http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/184387#.U_sNiMVdXSgBarak Seener of RUSI says Israel 'should have gone in harder,' must reclassify human shields as combatants and stop aborting airstrikes.Barak Seener, an Associate fellow at Britain's Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies, thinks Israel is “choosing not to win” the war in Gaza.
Seener – who has provided analysis and expert commentary for a range of international broadcasters and news outlets including the Associated Press, Al-Jazeera, BBC, CNN, Chinese CCTV, Fox News, Sky News, Voice of America, Bloomberg, Reuters and Xinhua – told Arutz Sheva that Israel is pursuing a misguided approach to the war, both on the ground and in the battle of words and images. The result will inevitably a deterioration of Israel's international standing, as the war wears on.
“In general,” he explained, “modern warfare is not geared towards protracted conflict, and thus Israel should have initially gone in harder. This was prevented by a lack of extensive sound intelligence of tunnels and the whereabouts of Hamas operatives. Israel's diplomatic standing will decline as Europe does not anymore understand the power of ideologies, let alone a genocidal, zero sum game Islamist and suicidal ideology.”
Is Israel's hasbarah effort regarding the effort to avoid civilian casualties doing any good?“There is so much that has been reported in Israeli news outlets but has not been reported in European outlets. This includes Hamas executing Fatah members, children digging tunnels, concrete being redirected to building tunnels rather than hospitals and schools, the affluence of Hamas's leadership who divert funding to the Palestinians to their own personal accounts, even pictures of tunnels were reported by the Washington Post a few weeks earlier than Reuters.
“The main issue is that Israel should take exactly the same initiatives (not more) as Allied forces have done in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. While it is natural that Israel should seek to avoid civilian casualties, its priority is to its own civilians and soldiers. Israel has failed as there is a current stalemate of its civilians under attack, Hamas perpetuating its firing of rockets with Israel's economy having been hurt as a result.