46
I hope everyone here understands that none of this is Israel having a change of heart. The truth is the IDF based their entire warplan on Palestinians turning on Hamas and them being isolated. It hasn’t worked, Gazans are more supportive of Hamas than ever and average people are fighting back against Israel.
Now with the credible threat that Iran might attack, they have to regroup their military. Israel’s biggest weakness is their low population, while Israel claims it has access to up to 1.5 million troops, that is at the cost of the country’s working population. Realistically they only have a pool of 180,000 of active military units in fighting condition, compared to Iran’s 650,000. Losing troops in Southern Gaza is militarily a poor tactic.
Israel understands that their military has an additional huge weakness that no other militarized nation does, their moral always has to be very high, given that half the population of the nation has a foreign passport and could easily flee and that they’re reliant on the approval of Western governments, blocking fleeing dual-citizens is too dangerous. If Iran attacks, the fighting age population of Israel might halve overnight.
But, naturally, if Iran stands down, the IDF will march back into the South and begin their extermination campaign again but I think just now are the Israeli strategists realizing they might have bitten too much off to chew with Iran, especially with Russia analyzing everything very carefully if they should intervene in some way.