In a pointed article published in Foreign Affairs on Thursday, Ami Ayalon, who also once commanded the Israeli navy, declared, “Israel is fighting a war it cannot win.”
Ayalon described the assault as “unjust, immoral, and counterproductive,” urging the international community to enforce a political endgame.
He called on global powers to circumvent Tel Aviv’s obstruction and initiate a process aimed at establishing the so-called two-state solution.
He warned that Israel’s stubbornness threatens to unravel the entire regional order.
“The longer the vacuum in Israel’s planning persists, the more international actors will need to come together to prevent an even worse catastrophe than the one currently unfolding,” Ayalon cautioned.
Without a two-state solution, he argued, Israel risks deepening its international isolation, losing support among allies, and becoming a global pariah.
“Wars without a clear political goal cannot be won,” he asserted.
Ayalon’s essay represents one of the most scathing critiques to emerge from Israel’s security establishment. More than 22 months into the military offensive, he warned that Israel has lost any semblance of strategic coherence.
While the Israeli military claims to have dismantled the core infrastructure of the Hamas resistance group, Ayalon noted that Israeli authorities have failed to articulate a political plan for Gaza, leaving the region in the grip of a humanitarian catastrophe and instability.
In his article, the former spy chief also proposed a political solution to the conflict through the long-overlooked Arab Peace Initiative (API).
This 2002 proposal, endorsed by all 22 Arab League states, offers full normalization of ties with Israel in exchange for a complete withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories and the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the borders defined in 1967.
However, successive Israeli regimes, particularly under prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have not only dismissed the API but also actively sabotaged prospects for Palestinian statehood.
Netanyahu himself has openly boasted of derailing the Oslo Accords and has expanded settlement construction across the occupied West Bank.
Ayalon also directly challenges the assumptions underpinning the US-brokered Abraham Accords and Washington’s failed attempts to bypass the Palestinian question through regional normalization.
He believes these moves, which left Palestinians hopeless about the future, helped trigger the October 2023 al-Aqsa operation.
Israel has been facing mounting outrage over its war on Gaza. The war has devastated the besieged Palestinian region and brought it to the verge of famine.
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants last November for Netanyahu and former minister of military affairs Yoav Gallant, citing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the besieged coastal territory.
Recent reports reveal that Netanyahu ignored calls from senior ministers to speed up ceasefire talks and deliberately restricted aid to Gaza to force Hamas to surrender.
The military wing of the Hamas resistance movement, the Qassam Brigades, recently warned that if Israel chooses to continue with the “war of extermination,” it will witness increasing funerals of its soldiers and military officers.
Gaza death toll from Israeli war exceeds 61,200
Meanwhile, the Gaza Health Ministry said in a statement on Thursday that at least 61,258 Palestinians were killed in Israel’s aggression on the Gaza Strip since October 2023, including 197 who have died from hunger.
A statement said 100 bodies were brought to hospitals in the last 24 hours, while 603 people were injured, taking the number of injuries to 152,045 in the Israeli onslaught since October 2023.
The ministry also said that four more people died from starvation and malnutrition over the past day, pushing the death toll since the beginning of the war to 197, including 96 children.
The ministry also said that 51 Palestinians were killed and 230 were injured while trying to get humanitarian aid in the past day, bringing the total number of people killed while seeking aid to 1,706, with over 12,030 others wounded since May 27, when the controversial US-Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began operations.
Press TV