Gallant: ‘Israel’s greatest missed opportunity’ was not attacking Hezbollah in Oct. 2023
Fired defense minister accuses Netanyahu of being overly hesitant to use force in Gaza and Lebanon; also says Israel could have returned ‘more hostages, earlier, at a lower cost’
Ex-defense minister Yoav Gallant, in an interview aired Thursday, accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being overly hesitant to use military force against Hamas and Hezbollah, of undermining a viable hostage-ceasefire deal in May, and of failing to produce a political plan to capitalize on military successes in Gaza.
In the interview — Gallant’s first with Israeli television since he was fired from his post by Netanyahu in November — the general-turned-lawmaker also addressed the failures of the government and military to prevent and respond to Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, which started the ongoing war.
Gallant called for a state commission of inquiry into what happened and said he would cooperate fully and accept whatever it found with respect to his own failings.
Among the first topics discussed in the interview with Channel 12 news was Gallant’s push behind the scenes to launch a major attack against the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon, on October 11, 2023, just four days after Hamas had launched its invasion from the Gaza Strip.
The ex-defense minister called the government’s failure to heed his advice on that day “the State of Israel’s greatest missed opportunity, security-wise, since its founding.”
“We knew that senior officials from Hezbollah were going to convene. We could have attacked from the sky and taken out [censored] heads of Hezbollah, and also Iranians, [Hezbollah chief Hassan] Nasrallah, all the rest. The entire top echelon of Hezbollah,” Gallant said.
“Immediately after that, we could have carried out a plan of attack against the entire missile and rocket system, the way we did almost a year later, in September, and we would have gotten not just to 70 or 80 percent of them, but 90% or more, because a great portion of them were concentrated in storehouses,” he added.
Hezbollah ‘would have ceased to exist’
In addition, Gallant said, the “beeper operation” — in which thousands of Hezbollah pagers exploded, marking the start of Israel’s eventual offensive against the terror group some eleven months later — was “ready long before the war,” and could have been executed in concert with the strikes he advocated in October 2023.
“Hezbollah as a military organization would have ceased to exist — no leadership, no missiles or rockets, most of its operatives killed in the field,” Gallant asserted.
According to the ousted defense minister, when he presented the plan to Netanyahu, the prime minister insisted on discussing the proposal with the United States — at which point, Gallant said, he knew the attack would not come to pass.
“In accordance with his request, I spoke with [US National Security Adviser] Jake Sullivan. After a few minutes, [Strategic Affairs Minister] Ron Dermer joined the conversation, and I received an absolute ‘no,'” Gallant recalled.
“I went back to the prime minister, and I told him, ‘We have to do this.’ He pointed out the window at all the buildings, and told me: ‘You see these buildings? All of this will be destroyed, by Hezbollah’s leftover capacity. After we hit them, they’ll destroy everything you see,'” Gallant said.
Netanyahu defended his decision to block Gallant’s October 11 proposal, telling the friendly Channel 14 network on Thursday that it would have been “a horrible mistake” to open a two-front war so soon after the Hamas attacks of October 7.
The premier also claimed there were only around 150 booby-trapped beepers in Hezbollah hands in October 2023 “as opposed to thousands that we accumulated” in the ensuing months.
That assertion drew a swift response from Gallant, who wrote on X that “the pager operation was prepared years before the war and was ready for activation on October 11.”
“Contrary to what was said, thousands of pagers were in the hands of the terrorists by the time I suggested attacking Hezbollah,” Gallant said.
He asserted that had the plan been activated in October 2023, the damage caused by the pagers would have been secondary to the damage caused by walkie-talkie devices that had also been rigged with explosives.
While dozens of Hezbollah operatives were killed and thousands more were wounded in the September 16-17 pager and walkie-talkie attacks, far more were put out of commission by the pager blasts than by the walkie-talkies.
The reason for this, Gallant said, was because by September 2024, “the vast majority of walkie-talkies were in warehouses, and their explosion caused no damage.” Speaking with Channel 12, Gallant said the devices were being inspected after raising the suspicions of Hezbollah.
In the interview, Gallant also discussed the strike that killed Nasrallah , recalling how he and IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi phoned Netanyahu — who was visiting the United States — to get permission for the attack. After giving them the green light, Netanyahu asked that they wait until after he delivered his speech to the UN General Assembly, Gallant recalled.
“Eighty-four tons of bombs fell… and Nasrallah passed from this world.”
Gaza ground invasion
According to Gallant, Netanyahu was not only overly hesitant to attack Hezbollah early in the war — he was even reluctant to send ground troops into Gaza, again issuing grim predictions about the cost, that did not pan out.
“Before the ground operation, the prime minister told me there would be thousands [of soldiers] killed in Gaza. I told him, there won’t be thousands killed — and beyond that, what do we have an army for? If after they kill a thousand of our citizens and kidnap them and kill women and children and elderly people, we won’t carry it out?”
“And then came the reasoning: ‘They’ll use the hostages as human targets,'” Gallant recalled.
“I told him, we and Hamas, those human animals, have only one thing in common: We both want to protect the hostages,” Gallant said, explaining that Hamas needed the hostages alive to use them as a tool against Israel.
“It was a struggle,” Gallant said again, of the effort to convince the government to launch a ground operation. “This whole thing took time — in the end, the IDF chief of staff and I, we came to this decision,” he said.
Hostage deal and ‘day after’ in Gaza
Asked whether he believes the government did all that it could to return those abducted on October 7 and held hostage in Gaza, the ex-defense chief said, “I don’t think so.”
“We could have brought [home] more hostages, earlier, and at a lower cost. The proposal in early July, that Hamas agreed to, is identical to the deal now, just [the current one] is worse in several ways,” Gallant said.
“There are fewer hostages alive, I’m sorry to say, more time has gone by, and we’re paying a heavier price — because there are at least 110 more murderers who will be released in this process.”
Asked who he thinks is to blame for the July deal failing, Gallant told the following story, from the end of April:
“In the war cabinet, we made a unanimous decision to move toward a deal, during which we would withdraw from the Netzarim Corridor, and there were different keys for how many hostages would be released in exchange for how many prisoners.
“In the evening, there was a cabinet discussion, and in walked Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who didn’t know — or wasn’t supposed to know — about the plan, and he said: ‘There’s a plan to return 18 hostages in exchange for withdrawing from Netzarim,’ and he said he would oppose it and leave the government,” Gallant recalled.
“I don’t know [who told him]. I didn’t tell him. We said in the security establishment — we needed to bring [home] 33 hostages, and the minimum number was 18. The number that went out, several hours later, to the media, was 18.
Channel 12 reported late last year that Netanyahu’s office was behind the leak to Smotrich.
“It took a few days for Hamas to understand what was happening from the Israeli media, and they said, we’re backing out of the deal — and, in practice, the whole thing fell apart. And it only came back at the end of May, through the president’s speech.”
Asked if it was pressure by Trump that led to Netanyahu’s finally accepting the deal, in its worse form, this time around, Gallant responded:
“Netanyahu takes Trump into consideration more than he does [Itamar] Ben Gvir,” he said, referring to the far-right leader whose Otzma Yehudit party quit the government to protest the ceasefire agreement that took effect January 19. “That wasn’t true of [US president] Biden. That’s the whole story.”
Asked why his recollection of how Netanyahu torpedoed hostage negotiations doesn’t line up with that of the Biden administration, which repeatedly blamed Hamas as the lone obstacle, Gallant suggested that the Biden administration became influenced by domestic political considerations, which would not have judged kindly a president blaming Israel over Hamas ahead of a presidential election.
“I heard the Americans throughout the entire war. Something changed sometime around August when the US [entered] election [season],” he said.
Pressed as to why Biden officials haven’t changed their tune now that the election is over, Galant responded, “People are invested in their legacies.”
Gallant also — not for the first time — accused the government of failing to capitalize on military gains in Gaza by refusing to execute a plan to replace Hamas as a governing force in the Strip.
“For a year… I said ‘build an alternative.’ The prime minister, even though they attacked me, agreed to this,” said Gallant. “But what was needed wasn’t done.”
Gallant strongly objected to the prospect of Israeli military rule in Gaza “to fulfill the dreams of people that are disconnected from reality, of establishing settlements in the heart of Gaza.”
“The results will be disastrous,” he warned.
Likud ‘has strayed from its path’
Other topics raised in the interview included Gallant’s future in the ruling Likud party and the efforts to advance legislation to cement into law the exemptions from mandatory military service enjoyed by ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students.
“The issue of Haredi enlistment is a clear example of where the Likud faction has strayed from its path,” he said, while tearing into the party’s backbenchers for “thinking they can outflank [Itamar] Ben Gvir on the right.”
He also lamented attacks by Knesset members on the heads of the Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet.
“Likud must continue to lead and the State of Israel needs Likud, and we’ll fix these things,” he added.
Despite his firing by Netanyahu and subsequent decision to resign as a MK, Gallant was adamant he would remain in Likud. Asked whether he could remain as a viable political figure after the failures of October 7, Gallant said “The public will decide, preferably after it hears [from] a state commission of inquiry who is responsible and why.”
