Israel faces “multi-arena war” from seven different fronts, defence minister says
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00:00 to Geneva and bring in Alexandre Voutravers. He is a security expert and editor in chief of the
00:06 Swiss Military Review. Well let's start, Alexandre, on these official comments to say, you know,
00:13 we've known about skirmishes in the past with different countries but now saying officially
00:17 there's a war on several different fronts. Let me ask you first what you make of those comments.
00:21 There's definitely two different layers of interpretation. There's a political layer of
00:29 interpretation and here you want to say that definitely there is solidarity, there is objective
00:35 common interest between a certain number of parties, a certain number of countries,
00:39 and this feeds very well into the Israeli traditional rhetoric of not only a two-front war
00:45 but essentially everybody is against us. And then you can look at it from a military operational
00:51 point of view. There are missiles and drones and activities coming from all fronts and Israel
00:58 probably does not have enough air defences and defences in general to be placed against the
01:06 north to protect against Lebanese incursions, against the south to address the Gaza situation,
01:13 somewhere else in order to address drones and missiles fired from Yemen and so on and so forth.
01:20 Really interesting analysts picking up already in the last half an hour since these comments that
01:26 Iranian state media that talk about, well they claim that an airstrike carried out by Israel in
01:32 Damascus in Syria had killed one of its senior commanders, Saeed Razi Mousavi. Israel potentially
01:40 within those comments, analysts suggesting there was a tacit admission that actually Israel did
01:43 carry out that airstrike. What do you make of that? I can't really comment on that but once
01:48 again if you look at it from an operational and military point of view, the Israeli air force
01:54 capabilities have been essentially taking on the brunt of the fighting of the military operations
02:03 in the first few weeks of the war in Gaza and now that land forces have gone in, essentially there
02:12 is quite a bit of aerial potential that is available for other types of missions and definitely
02:21 these incursions and these targeted interdiction missions are something that the Israeli air force
02:27 is definitely capable of. Now we were talking about the intensity of the airstrikes overnight,
02:33 more than 100 according to the IDF on different parts of Gaza including not just the refugee
02:39 camps in the centre in the north, Jabalia but also Khan Yunis and in one of the supposed evacuation
02:45 safe zones around Rafa in the south as well. In terms of following the military patterns,
02:53 you know the drumbeat of it by the day for the last 11 weeks or so, are you getting a sense of
02:58 what Israel talks about potentially seeing a third stage of its operations, what we call the third
03:05 phase or you still think this is an all-out targeting? Where do you see this going at the
03:09 moment? It's not really an all-out targeting but definitely there is an effort made on the behalf
03:15 of the Israeli operational and military commanders to keep the pressure up, whatever is happening on
03:23 the ground even when there is a slower pace of land operations taking place or when forces need
03:31 to be moved to other areas. So definitely there's a bit of that. On the other hand, definitely we
03:38 are seeing more advance and I would say if we compare the results of the Israeli forces on the
03:47 ground with some of the expert predictions, we are seeing that the Israelis have moved very swiftly
03:54 and they have moved much more quickly than anticipated and they are definitely now moving
04:00 or shifting away from an emphasis in Gaza towards the south of the Gaza Strip.
04:07 With the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that the war will continue until Hamas
04:12 is destroyed, are you also managing to get any sense of analysis of the ability of
04:18 Hamas in its responses? We're seeing some rocket attacks towards Tel Aviv that have been
04:22 protected by the IM-Don't system but what sense do you get of its ability to continue fighting?
04:30 If we look at the long game of this military operation, I have been saying this consistently,
04:37 there's three military and political options. These three military and political options have
04:44 not changed regardless of the success or the pace of operations taking place now in Gaza and
04:53 definitely we are still going to be confronted with a substantial, very important, significant
04:59 political decision what to do with the Gaza Strip in the future.