Knesset panel approves release of 2014 Gaza war report

A Knesset subcommittee on Sunday unanimously approved releasing to the public parts of a biting comptroller’s report into how the security cabinet of top-level ministers handled itself during the war in Gaza in 2014.

Last week, the subcommittee on classified information, part of the parliament’s State Control Committee, delayed making a final decision on the report due to security considerations that came up as the panel reviewed the materials intended for publication. After consulting with relevant officials, only small parts of the original report were deemed too sensitive for release.

State Comptroller Yosef Shapira will make the final decision on when the document will be released, though he is expected to make it available to the public in the next two weeks.

When it is eventually released, the document will give Israelis a rare look at the discussions of one of the most powerful and secretive state institutions, the powerful ten-member committee of ministers that oversees national security and foreign policy.

The report of the ministers’ handling of the 2014 war, dubbed Operation Protective Edge, 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.

Coalition officials, particularly those close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, fought against releasing the report.

The report finds that despite Netanyahu’s claims to the contrary, he and Ya’alon did not properly inform the security cabinet of the extent of the threat emanating from Hamas’s cross-border tunnels, Channel 2 reported in November.

Some members of the security cabinet during Protective Edge have long complained that Netanyahu would not allow serious consultations and decisions in the forum. Part of the criticism, especially by Bennett, was already voiced during the war itself, during which he took to visiting frontline army units and discussing the war’s progress with officers in the field.

Bennett, who has since moved on to the position of education minister, maintains that he became aware of the urgency of dealing with cross-border tunnels, an issue that became the war’s main goal in its final weeks, outside the confines of cabinet discussions, including during his conversations with IDF officers, and that the threat posed by the tunnels was not properly discussed or understood in the security cabinet’s meetings.

Netanyahu and Ya’alon have denied Bennett’s claims, and criticized as “populist” his public excoriation of the army’s strategy while fighting was still underway in Gaza.

Both Bennett and then-finance minister Yair Lapid, another critic of Netanyahu’s handling of the wartime cabinet, called last week for the Knesset to make the comptroller’s findings public.

“We must not suppress the report on Protective Edge or use it to see heads roll,” but rather learn from it, Bennett said at the weekly Jewish Home faction meeting last Monday.

“Only the disclosure of the non-confidential elements and the study of its particulars will allow us to move forward,” he said. “I was there; we can do better.”

Lapid, who leads the opposition Yesh Atid party, said the government must make the report public for the sake of the bereaved Israeli families of soldiers killed in the 50-day conflict.

“They need to release the report for the families of the fallen; they deserve to know what happened there. There’s no room for politics when you are talking about the security of soldiers and well-being of residents of Gaza-area communities,” he said.

Lapid accused Netanyahu of attempting to bury the report for political reasons.

“The Prime Minister’s Office fears this report, because serious failures emerge from it,” he said. “Because the report reveals that the account the public received [on the war] was not the true account.”

Opposition leader Isaac Herzog joined the chorus. “The Israeli public, and especially families who lost loved ones, deserve to know how their leaders acted when they sent their sons into battle, and how discussions on new strategic threats, chief among them the tunnels, were carried out,” he said at the start of the weekly meeting of his Zionist Union faction Monday.