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Israeli Army Predicts Violence May Last for Months
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) estimated that the current wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence is likely to continue for months, and may probably run into next year, IDF spokesman Ron Kitrey said Tuesday morning.
Speaking in an interview with Israel's Army Radio, Kitrey said "The assessment of the situation by the IDF chief of staff is that we are not talking about a short-lived adventure."
He said the army has plans to prepare for the continuation of the clashes. "The significance for the army is first of all not to prepare for a short-term deployment but to move toward long-term procedures," said the brigadier general.
The bloody clashes that rocked the region for nearly four weeks, have killed over 120 and wounded thousands, most of them Palestinians.
According to a report published Tuesday by Israel's Ha'aretz daily, the IDF's most recent revised assessment was that if peace talks with the Palestinians resume, the current disturbance will subside for a short time but is likely to erupt again once the negotiations run into trouble again.
Such a cycle of ebb and flow will continue for months, it added.
Kitrey said Tuesday the Palestinians have taken a "strategic decision" whereby "one way or another they are moving towards an independent Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem."
In a separate analysis, Uzi Dayan, head of the National Security Council, also concluded that the current round of violence is likely to go on for many months.
The Dayan report was drafted in cooperation with military intelligence, the General Security Service of Israel, the Mossad (Israel's secret agency), the Foreign Ministry and the police.
Due to such a prospect, the IDF had asked the Finance Ministry to allocate more budget money, an additional 2.5 billion shekels (about 600 million U.S. dollars), for its operation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The army argued that it should fill the gaps in its stockpile of war material, which had been almost used up because of the violence. It will also have to extend compulsory service on those soldiers who might have been demobilized if there were no clashes.
However, the army predicted that it is unlikely that the violence will spill over and lead to a full-scale regional war, after the Arab League summit last weekend, which condemned Israel's "barbaric" measures against the Palestinians but stopped short of urging Arab countries to sever ties with Israel.
Meanwhile, the Israeli-Lebanese border could heat up soon, according to the report. Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas seized three Israeli soldiers in the border area on October 7 to show their support for the struggle of their Palestinian brothers.
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