Report: Days after Oct. 7, Ofer Winter tried to talk PM out of Gaza ground offensive

Former IDF brigadier general turned political hopeful Ofer Winter warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against launching a full-scale ground offensive in the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion, claiming as many as 15,000 soldiers could die in the effort, according to an unsourced Channel 12 report on Saturday.

According to the report, in the days after the October 7 massacre, Winter met with Netanyahu at a secret location, without the knowledge or permission of senior military commanders, to present an alternative plan to a ground invasion — a total military blockade.

The right-wing ex-general also reportedly presented his plan to senior military officials, despite it being beyond the scope of his responsibilities at the time.

He argued, according to Channel 12, that the IDF was “incompetent — it doesn’t know how to carry out such a maneuver.”

“There will be 15,000 dead soldiers,” Winter reportedly told Netanyahu. “High-rise buildings will collapse on companies, and thousands of soldiers will be abducted. It will be a national disaster.”

In the end, the predictions attributed to him did not come to pass. Four hundred and seventy-three IDF soldiers were killed in the Gaza ground offensive.

The television network quoted an unnamed former military official who accused Winter of spreading demoralizing assessments of how the military would perform in the Gaza Strip, ultimately resulting in Netanyahu delaying the start of the offensive.

Winter denied the report, saying the claim that he predicted 15,000 dead was a “complete lie.”

He did not deny, however, that he had offered an alternative proposal to a ground invasion.

“The proposal was clear: a powerful, short, and smart war that leads to a decisive victory, and not to a three-year campaign without any resolution,” he said.

Winter entered politics last month with the launch of his People of Israel party, which has since been hovering at the edge of the 3.25 percent electoral threshold in opinion polls ahead of the October 27 election.

The report was the latest in a string of controversial incidents that followed Winter throughout the last decade of his military career.

He first came under criticism during the 2014 Gaza war, when he served as commander of the Givati Brigade, for a letter to his subordinate officers in which he described the operation as a religious war against a “blasphemous” foe.

In media interviews, the officer also described his troops as being protected in battle by “clouds of glory,” raising concerns among religious freedom activists that Winter was theocratizing the military.

He commanded the forces in the bloody “Black Friday” battle in the city of Rafah in southern Gaza on August 1, 2014. The fighting there became a central issue in a United Nations report on the war, with accusations that war crimes had been committed. In its own investigation, the Israeli military identified failures in how the battle was waged, but no criminal acts.

Since that war, known in Israel as Operation Protective Edge, Winter’s career did not reach the heights previously foreseen in which he would be tapped for advancement to the upper echelons of the IDF.

Winter was promoted from colonel to brigadier general in 2015 and was made chief of staff for the Central Command. In 2017, he was appointed military secretary to then-defense minister Avigdor Liberman, and only in 2019 was he given command over a division. Winter served as head of the Central Command’s 98th Division until September 2022, and has been without a role since.

In the army’s normal trajectory for promotion, Winter would have been on track to take command of a division in 2018, but he was passed over for promotion by then-IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot.

Lazar Berman contributed to this report.