The Hamas leadership is provoking Israel into starting a ground operation in the Gaza Strip, which may result in a failure for Israeli authorities, Alex Younger, Former Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) said in an interview for BBC.
"HAMAS is essentially creating a trap for Israel, and will be well pleased, if Israel commits itself to an open-ended full-scale ground invasion of Gaza, because of the scale and intensity of the conflict that that would entail and the loss of innocent life that would inevitably follow, and the radicalization [of the standoff] that would engender," he said, adding that this would put Israel’s allies in an ‘impossible position,’ and this is what HAMAS wants.
"It is about reactions. Israel is going to have to do strikes into Gaza to demonstrate its intent to assuage the expectations of the Israeli people. But there is not, fundamentally, at the end of this, a military solution to this problem. You cannot kill all the terrorists without creating more terrorists. And military operations of this kind very, very rarely succeed outside of some kind of political strategy," Younger noted.