Eisenkot doubts Netanyahu has ‘strategic leadership’ needed to close hostage deal, rally coalition support

While he believes that Israel is the closest it has been to a hostage deal in months, National Unity MK Gadi Eisenkot expresses doubt that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can rise “to the strategic level of leadership” needed to come to an agreement and sell it to his hard-right coalition allies.

“I find it difficult to see Netanyahu accepting a deal and telling Smotrich and Ben Gvir that this is the right thing,” the former war cabinet observer tells news site Walla, arguing that the prime minister is “bound by personal and political needs that overpower his capacity to save the State of Israel.”

“He does not have these leadership abilities, that’s why he needs to be replaced,” says Eisenkot, who quit the coalition alongside National Unity chair Benny Gantz last month.

“The price of a deal will be high but Israel can afford to halt the war for several months,” he continues, insisting that while the “central villain” holding back a deal is Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, “Netanyahu is the prime minister who is supposed to achieve the goals of the war” and the buck stops with his government.

“He has a strategic dilemma in front of him: the return of hostages versus the survival of a government,” he adds, arguing that the Netanyahu he had served under when he was IDF chief of staff “would have chosen the right path” and “reached an end to the war and made a deal even through difficult negotiations.”

Turning to the crisis in the north, Eisenkot tells Walla that while Israel has the military capacity to go to war against Hezbollah, he does not trust the government to lead the country through such a conflict.

“Today, Israel has a government that is unable to make decisions,” he charges, casting doubt on the knowledge and ability of the cabinet and accusing Netanyahu of taking little action to roll back the Iranian nuclear threat over the past two years.

“The path that Netanyahu is taking does not lead to victory,” he insists.

Asked about the recent High Court of Justice ruling that there is no legal basis for excluding ultra-Orthodox men from the military draft, Eisenkot replies that IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi must order the army to “to issue orders to all those eligible for enlistment” even though it is “impossible” to mobilize all of the tens of thousands of Haredi yeshiva students previously exempt from service.