Israeli officials believe that the southern Gaza city of Rafah is “not as important” for Hamas as other bastions where the Israel Defense Forces have conducted major ground operations, according to a top Israeli military spokesman.
“We took an operational plan for the war for approval by the political echelon,” IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said at a conference in Tel Aviv. “Within this plan, we mapped out the war, which was estimated to be about a year of fighting. Within this year, we saw that we would first of all deal with Hamas’s greatest centers of power, which are mostly in northern Gaza and Khan Yunis.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has maintained, in recent months, that Israel cannot achieve the required victory over Hamas without a major ground
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