The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, thrust Israel into wars on seven fronts. A new book by Yonah Jeremy Bob, of the Jerusalem Post, and Elliot Kaufman, of the Wall Street Journal, chronicles an eighth front: the battle inside Israel's war cabinet. In the War Room details the clashes between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Minister without Portfolio Benny Gantz, and Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant. We've heard about these conflicts in bits and pieces over the past three years, but until the release of this new book, they lacked a cohesive narrative.
Bob and Kaufman weave the compelling story of Israel's remarkable achievements on the battlefield against the Iranian regime and its terror proxies together with the utter dysfunction of a war cabinet comprising three politicians. Each had his own aspirations for power, and each had his own distinct understanding of what victory would mean in what is undeniably Israel's longest and most complex war in the country's history.
Individually and together, the authors enjoyed remarkable access to the key players involved. Bob embedded with the IDF to visit the tunnels of Gaza and spoke with top officials and their deputies throughout the war. Kaufman interviewed top players in both Israel and America as the war dragged on. The result is the most compelling long-form narrative of Israel's war to date.
The book reveals the chaos during the early hours of the war. Netanyahu was not awakened until 6:29 that morning, even as Hamas fighters were gunning down Israeli citizens across large swaths of the country's south. Shockingly, Netanyahu and IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi didn't speak to each other until the fighting had gone on for four hours.
Bob and Kaufman also detail the dynamic in the U.S.-Israel relationship, including the surprising alliance between Netanyahu and U.S. President Joe Biden early in the war as both men worked to keep the war from widening to involve Hezbollah in Lebanon. This meeting of Machiavellian minds did not last long, as Netanyahu ultimately embraced a more aggressive posture. This put him at odds with Biden and his lieutenants and ultimately led to the (then) unthinkable: America withholding armaments from Israel.
In the War Room also provides glimpses of Hamas's depravity. The Palestinian terrorist group scuttled three prior mass invasion plans in April 2022, October 2022, and April 2023. But it was only on October 7, 2023, that the group finally unleashed a force of around 5,600 at 119 different locations. The fact that Hamas operated out of tunnels beneath hospitals and schools is, by now, well known. The group invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a subterranean paramilitary maze instead of alleviating the economic challenges faced by some 2 million Gazans. But the authors reveal that Hamas also fought from a large tunnel beneath a cemetery in the heart of Khan Younis.
The unspeakable evil didn't end there. Months into the war, as negative public sentiment over the death toll of the war continued to mount, with an estimated 30,000 killed, Hamas officials sought to double down. "We have the Israelis right where we want them," read one Hamas leader's message reviewed by Kaufman and the Wall Street Journal.
The war with Hezbollah, including the "Grim Beeper" operation and the air strikes that killed longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah a year after the Hamas invasion, is described in terrific detail. The authors reveal that Hezbollah nearly discovered the explosives in their beepers at "earlier times." And they ask a compelling question about whether "Israel might have saved itself more than a year of war in the north" had the beeper op been executed in the early days after October 7, as Defense Minister Gallant had suggested. Predictably, a "battle over credit" among the war-room principals erupted over these major battlefield achievements.
The Iranian regime's decision to attack Israel on April 13, 2024, was "the second-largest miss of the war" for Israeli intelligence, the authors claim. Israeli brass simply didn't believe that the mullahs would make such a move following Israel's strike on an Iranian outpost in Syria. The episode only reinforces a profound truism of war, namely, that wars produce only one thing consistently: unintended consequences.
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When the Iranians fired additional ballistic missiles in October 2024, the Israelis still had a policy goal of not being "dragged into a regional war." Whatever fears existed at that time were clearly no longer present by 2025, when Israel launched its 12-day war that severely damaged the Iranian military and nuclear program, capped off with the massive American strike on Iran's nuclear sites. The next round, which began on February 28 of this year, provided clear evidence of a shift in Israeli thinking.
This halting journey from 2023 to 2026 was, in part, the result of the dysfunctional relationships among Israel's top leaders. This is perhaps the most important theme of In the War Room. Early alignment among them was key to helping Israel rebound from the shock of Hamas's initial success. But that alignment didn't last. The positions of Netanyahu, Gallant, and Gantz began to shift in the face of American pressure to reduce the intensity of the war, international pressure to end the war, and new threats from across the war's seven fronts. Interestingly, as the authors note, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar refused to make a hostage deal with Israel in March 2024 because he knew of the war-room divisions and thought they signaled a profound weakness in his enemy.
To be fair, the pressures facing these three men were enormous. Conflicts among them were inevitable, and so was the collapse of their mechanism, which required that all three agree on a given strike or strategy. Competition and mistrust had existed between them long before the war began. "Policy disagreements gave way to deeply personal spats," the authors note. Gantz quit in June 2024. Netanyahu fired Gallant in November 2024. The distrust among them took its toll. Today, the prime minister alone charts the course of Israel's historic multifront war.
The end point for this book is the close of 2025. Obviously, the 2026 war with Iran, undertaken in full partnership with the United States, created an entirely new set of possibilities, problems, dysfunctions, and confusions. The upcoming Israeli elections in October could be the culmination of this story or the beginning of a new chapter. Perhaps the authors will write a sequel.
For now, however, history continues to unfold in real time. Netanyahu's achievements, with and without the input of the war room, are hard to deny. But the fact that the October 7 attacks occurred on his watch cannot be ignored. As the authors rightly note, "The buck must stop with the prime minister."