The report by State Comptroller Joseph Shapira on Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza Strip has not yet been published, but the initial draft, received by some 40 top defense and political figures, has already stirred up a storm. Reactions by associates of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who pounced on the report and on the comptroller with sharp and irrelevant comments, only reinforced the troubling feelings about the summer 2014 military campaign, which the Israeli public never perceived as a great military success to begin with. Now comes the draft report, which lambasts the political and military echelons for alleged negligence and infuriating irresponsibility.

In a May 9 Al-Monitor article, Ben Caspit described the “war of generals” expected to erupt after the release of the final report. The most significant point in the comptroller’s report is his assessment that putting aside the flawed conduct of the operation and attendant decision-making, the war in Gaza could have been avoided. If the Israeli political echelon had not been shackled by outdated conceptions and basic lack of understanding regarding the significance of the Gaza blockade and its inherent dangers, many lives would have probably been spared. Senior Israeli officials who received the draft — which they described as more severe than the findings of the Winograd Commission that investigated the shortcomings of Israel’s 2006 Lebanon War — said that one of the report’s chapters deals with what Israel could have done to avert the clash.

In the days before the military campaign, there was obvious satisfaction in Jerusalem over Egypt having joined in imposing a hermetic seal on Gaza and the new regime of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi conducting an all-out war against the tunnels dug by Hamas in Rafah on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. The military and political leaderships failed, however, to understand one simple fact: that additional pressure on the Gaza pressure cooker would result in an explosion, as indeed it did.

Although Operation Protective Edge was the peak of an escalation that began with the June 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli youths in the West Bank Etziyon settlement bloc, the root of the problem that led Hamas toward the conflict was the Gaza blockade and the desire to get rid of it at whatever the cost. When Hamas says “whatever the cost,” that includes the total destruction of extensive areas of the Gaza Strip and the lives of Gaza residents.