Benny Gantz: Israel can destroy Hezbollah’s military in days

The IDF can destroy Hezbollah’s military capabilities in a matter of days, National Unity Party leader Benny Gantz said on Tuesday.

Speaking at the 21st Herzliya Conference at Reichman University, Gantz said a major challenge for Israel is to “return the southern and northern residents back to their homes, even at the price of escalation.”

He said he heard the reports about the Hezbollah threat to bring down Israel’s electrical grid, and responded, “We can bring Lebanon completely into the dark, and take apart Hezbollah’s power in days.”

The former defense minister and IDF chief of staff said the price to “Israel will be heavy. We need to back up our institutions. We need to be ready for major incidents of harm [to the public]. We should try to avoid it, but if we need to do it, we cannot be deterred from it.

“We cannot let Hezbollah keep threats close to the northern border,” he added, “we need to get the [northern] residents back by September 1.”

Forming a team

Another challenge for Israel that Gantz discussed was building a regional and global alliance against Iran.

“We still have the opportunity of normalization with the Saudis and other states, to build what we started to build, the Middle East air defense, to form a stranglehold on the Iranian axis,” he said.

He emphasized that Israel must work hard with the US “to build up Israel’s defenses and to be ready for ‘the Judgment Day’ of stopping Iranian nuclear weapons.”

The day after

A third challenge he noted was the long-term conflict with Hamas, including the need for a political plan to replace the terror group’s management of Gaza.

He pushed hard for a hostage deal, even at the cost of ending the war for now.

Gantz noted that the US only killed Osama Bin Laden of al-Qaeda in 2011, 10 years after 9/11, meaning that even a long ceasefire would in no way mean that Israel would allow Gaza Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar to live out his days without killing him.

Rather, he said, it was clear that Hamas would continue to promote terror and their actions would give Israel the later excuse to eliminate him and other top Hamas leaders.

In any event, he said it would take years to replace Hamas at a governance level, but credited the IDF with destroying Hamas’s existing military capacities.

In matters relating to direct news of the day, Gantz praised the High Court of Justice for its ruling to order a draft for eligible ultra-Orthodox (haredi) men. He expressed his disappointment in the political class for mishandling the issue earlier, instead of passing the ball over and over again to the court.

He further suggested that now the political class must create mechanisms for integrating haredim into the IDF in much higher numbers.

Earlier at the conference, Reichman University President Boaz Ganor said, “Hamas is a tactical threat, Hezbollah is a strategic threat, and Iran is an existential threat.”

He warned that Israel had fallen into Iran’s trap, spending nine months fighting a player of minimal importance and wasting large amounts of goodwill globally, while Tehran has mostly gotten to sit back and watch.

Further, he said Iran is playing long-term chess, with Israel playing short-term poker.Ganor even argued that Iran knew more than Israeli intelligence has said, meaning that it really did plan the entire October 7 invasion.

In addition, he argued that Iran and Hezbollah’s denials of knowing Hamas’s plans were also pre-coordinated.

He did not specifically say that Tehran knew the date of the invasion, but Ganor has argued that Hamas was not sophisticated enough to pull off the coordinated massive rocket attack land invasion simultaneously on its own, nor was it capable of the extreme information security it undertook to avoid the IDF detecting the moment of the invasion.