Five Points, from Journalist Itay Ilani

1. The army is not a mess in Gaza. The mission that the IDF has received is such that no organization has ever encountered: the demolition of an elite city (above ground), and the demolition of a lower city (the tunnel-system). Fundamentally, it's a complex engineering task that involves endless logistical efforts, making its completion a very long-term affair. For the sake of the illustration, in order to bring an excavator to the point where there is a tunnel, you must first conquer the entire space for security, to make a way between the ruins from the fence to the point, and only then can you start working. At every stage, countless technical glitches can appear - and that's even before we talked about the threat of the terrorists and the chargers, the challenges of supply and manpower, and more. Think about the project of building the light rail in Tel Aviv, that has been going on for decades, and maybe you will be able to get the point. No way will the ground in Gaza turn into dust: it was repeatedly milled by the chains of tanks, the APCs and tractors that move on it continuously back and forth on the way to another mission. The IDF is hard at work on the strip.

2. In World War II, the Sixth Army failed to capture Stalingrad because the urban combat devolved into a war of attrition amid ruins, where the German army struggled to advance. The Soviets, though outnumbered and outgunned, fought fiercely for every building — to the extent that in some structures, one floor was held by Germans, the next by Soviets.

Gaza is not Stalingrad. Hamas doesn’t fight fiercely over every inch — it vanishes underground and reemerges in surprise attacks. But in nearly two decades of security neglect, Hamas has dug thousands of kilometers of tunnels, trained tens of thousands of fighters, and amassed an incomprehensible quantity of weapons.

Even after nearly two years of war, not all of these infrastructures have been destroyed — they still exist. As long as that’s the case, Hamas isn’t going anywhere. Like the Soviets in Stalingrad, they will fight to the last man.

3. Also in areas that have been fully occupied by the IDF, civilians continue to walk around. The Indonesian hospital in Jebalia, for example, remains standing by a thread, as a lonely island in the sea of ruins that surrounds it, because the IDF avoided destroying it. It is likely that there is no longer a medical staff working inside the hospital, but hundreds of citizens remaining in Jabalya find shelter there because they know they will be protected. Even the terrorists know that well. The matter presents an almost impossible challenge to the IDF, that forces it to keep a constant eye on the hospital and its surroundings, to try and understand when it is an innocent citizen going out to collect food, and when it is a terrorist going out to carry out a terrorist attack. This is also a mission that the IDF invests a lot of resources in.

4. Talks of an impending deal reached the last of the soldiers in Gaza. The spreading of rumors is a weakness that the commanders are trying to tackle, as it brings with it a drop in morale. All the fighters in Gaza will be happy with a ceasefire agreement because it will allow them to go home (the summit of every soldier's aspirations), and more importantly - it will bring about the release of hostages, the super mission of IDF soldiers in the strip as they grasp it. But until then, all the soldiers know that they'll have to keep fighting and eat dust (fight in the tunnels).

5. The soldiers I met in Gaza were not worn out. Yes, they were smelly, tired, covered in dust, and longing for home. All of them — all of them — had lost friends. But they were also in their element. The military, and the IDF in particular, is at its peak when it’s fighting.

I met officers who’ve been fighting for almost two years, young soldiers who enlisted after the war began, and reservists who’ve been under emergency call-up since October 7. Every one of them knew exactly what they were doing in Gaza; every one of them had a sense of purpose, pride, and fulfillment. Studio pundits who go on and on about fatigue would do well to step outside their air-conditioned rooms and come down to the field. I’m convinced their perspective would change.