Israel's Army Chief Calls Gaza 'Not an Endless War' in Khan Yunis

Israel’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, spent Sunday in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, holding a situation assessment with senior commanders, touring positions in the field and approving further plans, the Israel Defense Forces said. He told soldiers they were fighting on “the central front of the State of Israel” in what he described as a continuous, multi-arena war.

The visit took place inside Operation Gideon’s Chariots, the name the Israeli military gave to the ground campaign it was then running in Gaza. “You defeated the Rafah Brigade and it is your time to defeat the Khan Yunis Brigade,” Zamir told the troops, referring to Hamas’s regional formations. “We are increasing our activity in accordance with the regular plan,” he added. “Hamas is under great pressure; it has lost most of its assets and its command and control. We will use all our tools so that we can return the hostages to their homes, defeat Hamas and dismantle its rule.” The war in Gaza, he said, “is not an endless war”, and the army would work to shorten it in line with the fulfilment of its goals.

What Operation Gideon's Chariots was

The operation was launched in the middle of May 2025. ABC News reported that the IDF announced on 19 May that it had begun extensive ground operations across northern and southern Gaza and had struck more than 670 targets it linked to Hamas, dismantling infrastructure above and below ground. The stated aims were to defeat Hamas and secure the release of the hostages held in the Strip.

Zamir holds the rank of lieutenant general, the Israeli army’s most senior grade, as The Times of Israel notes in its reporting on his statements about the campaign.

Why commanders talked about brigades, not towns

Hamas organised its forces in Gaza into regional brigades named for the areas they held, Rafah and Khan Yunis among them. That is why Israeli commanders framed progress as the defeat of one brigade after another rather than as territory taken. In early July 2025, on another visit to Khan Yunis, Zamir told troops that the operation had produced the most significant results in Gaza since the start of the war, Arutz Sheva reported, and said that Gaza remained the military’s main effort, with five divisions committed.

How the promise to shorten the war held up

Zamir’s undertaking can be measured against what followed. In late June 2025, The Times of Israel reported that he said the offensive would soon reach the lines set by the government (control of roughly 75 per cent of Gaza’s territory) and that he intended to tell the cabinet that military options in Gaza were approaching their limit. Fighting nevertheless continued for months. A ceasefire took effect only in October 2025, according to PBS NewsHour, roughly five months after Gideon’s Chariots began.

What the military did not say

The IDF’s account of the visit carried no timetable and no definition of what defeating the Khan Yunis Brigade would mean in practice. It gave no casualty figures, Israeli or Palestinian, for the operation. It did not describe the plans Zamir approved on the tour, and it did not explain what “all our tools” referred to in the context of returning the hostages.