Three years after the war began, Gaza Division commander Aluf Mishne Liron Batito presented the IDF's achievements in Gaza in an interview Thursday on the IDF podcast.
"Today the Gaza Division is in a position where we control 63% of the territory. We have established nearly 40 new outposts, and this gives us a very significant advantage," Batito said. "The defense is forward defense, the communities are behind, and IDF soldiers are positioned ahead of everything. Our control of the crossings today is such that Hamas cannot bring in what it brought in before."
"We are conducting many operations to degrade its capabilities, strike operatives, seize weapons, and perhaps most significantly, operational freedom of movement," he added. "We are constantly doing active work to create the best possible defense."
"In addition, we are drilling across the entire Strip to locate underground infrastructure. Although we already have a very significant achievement, we have destroyed nearly all the underground network," he noted. "And still there is underground infrastructure that may exist within the Strip. We are drilling the entire Strip, literally arriving and every few meters, drilling deep and using technological means to map the entire Strip. Hamas is in a very, very difficult situation."
Batito also addressed the elimination of Hamas's military leadership: "When you look objectively at three years of war, we have eliminated all the heads of the military wing, all the brigade commanders, most of the battalion commanders were eliminated in this war."
Asked about the complexity of maneuvering while attempting to return hostages and prevent harm to them, Batito acknowledged "it really is a very complex maneuver. You cannot use fire as you wish, you are very careful about reaching places where there are hostages. Literally toward the end of the first month of the war, we had intelligence about a location with live hostages. We were there in formation to extract them, day after day and they are not coming out. I am praying they will come out, and the moment they come out, I know how to create a move where I pull them out. And 3-4 days pass, literally 24 hours before the agreement, this is the first agreement. And I, in one of the most difficult decisions, I am leaving here now, when a few hundred meters away there is a family. But we made a decision, and I am proud of it in retrospect, because we would have endangered them there."
"I did not believe at first that we would succeed in bringing all the people back home in such a period," he concluded. "I did everything I could, we worked hard on it, but it is an insane achievement, and I think it is part of our uniqueness."
