Former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert said that the Zionist entity’s leadership knew it was hopeless to try and retrieve the detained soldiers.

Haaretz

By Gili Cohen

Former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, who witnessed the defeat in the year of 2006 on the hands of Hezbollah fighters, said that the Zionist entity’s leadership knew it was hopeless to try and retrieve the detained soldiers.

Speaking on the sixth anniversary of July war, Olmert said the Israeli leadership knew in advance that the retrieval of the two soldiers was a lost cause, saying that the war had "one objective which we did not achieve, and knew in advance that we couldn't achieve, and it was said in cabinet meetings."

"We said that we were working to bring about the two soldiers' release, [however] we had no doubts that it was so (that they were no longer alive), but we didn't want that to stand as it is, if they were murdered," he added.
Olmert then said that those who had participated in cabinet meetings at the time "said that there wasn't a chance to bring them back through a military operation."

The former prime minister also spoke of that war's final push, a move to advance Israeli occupation forces as much as possible in the last 48 hours prior to the planned ceasefire.

According to Olmert, the Israeli government received an overnight message toward the end of the war from a senior U.S. official, which said that United Nations was about to pass a resolution that was significantly different than the ceasefire, and that was written "under French pressure and [using French] wording, and that the Americans weren't able to withstand the pressure of this maneuvers."

"We understood that perhaps the only way to change these things is to let this wider move [of entering moving Israeli forces to the north of their positions in Lebanon] to appear as the real thing, so to apply the required pressure on agents in the international arena," Olmert said.

According to the former premier, "attempts to get anything from the Americans failed, because everyone was asleep. And so eventually, it boiled down to a point in time where it's possible that the required pressure would not have been created. That's where the operation dubbed "the last 48 hours" was born."