Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, IDF Chief of Staff, had to intervene into a shouting match between the head of his army’s southern command Maj. Gen. Yaniv Asor and Air Force chief Maj. Gen. Tomer Bar. Asor complained that his bombing requests were being overruled, and Bar said that the strikes that he had been calling in were unnecessarily killing civilians and showed a “lack of professionalism,” according to sources reported yesterday by The Telegraph in London. They write that Hebrew media said the argument swiftly escalated, “with both veteran commanders shouting at each other in front of numerous senior officers.
The Telegraph reported that “the southern command firepower policy was taken to the extreme and the definitions of collateral damage were changed in a way that the damage outweighed the benefit, such as in demands to attack junior Hamas operatives amid high collateral damage.” They cited an anonymous military official as saying: “We aren’t talking about either air support for ground forces in breaking developments or terrorists who have been spotted. There isn’t any dilemma here, no matter the price, in order to help the troops in battle. We’re at a different stage of the war and aren’t in the first months of the [ground] maneuver” any more.
Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth has been covering the tensions amongst the commanders in recent months. Should the full occupation of Gaza be ordered, it is expected that heavy bombing will precede any ground deployment. Such fracture lines amongst various commanders may be sorely tested, as they see many more civilians killed by bombs.
