Senior Haredi lawmaker Gafni was told about plans for Iran attack days in advance — report

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu informed senior Haredi lawmaker Moshe Gafni about Israel’s plans to attack Iran three days ahead of time, in a bid to have him drop his threat of dissolving the Knesset over the failure to pass a law exempting yeshiva students from conscription, The New York Times reports.

The report is part of a lengthy item by the Times examining Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s grip on power in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas assault and the subsequent war in Gaza.

On June 9, according to the report, Gafni — who leads the Degel Hatorah faction of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party — was summoned by Netanyahu for a meeting at the IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv.

The summons from the premier came two days before a vote on an opposition-backed bill to disperse the Knesset and call early elections, which ultra-Orthodox parties had initially said they would support due to a lack of progress on the Haredi conscription legislation.

At the start of the meeting, Gafni was told by Netanyahu to sign a confidentiality agreement and, upon doing so, was given the details of Israel’s planned attack on Iran’s nuclear and military targets, which would be launched four days later, on June 13.

According to the Times, Gafni left the meeting suspecting that Netanyahu may have been attempting to manipulate him into dropping the threat to dissolve the government, but also worried that if the bill passed, it could interfere with Israel’s planned operation in Iran.

Ultimately, the Degel Hatorah faction withdrew its support for the bill to dissolve the Knesset, and it failed to garner enough votes to pass.

Gafni is not the only Haredi lawmaker said to have been told about the Iran strike in advance, as days into the 12-day war last month, Shas leader Aryeh Deri appeared to confirm that he too had known about it.

Writing in HaDerech, Shas’s official newspaper, Deri said that the decision to launch the Iran operation “was the most difficult decision that any cabinet in the State of Israel has ever made.”

Long months of discussions, hundreds of hours of security reviews, analyses and risk assessments – everything boiled down to one charged, fateful moment: whether to approve the military attack plan against Iran,” he had written.