The below excerpt is from chapter 5 in the newly published book While Israel Slept, published by St. Martin’s Press on September 2 and available on Amazon and at bookstores worldwide.
The book tells the gripping inside story how Hamas, Israel’s weakest enemy, succeeded in launching a surprise attack that has changed the Middle East.
Excerpt
Shortly after the Guardian of the Walls operation in the summer of 2021, a new government took office in Jerusalem, led by Naftali Bennett. It was the first time in 13 years that someone other than Netanyahu was sitting in the aquarium, the glass-lined suite of offices in the drab and gray Jerusalem building known as the Prime Minister’s Office. Netanyahu – who had ruled the country consecutively since 2009 – was now in the opposition.
In the IDF, the feeling was that the recent operation had been a major success and that after 12 days of extensive aerial bombings, Hamas was weakened and deterred. The IDF Spokesperson’s Office later bragged that “by combining its military defense capabilities with proactive military strikes, the IDF was able to destroy a large amount of Hamas’s weapons-manufacturing capabilities in order to bring an enduring calm to the people of Israel.”
Aharon Haliva, head of Israeli Military Intelligence, predicted the same at the time. “If there is one thing that [Hamas leader] Yahya Sinwar wants, it is to go back to May 10 at 5:59 p.m. and cancel the order to fire rockets at Jerusalem,” he said just two weeks after the operation had ended and as Bennett prepared to take office.
Beyond the blows the IDF thought it had inflicted upon Hamas, what contributed to this assessment was how the terrorist group had decided to sit out one of the more recent operations in Gaza – Operation Black Belt in November 2019 – which the IDF had launched exclusively against Islamic Jihad.
Despite pressure from its terrorist counterparts, Hamas decided not to get involved at the time, an act it would follow a year later during another IDF operation against Islamic Jihad. This led intelligence analysts to believe that Hamas was calculated in its priorities – it wanted economic prosperity and stability, not war.
What should have caught the IDF’s attention was the way Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was talking and acting after Guardian of the Walls, and especially the photo of him smiling in an armchair in his bombed home. Sinwar was walking around Gaza without fear that Israel would dare to kill him. Bennett saw it all and demanded change.
A former chief of staff to Netanyahu and member of several of his coalitions, Bennett had come from the Israeli Right and previously served as the head of the settler lobby, but he had crossed partisan lines to form a government with the Left and an Arab party, with the aim of removing Netanyahu from power. One of the changes he wanted to institute was the government’s policy vis-à-vis the Gaza Strip.
In his first weeks in office, the new prime minister spoke tough. He promised an immediate response to every incendiary balloon that Hamas flew over the border. He approved an escalated response to any Hamas violation of the post-operation ceasefire and warned that violence would be met with a fierce Israeli response.
“I again clarify here: things have changed,” Bennett said at the start of a weekly cabinet meeting in July 2021. “Israel is interested in calm and has no interest in harming Gaza residents, but violence… will be met with a strong response.”
What the public didn’t know was at that this time, Bennett had ordered the IDF and Shin Bet to prepare plans to eliminate all of Hamas’s leaders – Sinwar, Mohammad Deif, Marwan Issa, and a few others. The request caught the IDF by surprise. With Guardian of the Walls considered a success, the IDF chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Aviv Kohavi was solely focused on what in Israel were described as “third-circle threats,” a reference to Iran and stopping its nuclear program.
In one of their meetings, Kohavi pushed back. “Hamas is deterred, and there is no need to risk an all-out war with such an operation,” he told the prime minister.
But Bennett was determined and ordered Kohavi to move ahead with the plans. At almost all of Bennett’s regular meetings with the IDF chief of staff and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) chief Ronen Bar, they would discuss the elimination of the Hamas leaders. The IDF stalled a bit but ultimately moved the plan ahead, giving it different operational names depending on which of the Hamas members – whether all of them or just a few – would end up being targeted in an airstrike.
Bennett’s approach was one of carrots and sticks. While he claimed to have changed the containment policy, ordering the IDF to now respond to every rocket attack or incendiary balloon flown across the border, he also allowed – for the first time in years – for Palestinians from Gaza to enter Israel for work. The first approval was for 2,000 workers, a quota that Bennett then increased to 5,000, and eventually as high as 14,000.
“Understand that a worker in Gaza makes NIS 800 a month, and in Israel he makes ten times that – NIS 8,000,” Bennett tweeted. “Hundreds of thousands of Gazans are living off the salaries of these workers, and Hamas doesn’t want to hurt them.” The information that Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet presented – now known to be wrong – appeared to back this assessment.
IN JANUARY 2022, Sinwar’s father passed away, and Qatar’s envoy to Gaza, a former diplomat by the name of Mohammed Al Emadi, who would occasionally pass on messages from one side to the other, traveled to Gaza to make a condolence call. Yes, Sinwar was a terrorist, but Qatar had an open line of communication with him.
After a few days, Al Emadi reported back to Israel that Sinwar remained pragmatic and understood that he needed to stop the protests at the border for the Qatari money to keep flowing.
But then in March 2022, everything changed. Palestinian terrorists started striking throughout Israel. On March 22, four people were killed in an attack in Beersheba; five days later, two people were killed in an attack in the northern city of Hadera; two days after that, five people were killed in the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak; and a week later, three people were shot dead in Tel Aviv. Terror attack followed terror attack, and Bennett – who had promised to restore security – was losing his patience.
May 5 pushed Bennett over the edge. It was Israel’s Independence Day, and in the city of Elad, east of Tel Aviv, people were cleaning up the barbecues they had just finished at a local park when two Palestinian attackers showed up with axes and a pistol, hacking and shooting at local bystanders. Four people were killed.
Sinwar, it turned out, had given a speech a few days earlier, urging Palestinians to strike Israelis with whatever they had – including axes. “Let everyone who has a rifle, ready it. And if you don’t have a rifle, ready your cleaver or an ax, or a knife,” the Hamas leader said. The connection was clear. Sinwar spoke in Gaza and instigated terrorist attacks in Israel. He needed to be stopped.
A few days following the park attack, Bennett brought up the assassination plans at a security briefing. Bar, who had become the head of Shin Bet seven months earlier, supported the idea, but Kohavi remained opposed. He told the prime minister that the IDF was constantly tracking Sinwar and recently had him in its sights as he drove through Gaza City. The problem was that he was part of a three-car convoy, and the IDF couldn’t always tell which car he was in.
“We have a lot of bigger challenges in the North and against Iran,” the IDF chief told the prime minister. “If you want me to advance a plan to kill Sinwar, you will need to first convince me that it is worth the war that will follow, since I will be the one who will need to explain why this war happened to the soldiers and the bereaved parents.”
This was not the way IDF officers were meant to speak to the country’s political leadership. In democracies, prime ministers do not need to convince the military chief of their decisions. But then again, Bennett was not viewed as a traditional prime minister.
Yes, he was chosen to lead and to form the government by a majority of members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, but he had only six seats in the coalition of 61, and he had gotten the job of prime minister simply because, if he hadn’t, the so-called Change Government that replaced Netanyahu would not have been possible.
Being prime minister is what allowed Bennett to cross partisan lines, join with the Left, and establish the government. Kohavi knew all of this and sensed Bennett’s weakness. The IDF chief was in his last year in office and felt he didn’t have much to lose.
Bennett tried to rally support within the security cabinet but had no success. Yair Lapid, the foreign minister and the man who pulled the real strings within the government, opposed the idea. Benny Gantz, the defense minister, also thought that it was unnecessary.
In the end, Bennett understood something simple – the makeup of his coalition would not allow such an operation to take place. Part of the 61-member coalition was the Israeli-Arab Ra’am Party. An Israeli preemptive strike against Hamas would almost definitely have led to a large-scale war in Gaza, and Ra’am would have bolted the coalition.
Bennett would be without a parliamentary majority, and Israel would have a new election. So he held back, like Netanyahu before him, a decision that would come back to haunt the country.
THE STORY OF Bennett’s attempt to advance plans to eliminate Hamas leadership was not unique. Over the years, consecutive heads of the Shin Bet have recommended the elimination of Hamas leadership in Gaza to prime ministers. In at least a dozen different cases, Shin Bet and the IDF prepared plans and presented them to the prime minister to do so.
In some cases, the prime minister finally agreed to strike, but only under restrictions that made the success of the operation almost impossible. In most cases, the prime minister refused to advance the plans, fearing that they would lead to an all-out war with Hamas and possibly beyond. In other cases, the considerations were political.
One such operation was brought to Netanyahu in 2016, two years after the end of Operation Protective Edge. Nadav Argaman, head of the Shin Bet at the time, called the targeted killing operation “Musical Chairs.” The defense minister at the time, Avigdor Lieberman, supported it, but Netanyahu rejected the proposal, fearing an escalation at a time of relative quiet.
“We were told to be prepared and to prepare an operational plan,” Argaman, the head of the Shin Bet from 2016 to 2021, recalled in a TV interview. “We pushed for it and we presented plans.” But, according to Argaman, the Shin Bet never received an answer from the government.
This was the case through the summer of 2023 and even in the weeks ahead of the October 7 attacks. At the end of August, an organization in Gaza called the Supreme National Authority for the Great March of Return and Breaking the Siege announced that it was restarting protests along the border with Israel.
The organization, which had led similar protests back in 2018, brought tractors and heavy equipment near the border to prepare tent camps for the demonstrators, who would not stop, they said, until they were allowed to return to the lands in Israel from which they were evicted in 1948.
On September 1, as more than two million Israeli children started the school year, about 100 Palestinians rioted near the security fence, throwing IEDs and making several attempts to cross the barrier, drawing IDF sniper fire. The rioters waved Palestinian flags, burned tires, and chanted slogans against Israel’s presence on the Temple Mount and near the Al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as against the treatment of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. The Gaza Health Ministry claimed that nine people were wounded that day.
From there, the situation escalated quickly. By the end of September, Israel was attacking targets near the border as IEDs regularly blew up nearby. Troops were reinforced as incendiary devices tied to helium balloons were launched once again into Israel to burn fields and homes.
After weeks of clashes, Netanyahu, back as prime minister, finally convened a meeting of his top national security staff on September 26. But the focus was on anything but Gaza.
Hours into the discussion, Gaza did not even come up as a topic, even though the protests were still occurring along the border. Instead, IDF chief Herzi Halevi and Shin Bet chief Bar focused their briefing on the West Bank and the fear that the protests in Gaza would spread there.
In the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, the IDF realized what the protests were really about. They were not about raising awareness about alleged Israeli violations of the status quo on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem but meant to serve an entirely different purpose – to “normalize” the presence of protesters near the border, something that served Hamas when it sent the first teams that dark Saturday morning to blow multiple holes in the barrier and storm Israel.
Around the same time at the Knesset, Military Intelligence officers briefed the prestigious Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. The Israeli parliamentarians – used to being exposed to the most classified intelligence – heard the latest on Iran’s nuclear program, Hezbollah’s efforts to increase its arsenal of precision-guided munitions, and the future of the West Bank.
After five hours, when one of the Knesset members asked the intelligence officers about Gaza, he received a curt answer. The officer closed the briefing folder and placed it back in his briefcase: “Hamas is deterred,” was all he said.