Ombudsman’s long-awaited Gaza war report set for release

After nine months of leaks and off-record statements by politicians, the state comptroller’s excoriating report on the 2014 Gaza war was poised to be released on Tuesday afternoon.

In the days leading up to the publication, Israeli politicians have been scurrying to prepare their talking points and strategies in order to sway the public to believe their version of the military campaign, known in Israel as Operation Protective Edge.

“In the next week, you’re going to hear a lot about Protective Edge,” former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon wrote on his Facebook page on Saturday night. “They’ll say that we didn’t know, that we didn’t tell them, that we didn’t report to them. And the biggest lie of all? That we weren’t prepared and we lost. That’s nonsense.”

Earlier this month, the report received its final approval from the Knesset. It will not be published in full. MK Karin Elharar (Yesh Atid), who chairs the State Control Committee, said some parts of the section on the tunnels would still be redacted as it contained “information that can be used against us.”

Leaked copies of the long-awaited report by State Comptroller Yosef Shapira indicate that it will criticize the army’s failures to prepare adequately for the threat of Hamas tunnels during the war, and chastise the political leadership for improperly managing the war effort.

According to some of the reports, Shapira is said to show bitter infighting among members of the security cabinet, especially between then-defense minister Moshe Ya’alon and then-economy minister Naftali Bennett.

As so much of it has been leaked ahead of its release, very little is likely to be shocking in the report, but its publication will allow politicians to discuss the topic more freely in public.

Speaking at his weekly Likud faction meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the claim that the military operation had been a failure, asserting instead it was nothing other than a resounding success.

“We hit Hamas with the hardest blow they have ever received. We killed around 1,000 Hamas terrorists, their senior officers. We took down the terror towers,” Netanyahu said. “We acted responsibly and with full coordination between the military and political echelons.”

Netanyahu also rejected the allegation that he had failed to update the Security Cabinet during the military operation and slammed other politicians for playing politics with Israel’s security.

“No cabinet in the history of the state was briefed more,” he said. “And when you enter a cabinet meeting, you are supposed to leave your phone, petty politics and your personal ambitions at the door.”

Those comments appeared to be directed towards Bennett, head of the Jewish Home party, who has painted himself as the sole actor to recognize the threat of Hamas terror tunnels, both during the operation and in the nearly two and a half years since it ended.

Netanyahu also attacked the state comptroller, saying that in contrast to the report, “I back the heads of the IDF and the Shin Bet.”

In the same light, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, who served as foreign minister during the war, said Monday that all the recent criticism about the government’s conduct during the conflict stemmed solely from political concerns, and was harming Israel’s security.

Talk about the report “is a political discourse that does not contribute to security, and even the opposite — it harms Israel’s security,” Liberman told his Yisrael Beytenu faction.

“The IDF and defense establishment have been dealing with drawing lessons and rectifying what needs fixing from the day after the campaign. We have a strong army and the readiness of the army and reservists is at one of the highest levels in decades,” he said.

The 50-day Operation Protective Edge began on July 7, coming on the heels of a large-scale terrorism crackdown operation in the West Bank that was prompted by the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers by Hamas terrorists the month before.

Throughout June and July, Gaza-based terrorist groups began firing missiles at Israel’s southern communities. The IDF responded to these rocket and mortar attacks with limited air and artillery strikes on launch sites, weapons caches and tunnel openings.

Following a number of attacks on Israeli soldiers that used border-crossing Hamas tunnels, Protective Edge, which began as a response to rocket fire, became instead a tunnel-demolition mission.

By the war’s end on August 26, 2014, the IDF had targeted over 30 tunnels, 14 of which crossed into Israel. A total of 73 people — 67 soldiers, six civilians — died on the Israeli side of the conflict. In Gaza, more than 2,000 people were killed, with Israel putting the percentage of civilians killed at approximately 50 percent and Palestinians estimating it to be closer to 70%.

The military is said to be criticized in the report for failing to adequately prepare for the threat of Hamas tunnels and for not being forthright with the security cabinet about its “intelligence gaps,” according to a former top minister, who asked to remain anonymous.

Responding to questions from reporters on Monday, Liberman declined to comment on the content of the report, saying he would do so after the embargo is lifted Tuesday afternoon.

Benny Gantz, who was the IDF chief of staff during the war, stood up for Military Intelligence and its conduct during the war, at a conference for veterans of “Havatzalot,” an elite intelligence program, on Friday.

“During Protective Edge, there was intelligence that was excellent, terrific, accessible, but not always perfect. I am ready to go to the next campaign with the same intelligence that we had in the last one,” Gantz said, according to a report Sunday in the the Yedioth Ahronoth daily.

On the attack side, opposition leader Isaac Herzog said the report was an “indictment” against the political leadership during the military operation.

“This indictment doesn’t deal with receiving illicit gifts or with inappropriate personal behavior,” Herzog told his Zionist Union faction meeting, referring to the ongoing criminal investigations into the prime minister, “but rather with the failure of the country’s leadership, the disregard for human life, the abandonment of soldiers and officers and the citizens of the south.”

He added: “This indictment reveals how the prime minister and his security cabinet failed to understand the threats, to set a strategy to deal with them and to prepare the operation.”

According to Herzog, the only member of the security cabinet who acted appropriately during the war was Tzipi Livni, his number two in the Zionist Union faction, who sat next to him in the meeting. During the war, Livni served as justice minister.

Speaking to reporters earlier Monday, Livni said that the political brouhaha over the tunnel threat and the cabinet briefings is a distraction from the spectacular lack of strategy.

“We should have solved the problem [of Hamas’s terror tunnels] ahead of time. The fact that this wasn’t done by the time the operation began is a great failure,” Livni said.

“Israel doesn’t have a strategy vis-à-vis the Palestinians generally or Gaza specifically,” she cautioned. “We don’t have to reach an agreement with Hamas, but we need to rally the world against Hamas so Israel has the legitimacy to act against the tunnels in any future operation.”

Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid accused Netanyahu of trying to cover up mistakes he had made rather than fix them.

“What is more worrying than the mistakes is the denial,” Lapid said at the start of the Yesh Atid faction meeting. “The attempt to deal with public perception and politics and media spin comes at the expense of national security. That’s not how to run a country.”

Asked if, as a senior minister and member of the security cabinet at the time, he also bears responsibility. Lapid said that “the buck stops” with the prime minister, but added he didn’t think Netanyahu need resign over the report.

Marissa Newman contributed to this report.