Head of Israeli military intelligence quits

Maj Gen Aharon Haliva has served in the IDF for 38 years

The head of Israel’s military intelligence resigned on Monday after taking responsibility for failures leading to the Oct 7 massacre in which some 1,200 Israelis died, most of them civilians.

Major General Aharon Haliva is the first high-ranking official to step down in the wake of the Hamas attack but others in the country’s military and wider intelligence community are expected to follow.

Maj Gen Haliva’s resignation comes amid an ongoing Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) investigation of its role in the most serious breach of Israeli security since the Yom Kippur war exactly 50 years before.

In his resignation letter, Maj Gen Haliva, who served in the IDF for 38 years, took his share of responsibility for failing to prevent the attack.

“The intelligence division under my command did not live up to the task we were entrusted with”, he wrote. “I carry that black day with me ever since. Day after day, night after night. I will forever carry with me the terrible pain of the war.”

Although the IDF made serious errors, most notably ignoring warnings given by its female spotters in the days and hours leading up to the attack, few doubt the bigger errors were strategic and came from further up.

Call for in-depth investigation

In an apparent nod to this, Maj Gen Haliva’s resignation letter called for the establishment of a state investigative committee, “that can investigate and find out in a thorough, in-depth, comprehensive and precise manner all the factors and circumstances that led to the difficult events”.

If, and when, a wider investigation is launched, it is likely to examine the way in which the Israeli government enabled Hamas in Gaza in the years ahead of the attack, apparently as a foil to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

It will also consider how the wider intelligence community came to the view – despite explicit Hamas statements and actions to the contrary – that Israel had successfully “deterred” the terrorist group from launching a major assault on its southern border.

Maj Gen Haliva is the first senior officer to step down in the wake of the massacre but not the first to accept responsibility.

Others to have done so include the head of the Shin Bet internal security agency, the Israeli equivalent of MI5, and also General Herzl Halevi, the IDF chief of staff. Although they and other senior officers remain in post, they are widely expected to go when the war in Gaza and the wider region ends.

“There will be a cleaning in the military and intelligence spheres and – in the end – in the political area. It is the Israeli way,” an Israeli security establishment source told The Telegraph.

Some 3,000 Hamas fighters and Palestinian civilians attacked southern Israel on Oct 7, carrying out a modern day pogrom.

In addition to those killed, another 253 people were kidnapped and taken to Gaza, where more than 130 remain hostage. Since then, the war in Gaza has resulted in the death of more than 260 Israeli soldiers and, according to the health ministry in Gaza, over 34,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.

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