tel Aviv on Wednesday.
Ashkenazi said it was critical to make Hamas feel the cost of continuing to periodically fire rockets on Israel as well as continuing a year long confrontation on the Gaza border.
He said that “our deterrence has crashed,” but that Hamas is “not an irresolvable problem.”
The former IDF chief acknowledged that Hamas will respond and the situation “will not be simple,” but said there was no choice if Israel is going to succeed in breaking the cycle of violence with Gaza.
Regarding the threat of Iran building threats against Israel in Syria, he said that the only way to remove the Iranians from that front is to threaten Bashar Assad’s rule.
Complimenting the IDF’s attacks on Iran in Syria in recent years, he said that it would not be sufficient to get Tehran to remove its forces.
He said that Israel needs to “change its strategy. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin smiled, but cannot succeed” at getting Iran and Hezbollah out of Syria.
“We need to take a price from Assad,” saying that Israel would need to directly attack Syrian units and threaten Assad himself, as opposed to only attacking Iranian units in Syria.
He explained that only once Assad himself felt the price of having Iranian forces in his country would he force them to leave.
As reported by The Jerusalem Post