Middle East

Retired IDF General Says Gaza War ‘Lost Its Purpose’, And Cautions Against Hezbollah Escalation

13/07/2024

Jun 27, 2024

The retired general said in a radio interview that Ukraine had offered lessons to the IDF on how to take on UAVs, but explained that the IDF was not interested in their offer.

Brigadier General Yitzhak Brik, a retired IDF general, said that he believes a war against Lebanon’s Hezbollah could mean “the ruin of the Third Temple” and said the “initiative being rolled out in the security establishment to launch an attack on Hezbollah is collective suicide,” the retired general wrote this week.

“If we pay attention to what Hezbollah is doing to the Galilee in recent months – we find settlements crumbling, empty of people, on thousands of burned acres of land. Scenes that can be seen in Gaza are seen today in the North,” Brik said in a radio interview. “The Iron Dome has been failing to stop the UAVs, rockets, and missiles for months. We did not prepare ourselves for dozens of missiles every day and not for the thousands that we will have in the next war.”

The general also said that Israel needs to “take a time-out” in their war in Gaza and added that it has lost its purpose. He suggested that the IDF needs to take a break from fighting so it can regroup and organize because it hasn’t done so for “20 years”.

On Wednesday, Dr. Seyyed Mohammad Marandi, a professor of English literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran joined Sputnik’s The Critical Hour to discuss a potential conflict between the IDF and Hezbollah.

“They basically want to destroy a very holy site of Muslims that’s been there for many centuries and since the beginning of the rise of Islam. And, the Zionist regime, the Israeli regime being an ethno-supremacist regime, is keen on pushing this forward, much more swiftly nowadays because the more right-wing and extreme elements of the Zionist movement are now in power,” said Marandi.

“And so, they have put aside the pretense of tolerance and the pretense of human rights, of abiding by human rights, which is something which they, previous regimes in Israel never cared for,” the professor added. “They always abuse Palestinians. They always mass slaughter them. But nowadays it’s at an industrial scale – the massacre and slaughter.”

“This is the catastrophic situation that Netanyahu has created for the regime. And if they choose to attack Lebanon or invade Lebanon, it’s going to only get worse. Hezbollah is very powerful. It is very well trained. They are highly motivated. They have prepared themselves for this situation,” he added. “Already the world is outraged at what they’re doing in Gaza. If they do the same thing in Lebanon, it is just going to increase the outrage and it’s going to make the US look even more evil in the eyes of the world.”

Sputnik’s Garland Nixon suggested that a possible conflict would be “catastrophic” for the US economy and “probably even worse for the European economy”. He then asked Marandi if Israel’s economic suffering would be tied to their Western allies.

“The economic situation in the US is not good, but the economic situation in Europe is much worse. And if there is a crisis, it is going to get much worse in Europe,” the professor said. “They are more vulnerable than the US. They don’t produce any oil. And, the refugees will be moving to Europe.”

“It’s extraordinary that the Americans and Europeans, when they supported apartheid South Africa, when they supported Rwanda, they didn’t pay that much of a price back then because it was far off. It was during the Cold War,” he continued. “Today, it’s being done in front of a global audience, this genocide. It’s very close to home. It’s very close to, as you were saying, key oil and gas-producing centers.”

“If this war extends into Lebanon, the chances of it becoming a regional war will be very high. If the Americans in any way or form start attacking Lebanon, for example, I have no doubt that the Americans will lose everything in Iraq. The resistance in Iraq will not let them get away with it. And then, that would bring about a catastrophic situation economically. So it’s amazing how the Americans and the Europeans are willing to risk everything for the sake of this regime,” Marandi suggested.

The show’s guest then suggested that the Israeli regime has for “decades” been conducting a diplomatic, public relations facade allowing them to be “slick enough” to get away with genocide.

“In Lebanon, for example, when they invaded Lebanon and massacred the Lebanese. When they would attack Gaza on previous occasions, they’d always be able to somehow justify this to Western audiences, but now they are their own worst enemies,” he added.

“But these people who are now in office are so fanatical that they’ve just thrown aside the facade. They’ve thrown aside the mask, and that’s why you see young Americans, young American Jews, you see Europeans alongside the whole of the Global South, looking on in shock at what these people are saying and doing.”

“I’m sure these retired generals have been hearing from their former colleagues that they’ve lost. That Hezbollah in the north is taking out their high tech equipment, that Hezbollah in the north is able to go into Israel without the Iron Dome being able to do anything about it,” Marandi said.