Middle East Crisis: Senior Israeli Military Official Resigns After Oct. 7 Intelligence Failures (2024)

General Haliva became a symbol of the failure to prevent the deadliest attack in Israel’s history.

General Haliva had become a symbol of the Israeli establishment’s failure to prevent the deadliest attack in Israeli history. His resignation, though long expected, was expected to heighten pressure on other senior figures, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to take greater responsibility for their role in the catastrophe.

And it suggested that a bitter reckoning within Israeli society about the October failure — one that has been largely postponed while Israel battles Hamas in Gaza — is gathering momentum now that the pace of the war has ebbed.

Since the Oct. 7 assault, Israelis have learned about a slew of military and intelligence failures that have destabilized their sense of security and shaken confidence in their leaders. One of the most significant was the assessment of many in Israel’s security establishment that Hamas in Gaza was not preparing for a major battle.

Israel also had a copy of Hamas’s battle plan for Oct. 7 more than a year in advance, but analysts had determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond the group’s capacity, according to documents and officials.

General Haliva will remain in his role at least until the appointment of a new military intelligence chief, said Major Dinar. It was unclear how long it would take to appoint a successor. And General Haliva said in his letter that he would like to remain in the post until internal inquiries into the Oct. 7 failures are completed.

In his letter on Monday, General Haliva wrote to the army chief: “At the start of the war, I expressed to you my desire to take responsibility and end my role. Now, after more than six and a half months, and alongside the commencement of investigations, I am asking to finish my job and retire from the Israel Defense Forces.”

Under pressure to provide answers for the army’s performance, General Halevi said in March that the military would conduct internal inquiries into the failures of Oct. 7.

At the time, General Halevi defended the review process, arguing that its purpose was to help the army learn from past failures.

“We suffered tough events at the start of the war, and we failed to protect civilians — our most important mission,” he said in a letter to commanders. “If we do not bravely assess our actions, we will experience difficulty in learning and improving.”

Within days of Oct. 7, General Haliva said the military intelligence directorate had failed to warn of the impending assault and declared that he bore “full responsibility” for the failure.

In contrast to General Haliva, Mr. Netanyahu has refused to take responsibility for Oct. 7. He has said he will have to provide answers to questions about the assault, but that would only happen after the war.

Many Israelis have said that they felt abandoned by the government when thousands of militants invaded Israel, killing and taking hostage around 1,400 people, according to Israeli authorities.

General Haliva was also at the helm of military intelligence when several senior Iranian military officials were killed in a strike on Tehran’s embassy in Damascus, an attack widely attributed to Israel. Iran retaliated with a massive barrage of drones and missiles on Israel, — the first time Tehran hit Israel directly — and the tit-for-tat raised fears of a wider regional conflagration.

The Israelis had badly miscalculated, thinking that Iran would not react strongly, according to multiple American officials who were involved in high-level discussions after the attack, a view shared by a senior Israeli official.

General Haliva had no previous significant roles in intelligence. He had previously served as the head of the army’s operations directorate, before being appointed as military intelligence chief in 2021.

“The head of military intelligence is considered the national assessor,” said Uzi Arad, the former chairman of Israel’s national security council. “His successor should be a person that’s better equipped and qualified to perform this mission.”

In his letter, General Haliva said the results of the brutal assault on Israel were “difficult and painful” and military intelligence directorate under his command didn’t fulfill its mission.

“I have carried that dark day with me ever since — day by day, night by night,” he wrote. “I will forever carry with me the unbearable pain of the war.”

Analysts said General Haliva’s resignation was unsurprising but necessary, given the centrality of his role in the security failures.

“He made grave mistakes,” said Mr. Arad. “His job was to provide a strategic warning — to blow the horn — and he failed to do that. He needs to pay a price.”

Separately, Major Dinar said on Monday that Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs, the commander of Israeli troops in the West Bank, would be leaving his post in the coming months and retire from the military.

General Fuchs had a tense relationship with settlers in the West Bank over his criticisms of settler violence.

Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting.

Israel hasn’t provided evidence for claims that many UNRWA workers belong to Hamas, an external review says.

The review was announced in January, before Israel circulated claims that one in 10 of UNRWA’s 13,000 employees in the Gaza Strip was a member of Hamas or its ally, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and that some of those employees took part in the Oct. 7 attack.

But by the time investigators started working on the review in early February, Israel had leveled those charges, giving the inquiry added significance.

Speaking at a news conference at U.N. headquarters in New York on Monday, Ms. Colonna said she wanted to be “very clear” that the question of involvement in Oct. 7 is a separate question, one that remains under internal investigation by the U.N.

While Israel has not produced evidence of ties to Hamas and other militant groups among UNRWA workers, that does not mean there is no evidence, she noted. “It’s very different,” she said.

More than a dozen countries, including the United States, suspended funding to UNRWA in light of the allegations. The United Nations fired 10 of the 12 employees accused in the attack while pleading with donor countries to restore funding at a time when the majority of Gazans depend on the group for food and shelter. It also announced an internal investigation along with the independent external review, which was made public on Monday.

After the Biden administration halted funding for the agency pending the results of investigations, Congress barred any money for the agency for a year, through March 2025.

The review led by Ms. Colonna said that UNRWA had long shared lists of its employees with Israel, but that the Israeli government had not flagged any concerns about agency employees since 2011.

“Israel made public claims that a significant number of UNRWA employees are members of terrorist organizations,” the report said. “However, Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence of this.”

In a statement on Monday, Oren Marmorstein, a spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, said, “Hamas has infiltrated UNRWA so deeply that it is no longer possible to determine where UNRWA ends and where Hamas begins.”

“This is not what a genuine and thorough review looks like,” he added. “This is what an effort to avoid the problem and not address it head on looks like.”

Amid calls from Israel to shutter the agency, the report commissioned by the United Nations said UNRWA remained “pivotal in providing life-saving humanitarian aid and essential social services,” adding that “UNRWA is irreplaceable and indispensable to Palestinians’ human and economic development.”

Still, the report found that despite “robust” guidelines to ensure its neutrality, there were weaknesses in their implementation because of problems in the agency’s vetting processes, its internal investigations and restrictions on its ability to prevent armed groups from using its facilities for military purposes.

The report said the agency “lacks the support of intelligence services to undertake efficient and comprehensive vetting.”

A lack of resources had slowed the agency’s investigations into alleged breaches of neutrality, “limiting UNRWA’s ability to attract, hire, train and retain suitable, experienced and qualified investigators,” the report said.

The report added that there had been instances when agency employees had publicly expressed political views, its schools had used textbooks with “problematic content” and some of its facilities had been used for “political or military purposes.” The report did not elaborate, but said that breaches of neutrality “could include the discovery of weapons, cavities and tunnel openings, military activities or incursions.”

The review offered recommendations for protecting the agency’s neutrality, including additional screening and training of staff members, and closer cooperation with host countries and Israel in sharing employee rosters.

Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, said on Monday that Mr. Guterres had accepted the report’s recommendations and appealed for donors “to actively support UNRWA, as it is a lifeline for Palestine refugees in the region.”

Among the countries that suspended payments over Israel’s allegations, several — including Canada, Japan and Australia — have resumed funding UNRWA, citing the spiraling humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and steps taken by the agency to improve accountability. The United States has said it would wait for the results of U.N. investigations before deciding whether to resume donations to UNRWA.

Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesman, told reporters on Monday that the Biden administration was reviewing the United Nations report and had no assessment yet of its conclusions.

“Certainly, we welcome the fact that the secretary-general has accepted the recommendations,” Mr. Miller said, adding that the United States had “long made clear that there needs to be reforms at UNRWA.”

“We have always made clear that we think the role that UNRWA plays is indispensable in providing and facilitating the delivery of humanitarian assistance — not just in Gaza, but in the broader region,” he said. “We continue to support the work that they do.”

UNRWA was created to provide aid to Palestinians across the Middle East whose families fled or were forced from lands during the wars surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948. Since Hamas won Palestinian elections in Gaza in 2006 and ousted a rival faction from the enclave a year later, the group ceded many of its civil responsibilities to UNRWA.

Israel has alleged that UNRWA is fundamentally compromised, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for it to be closed and replaced “with responsible international aid agencies.”

Michael Levenson, Anushka Patil and Michael Crowley contributed reporting.

A Palestinian baby was delivered after her mother was killed in an Israeli strike.

“Here is the biggest tragedy: Even if this child survives she was born an orphan,” Dr. Mohammed Salama, the head of the neonatal intensive care unit at Al-Emirati Hospital in Rafah, told Reuters.

The baby was born 10 weeks premature and weighed three pounds, Dr. Salama told Reuters. Her mother was already dead when she was born, he said. Instead of a name, doctors wrote “the baby of the martyr Sabreen al-Sakani” on a piece of tape across her chest.

Rami al-Sheikh, the baby’s uncle, told a video journalist from Reuters that her older sister, Malak, had wanted to name her Rouh, the Arabic word for soul. Malak also died in the strike.

He said the family was “ordinary civilians.”

“My brother is a barber and used to work with me in the shop,” Mr. al-Sheikh said about the baby’s father. “They were happy people, and the little girl Malak was happy that her sister was coming into the world.”

The baby was in a perilous state after her birth, but now, aside from some respiratory problems, her condition is stable, Dr. Salama said. She will spend three to four weeks in the hospital, and then doctors will figure out whom to send the baby home with.

“Hopefully after her respiratory distress improves, she will need to be breastfed,” Dr. Salama said. “She has been denied everything — denied her mother, denied her milk. Some substitutions can be made, but nothing will ever replace her mother.”

The police arrest two men after a car rammed into pedestrians in Jerusalem.

After hitting the pedestrians, the vehicle appears to crash into a parked car, according to the video. Two young men then run out onto the street, pointing weapons, before fleeing the area.

The police said that the two men were arrested in a nearby store that was closed, and that a weapon used in the attack had been recovered.

It was the latest attack in Jerusalem in recent months, since Israeli forces went to war against Hamas in Gaza. Last month, a 15-year-old boy stabbed two Israelis at a checkpoint at the entrance to Jerusalem. In November, a gunman killed three Israelis at an entrance to the city, and a fourth Israeli who opened fire on the assailant was killed by Israeli soldiers who mistook him for a participant in the attack.

On Monday, video posted online by Channel 12 after the arrest shows men being led away by law enforcement officers as a crowd of ultra-Orthodox Jews, some standing on rooftops, clap and cheer.

Israelis prepare to mark a somber Passover, with hostages still in Gaza.

The holiday is to start after sundown on Monday with the traditional Seder meal. By tradition, this is a joyful gathering of family and friends who follow a ritual order of blessings over symbolic foods as they retell the biblical story of the bondage and suffering of the ancient Israelites in Egypt and their exodus and liberation.

Israelis are still jittery after an exchange of fire with Iran this month, the first time Tehran had directly attacked Israel from Iranian territory. And the country continues to mourn the roughly 1,200 people the Israeli authorities say were killed in the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, which prompted six months of deadly fighting in Gaza so far. More than 250 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza since the start of Israel’s ground invasion in late October, the military says. More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, according to Gaza health officials.

Daily tit-for-tat attacks over the northern border with Lebanon have turned a portion of Israel into a no-go zone. Tens of thousands of residents of northern and southern Israel remain in temporary accommodations, having been evacuated from their homes.

“We will mark the Seder night for the children,” said Irit Feingold, 35, a pedagogic instructor for preschoolers who was attending a rally for the hostages in Jerusalem on Saturday night, and was planning to spend Monday night with about 25 members of her extended family.

“We will talk about leadership, freedom and staying free, and everybody can share what they feel,” she said.

Many families like Ms. Feingold’s have been holding emotionally charged conversations about how to commemorate the holiday, with some saying they preferred not to conduct a Seder at all.

“Every festival is another milestone showing how we aren’t whole,” Ms. Feingold said, adding that it was imperative to resist sliding back into normalcy and routine. Her husband, a soldier in the reserves, is to return to Gaza after the holiday.

The organization representing most of the families of the hostages is urging families to place an empty chair at their table with a portrait of a hostage or a yellow ribbon. Traditionally, Jews leave an empty chair at the Seder for Elijah, the biblical prophet revered as the harbinger of hope and redemption.

“All of the symbolic things we do at the Seder will take on a much more profound and deep meaning this year,” said Rachel Goldberg-Polin, whose son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, a dual citizen of Israel and the United States, was taken captive into Gaza after his arm was blown off during an assault on a roadside bomb shelter. He had taken refuge there after fleeing the Tribe of Nova music festival.

Mentioning the salt water that is part of the Seder ritual to represent the tears of the Israelites while they were in bondage in Egypt, Ms. Goldberg-Polin told reporters she would be participating in a Seder with close friends and family, “and they have been very clear that if 15 minutes in we just can’t do it, and we need to cry, then we will cry.”

Hundreds of survivors from Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the border villages that was attacked on Oct. 7, were planning to hold a communal Seder in a Tel Aviv square that has become a focal point for the campaign to free the hostages.

A quarter of the residents of another border village, Nir Oz, were either killed or kidnapped. Avner Goren, a son of founders of the communal village, wrote a poem comparing the Israeli people to a fruit salad — some sour, some sweet — to celebrate the country’s multicultural mix for a version of the Haggadah that Nir Oz produced in the late 1990s.

Mr. Goren was killed on Oct. 7. His wife, Maya Goren, was kidnapped and taken to Gaza and has been declared dead. Addressing the rally in Jerusalem on Saturday night, Rabbi Binyamin Lau said he intended to sit at the Seder table with his family, an empty chair with a picture of his friend Alex Dancyg, a Holocaust expert from Nir Oz who remains a hostage, and a fruit salad.

Rabbi Lau, himself the son of a Holocaust survivor, said, “We are a people that tells a story at any time, under any conditions.”

Myra Noveck contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Gabby Sobelman from Rehovot, Israel.

A U.S. official says the military destroyed a rocket launcher in Iraq after rockets were fired toward a U.S. base.

It was not immediately clear who had fired the rockets, or how many had been fired, toward the base in Syria. The U.S. military has about 900 troops in Syria to help battle the remnants of the Islamic State, and they have been targeted in dozens of attacks by Iran-backed armed groups based in Iraq since the war in Gaza began last October. The Iran-backed groups in Iraq have said that they view their mission as attacking Israel and its allies.

The rocket fire over the weekend was believed to be the first attack directed at U.S. forces in Iraq, Syria or Jordan since early February, when, at the request of leaders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Iran-backed groups in Iraq reined in their assaults on American personnel in the region.

That request came after an Iran-backed armed group launched a drone strike on Jan. 28 that killed three U.S. service members and wounded 34 others at a military outpost in Jordan near the Syrian border. The United States responded to that strike by targeting bases used by Iran-backed armed groups in Iraq and Syria, killing dozens of people including civilians, according to officials in both countries.

Since then, a few attacks had targeted Syrian Kurdish forces who work closely with the U.S. Special Operations forces in Syria, but there had been no known attacks aimed at American troops.