The security failures that led to the Hamas massacre on October 7 have claimed their first political victim. General Aharon Haliva, head of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate, presented his resignation this Monday after assuming that the team under his command “did not fulfill its task.” «I have carried that black day with me since then, every day, every night. “I will always endure the terrible pain of war,” the commander expresses in his letter, where he also announces his intention to leave the army when his replacement is named.
Haliva is the highest-ranking officer who has so far taken responsibility for the chain of errors that led to the failure to foresee the attack by Hamas militias, which completely surprised the military. The terrorists crossed the Gaza fence without obstacles. They attacked three Israeli bases, where they killed or kidnapped soldiers, and devastated the agricultural communes closest to the Strip. In total, they murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 253.
The resignation, agreed with the Chief of the General Staff, Herzi Halevi, has already been approved by the Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant. In the eyes of many Israelis, Haliva was the general with all the assets to become the first to be fired for the massacre. The night before October 7, his team sent him a report confirming a series of unusual maneuvers by Islamist militiamen on the other side of the fence. He considered it to be an exercise and let it pass with the intention of convening his cabinet. the next morning. Hamas moved forward.
Against Netanyahu
Haliva is not the only one who has taken the blame, but he is the first to leave office. Other senior officials, including Herzi Halevi himself and the head of the Shin Bet security agency, have announced their willingness to leave when the war crisis in Gaza ends. The Government of Benjamin Netanyahu hopes that, when this happens, there will be a chain of resignations.
However, paradoxically, the first head that the population demands is that of the prime minister himself. Once again, this past weekend thousands of citizens demonstrated in Tel Aviv, and in front of the ruler's house, to demand the calling of elections. Among those mobilized were the relatives of the hostages still held by Hamas and who blame Netanyahu for not doing enough to save them. The opposition leader himself, Yair Lapid, asked the prime minister this Monday to follow the example of the head of Military Intelligence and leave his post. Lapid praises Haliva's decision as “justified and respected” and adds that Netanyahu “should have done the same.”
The Defense Forces are immersed in an exhaustive investigation into their failures. The investigations cover three periods: the decade before the massacre, in order to find out why events such as the construction of tunnels to the border itself or how the militiamen were able to accumulate an arsenal of such magnitude went unnoticed; the days before the attack, in which it is assumed that the terrorists had to coordinate, distribute plans and even rehearse an assault; and the day of the attack itself, when the army reacted late to the attack. It so happens that the investigators had to deliver their conclusions at the beginning of June to the chief of the General Staff.
Aharon Haliva was born in Haifa in 1967 and has spent 38 years in the army, where he joined, like a large number of senior Israeli military officials, after volunteering in the parachute brigade. Precisely, he led a platoon of this regiment during the second intifada in Palestinian territory, between 2000 and 2005, and previously in the clashes with Hezbollah and other radical militias in southern Lebanon. After having held other command positions, in October 2021 he was appointed head of the Intelligence Directorate. He has been a firm defender of “surgical operations” against Hamas to avoid civilian casualties, the type of catastrophe that is now shaking Gaza, where the death toll has already exceeded 34,200.
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