Exclusive: Netanyahu at War

For the past 10 months, Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to apologize for leaving Israel vulnerable to Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack. After the deaths of 1,200 people and the abduction of hundreds more, a traumatized Israeli public heard abject admissions of responsibility from the heads of the Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet, the country’s domestic security service, but none from Netanyahu, who had been Prime Minister for almost a year when the attack happened, and had presided over a more than 10-year strategy of tacit acceptance of Hamas rule in Gaza. His only apology was for a social media post blaming his own security chiefs for failing to foil the assault. So, early in a 66-minute conversation with TIME on Aug. 4 in the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, the question is, Would he make an apology?

“Apologize?” he asks back. “Of course, of course. I am sorry, deeply, that something like this happened. And you always look back and you say, Could we have done things that would have prevented it?” 

For Netanyahu, who first occupied the dowdy Kaplan Street offices in 1996, it’s a fraught question. Through a combination of electoral vicissitudes, sweeping regional changes, and his own political gifts, his almost 17-year cumulative tenure is longer than that of anyone else who has led Israel, a country only two years older than he is. Over that span, Netanyahu’s political endurance has been built around one consistent argument: that he’s the only leader who can ensure Israel’s safety. 

But in the wake of the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, with more than 40,000 Gazans dead in the ensuing conflict, Israel under Netanyahu is not blessed with peace but besieged by war. As we speak, the country is on edge for an expected aerial attack from Iran, the second in four months. Shops are shuttered, and pedestrians stay within sprinting distance of bomb shelters. The fighting is ongoing in Gaza, with more than 100 hostages still held by Hamas. Much to the frustration of the Biden Administration, Netanyahu still has not articulated a credible plan to end the war or a vision for how the Israelis and the Palestinians can peacefully coexist. Instead, he’s bracing for escalating conflict on even more fronts: in the north with Hezbollah in Lebanon; in the Gulf with the Houthis in Yemen; and most of all, with Israel’s nemesis Iran. “We’re facing not merely Hamas,” Netanyahu says. “We’re facing a full-fledged Iranian axis, and we understand that we have to organize ourselves for broader defense.”

The story of how Israel arrived at this precarious moment is entwined with Netanyahu’s personal ambitions and vulnerabilities. In the months before Oct. 7, Israeli society was sundered by his support of right-wing legislation diminishing the power of the Supreme Court. The collective trauma of the Hamas attack may have brought Jewish Israelis together, but deepened doubts about their Prime Minister, with 72% saying he should resign, either now or after the war, according to a July poll for Israel’s most watched television station. Abroad, the toll of the Gaza war can be tallied in Israel’s increasing isolation: arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant sought by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes; American college campuses convulsed by anti-Israel protests, the largest of their kind since Vietnam; antisemitism rising around the globe.

On his first trip overseas since the war’s outbreak, Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress on July 25 in hopes of reinforcing his nation’s most essential alliance. But behind the standing ovations, the advice from both ends of the political spectrum was unanimous: President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former President Donald Trump all said it was time to end the war in Gaza.

Netanyahu’s response? Two days after arriving home, without a heads-up to the White House, a bomb almost certainly planted by Israel killed Hamas’ most prominent negotiator in a heavily guarded government guest house in Tehran. With every passing week, critics raise further alarms that Netanyahu is drawing out the Gaza campaign for personal political reasons, arguing that a deal for a permanent cease-fire that would bring home the remaining hostages would also open the door to elections that could result in his removal from office. Biden himself told TIME on May 28 that there was “every reason to draw that conclusion,” and in Israel, many do. “Netanyahu is focused on his longevity in power more than the interests of the Israeli people or the State of Israel,” says former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who for four years served as his Defense Minister. “It will take half a generation to repair the damage that Netanyahu has caused in the last year.”

Read More: Inside the Israel-Hamas Information War

A defiant Netanyahu, 74, calls these charges a “canard.” He insists the goal in Gaza must be a victory so decisive that when the fighting stops, Hamas can make no claim to govern in Palestinian territories or pose a threat to Israel. Otherwise, he argues, it will only condemn his country to a future of more massacres at the hands of enemies who want to eliminate the world’s only Jewish state. With the conflict expanding, Netanyahu says he is puncturing the confidence of every other element of Iran’s “axis of resistance,” a network of nonstate actors throughout the Middle East with a collective arsenal of rockets trained on Israel.

If the war in Gaza widens into a regional conflict, the consequences for Israel and the world would be dangerously unpredictable. The U.S. and the West risk being dragged into another Middle East quagmire. Israelis increasingly worry that the war supposedly launched to save Israel will imperil it. Among their most profound fears is that the cycle of violence and the perception it shapes of Israel for the next generation will cause lasting damage to its survival and its soul.

For Netanyahu, who says he’s waging an existential war, it’s a risk he recognizes, but one he’s willing to take. “Being destroyed has bigger implications about Israel’s security,” he says. “I’d rather have bad press than a good obituary.”

Earlier this year, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Tel Aviv to meet Israeli officials in the Kirya, the towering office complex from which the Prime Minister and his Cabinet were conducting the war. Israel’s bombardment of Gaza had already caused an estimated 30,000 deaths, a count by the Hamas-led Health Ministry that doesn’t distinguish between militants and civilians, but is accepted by the U.N. and the White House. Nearly 2 million Palestinians had been displaced. It was a humanitarian catastrophe inflaming the world, and Blinken’s message to Netanyahu was simple: Wind down the war, you have achieved your objective, Hamas can no longer carry out another Oct. 7.

“That’s not our objective,” Netanyahu replied, according to a source familiar with the exchange. “Our objective is to completely destroy Hamas’ military and governing capabilities.” The larger, more essential goal, Netanyahu argued, was restoring Israel’s principle of deterrence. The price of Oct. 7 had to be sufficiently high for Hamas that any other power considering an attack on Israel would fear similar destruction. While Israel faces a cynical enemy that endangers its own people to delegitimize the Jewish state, the price of that full-throttle approach was already evident: the civilian death toll was mounting, Palestinians struggled to access basic health care, and there was a shortage of food and water. The calamity spawned accusations of a disproportionate counterattack. “This is collective punishment,” says Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia University professor who worked on Palestinian peace negotiations in the 1990s. “You don’t punish civilians for what Hamas did.” 

Netanyahu dismisses those allegations out of hand. “We’ve gone out of our way to enable humanitarian assistance since the beginning of the war,” he says, citing Israel’s delivery of aid through food trucks and air drops.

To some extent, Netanyahu has been preparing to fight this war his entire adult life. His political career began as a telegenic diplomat explaining Israel’s positions on U.S. television during Iran’s takeover of the U.S. embassy in 1979, and he was elected Prime Minister three times pitching himself as “Mr. Security.” That the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history happened on his watch was a deep wound, forcing a reckoning in Israel over the strategic policy decisions he had championed for decades. 

The first was allowing Qatar to send funds into the Gaza Strip. Hamas had come to power first by the ballot box (in 2006 elections promoted by U.S. President George W. Bush) and a year later by force of arms, amid factional fighting. Israel first responded by enforcing a blockade on the enclave. But under a policy embraced over the past 10 years by Netanyahu, billions in Qatari cash was allowed into Gaza. The infrastructure it financed included many miles of tunnels. 

“Hamas wore two hats. It wore a terrorist hat and it wore a governance hat after 2007,” says Michael Oren, Netanyahu’s ambassador to Washington from 2009 to 2013. “We thought that we could incentivize Hamas to wear the governance hat through large infusions of Qatari cash and by allowing Palestinian workers into Israel. Give Hamas something to lose. That was the idea. But it was wrong.” 

Others saw a more cynical strategy, to deepen divisions between Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and undermine the prospects for a unified Palestinian state. “He saw Hamas as an asset and the [West Bank–based] Palestinian Authority as a liability,” says Barak. “As long as he can hold Hamas alive and kicking and being a threat to Israel, he can easily protect himself against demands from America and from the rest of the world who argued that Israel should look for a way to achieve a breakthrough with the Palestinians.”

Netanyahu reportedly said as much at a Likud Party meeting in 2019, according to the Israeli media, but he denies it. Rather, he tells TIME, his approval of Qatari cash infusions was humanitarian: “We wanted to make sure that Gaza has a functioning civilian administration to avoid humanitarian collapse,” he says. Moreover, he claims, the money didn’t form the basis of Hamas’ eventual threat to Israel. “The main issue was the transfer of weapons and ammunition from the Sinai into Gaza,” he says. His primary mistake, he says, was acceding to his Security Cabinet’s reluctance to wage full-on war. “Oct. 7 showed that those who said that Hamas was deterred were wrong,” he says during the Aug. 4 interview. “If anything, I didn’t challenge enough the assumption that was common to all the security agencies.”

Instead, Israel maintained a policy known as mowing the grass—periodic fighting to degrade Hamas’ military capability and deter its desire to assault Israel. The 2014 Gaza war, during which Hamas sent forces into Israel via tunnels, lasted 51 days. Early in that round, senior Israeli officials say, Netanyahu’s Security Cabinet presented him with a plan to destroy Hamas that estimated the cost in deaths: roughly 10,000 Gazan civilians and nearly 500 Israeli soldiers. “There was no domestic support for such an action,” says Netanyahu. “There was certainly no international support for such an action—and you need both.”

While Hamas was growing stronger in secret, Israel was making a spectacle of its own division. In January 2023, after Netanyahu returned to power for the third time with a coalition that included far-right parties previously considered too extreme to govern, he backed a radical bill to weaken the judiciary. The plan triggered an immense backlash, with tens of thousands of Israelis protesting every weekend. “You are weakening us, and our enemy is going to see it and we’re going to pay the price,” former Minister of Defense Benny Gantz warned Netanyahu. 

Netanyahu blames the protesters, thousands of whom declared they wouldn’t serve in the military of an Israel with a diminished democratic foundation. “The refusal to serve because of an internal political debate—I think that, if anything, that had an effect,” he says. 

Amid this tumult, Hamas had been planning to infiltrate Israel by land, air, and sea, and not just for a one-off attack. The plan on Oct. 7 was to secure the south of Israel and keep moving farther into the north, according to two senior Israeli sources who have reviewed Hamas documentation discovered in Gaza. “This was not a plan to wound Israel,” says one source who reviewed the documents. “It was planned to be the first step in the operation to destroy Israel entirely.”

Israel’s invasion of Gaza began on Oct. 27, when Netanyahu launched a full-scale ground operation with aerial strikes. The offensive came with a cold calculation; because Hamas intentionally embeds its military infrastructure in densely populated areas, the attacks would inevitably inflict wide-scale civilian casualties. For an Israeli public still reeling from Oct. 7, their deaths became a tragic but necessary price to protect the nation-state established after the Holocaust to provide a safe haven for Jews in their ancestral homeland. A Pew poll in May showed fewer than 20% of Israelis thought the country’s military went “too far.” The press here seldom shows images of civilian deaths. In our interview, Netanyahu says the IDF’s “best estimate” is that the ratio of civilian deaths to military is 1 to 1—extraordinarily low for urban combat. (The U.N. has said that civilians usually account for 90% of casualties in war.)

The hostages remain the focus of domestic attention. In November, Israel and Hamas reached a temporary cease-fire to exchange 105 of them for 240 Palestinian prisoners. When fighting resumed a week later, the humanitarian crisis increasingly became the global focus. Only under intense pressure from the Biden Administration did Netanyahu allow more aid into the Strip. When he prepared to push into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, the last refuge both for displaced civilians and Hamas’ remaining battalions, Netanyahu also found himself up against the American President who had flown in after Oct. 7 to publicly embrace him.

Read More: The Families of Israelis Held Hostage by Hamas Speak Out

Israel seemed more internationally isolated than ever before. Most wounding to Netanyahu was a March cover of the Economist, which he read growing up in the States, headlined “Israel alone.” That, it turns out, was exaggerated. A few weeks later, on April 14, Iran for the first time launched 300 missiles toward Israel, a retaliation for its attack on a diplomatic facility in Damascus. Under Biden’s stewardship, the American, British, French, and Arab forces all rushed to Israel’s defense. 

But two things can be true at once. A government anxious to prevent a full-bore regional conflagration might scramble jets to save Israeli lives while also holding grave reservations about what Israel was doing in Gaza. The war had been going on for six months, and Biden wanted Netanyahu to accept a cease-fire-for-hostage deal that would end it. To Biden’s frustration, Netanyahu resisted. He wanted only a temporary pause in the fighting upon the return of the hostages. A longer respite for Hamas stood to cost Netanyahu the support of his far-right governing partners, tanking his fragile coalition. “He’s risking his government in having a deal with Hamas,” says a senior Israeli official. “Bibi will have a hostage deal only when it suits him politically.”

This was the backdrop for Netanyahu’s first trip abroad since Oct. 7, to address a joint session of Congress in Washington. The speech was at first opposed by Biden and Democratic congressional leadership, who knew it would exacerbate party tensions over the Administration’s support for the war. Nearly 130 Democrats skipped it, including Harris, who as Vice President would traditionally preside over the address. 

A visit intended to showcase solidarity with Israel’s most essential ally instead underscored what was for Israel a growing partisan divide. In recent years, Democratic voters have grown less supportive of Israel and more sympathetic toward Palestinians, according to Gallup. The Gaza war had only intensified the trend.

Netanyahu says that’s not his fault. “I don’t think that the much reported erosion of support among some quarters of the American public is related to Israel,” he says. “It’s more related to America.” He cites a Harvard-Harris survey that in January found that 80% of respondents supported Israel whereas 20% supported Hamas—a significant chunk of support for a terrorist organization. “There’s a problem that America has,” Netanyahu says. “It’s not a problem that Israel has.” 

The partisan divide on display during his trip offered the canny Israeli Premier an opportunity. After the speech he traveled to Trump’s Mediterranean-style Palm Beach mansion to repair his relationship with the billionaire, who remained angry at Netanyahu for backing out of a joint strike on a top Iranian in January 2020, and for congratulating Joe Biden on his election victory. But at Mar-a-Lago, Trump greeted Netanyahu and his wife Sara with open arms, and after their conversation set up a makeshift cabinet meeting around a boardroom table with Netanyahu’s top brass and his own.

Perhaps Netanyahu’s ultimate metric of success in the U.S. came as he prepared to fly home. On July 27, the centrist Israeli television station Channel 12 released a poll that showed his leading all three of his potential rivals in a hypothetical snap election.

Less than a day after the meeting with Trump, a Hezbollah rocket launched from Lebanon struck a soccer field in northern Israel, killing 12, mostly children. In retaliation for the soccer-field attack, Israel on July 30 bombed a senior Hezbollah commander in a suburb of Beirut—a rare strike in the Lebanese capital.

Just hours later, news broke that the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh had been killed in his sleep in Tehran, where he had just attended the inauguration of the new Iranian President. The Iranians accused the Israelis of the hit, which was reportedly delivered via a bomb secreted into an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps guesthouse. Israel has not confirmed or denied involvement but went on high alert, awaiting the promised Iranian retaliation.

Last April, a wider conflict had been narrowly avoided when Iran responded to an Israeli airstrike that killed an Iranian general with a massive but telegraphed direct attack on Israel that was rebuffed with the help of the allied defenses arranged by the U.S. This time, both sides again professed to want to avoid a broader conflict, even as each encounter tested the line between deterrence and provocation.

Read more: On TikTok, Gaza’s Palestinians Plead to the World: ‘Don’t Scroll’

If a larger war can indeed be averted, Netanyahu believes he can transcend the infamy of Oct. 7 in two ways, according to those close to him. One is by successfully ridding Gaza of Hamas. The second: cementing a Saudi-Israel normalization deal. This would be a dramatic expansion of the Abraham Accords forged under Trump, which normalized Israel’s ties with four Arab nations. Eviscerating Hamas, then providing the Jewish state a network of alliances in the heart of the Islamic world, would turn a catastrophe into a strategic triumph. 

The two goals could intersect in Netanyahu’s vague plan for a postwar Gaza. Once Hamas is out of power, he says, he wants to recruit Arab countries to help install a civilian Palestinian governing entity that wouldn’t pose a threat to Israel. “I’d like to see a civilian administration run by Gazans, perhaps with the support of regional partners,” says Netanyahu. “Demilitarization by Israel, civilian administration by Gaza.” 

Few Israelis see this as a realistic scenario. “He doesn’t have any plan for the endgame,” says Efraim Halevy, a former head of Mossad. “First of all, it took him a long time to admit that there would be an endgame, but he has never published it as a proposition, and what he has published is very flimsy.” It also strikes Palestinians as unlikely. “Not unless there’s some kind of Palestinian buy-in, and there will not be a buy-in to something that’s not Palestinian run,” says Khalidi. “Something that’s run by the Emirates or any other alternative is not going to fly.”

The fates of Israelis and Palestinians remain inextricably intertwined. If Israel does not find a way to peacefully separate from the millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, it faces a future of either absorbing them as citizens and losing its Jewish majority, or depriving them of the rights and freedoms afforded to the Jewish population and losing its democracy.  

Netanyahu has no interest in overseeing the creation of a Palestinian state. Rather, he offers a vision of limited pockets of autonomy in Palestinian areas where Israel maintains overriding security control, a version of the situation in the West Bank today. “That’s a detraction of sovereign powers,” he admits, “there’s no question about it.” But he also tacitly recognizes the dilemma Israel faces. “I agree we should maintain a Jewish majority, but I think we should do it in democratic means,” he says. “That’s why I don’t want to incorporate the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria as citizens of Israel,” referring to the biblical name of the West Bank. “It means that they should run their own lives. They should vote for their own institutions. They should have their own self-governance. But they should not have the power to threaten us.”

The Saudis have publicly said Israel needs to be taking steps toward a Palestinian state in order to clinch a normalization deal. But Netanyahu’s far-right ruling coalition won’t tolerate any move in that direction. Naming Itamar Ben-Gvir as National Security Minister and Belazel Smotrich as Finance Minister is, as Union for Reform Judaism president Rick Jacobs has put it, like a U.S. President welcoming into the Cabinet the KKK. The former cheered on the assassination of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin; the latter has said Israel would be “justified” in starving Palestinians to death but the world won’t let them. Together, they have undertaken a bureaucratic push to eliminate any possibility of Palestinian sovereignty. Smotrich has authorized illegal Israeli outposts in the West Bank and streamlined the approval of settlement activities to expand Israel’s footprint in the occupied territories. 

Extremist elements have seeped deeper and deeper into Israeli society since Oct. 7. At the end of July, a Palestinian detainee was rushed to the hospital with severe wounds after being sexually abused with a polelike object. Far-right demonstrators, including some lawmakers, stormed a military base to protest the arrest of nine suspects. 

The compounding crises may have Israel at the greatest risk since its founding 76 years ago. Halevy, the former Mossad chief, views the situation ominously. “There were 70 or so years between the temples,” he says, referring to the last two periods the Jewish people had sovereignty in Israel. “You can say that there is a pattern here.”

Amid the gathering sense of existential danger, Netanyahu is, as always, pitching himself as the man who can ensure that Zionism survives the war. “It will, if we win,” he says. “And if we don’t, our future will be in great jeopardy.” Barak, the former Prime Minister, says Netanyahu is in his psychological element. “He genuinely believes that he’s saving Israel,” says Barak. “Not that he’s responsible for one of the worst events in its history.”

Ultimately, the Israeli electorate will determine its future. Though 7 in 10 Israelis say he should step down, the Channel 12 poll showed Netanyahu winning a plurality of 32% support. “There’s a disconnect between public opinion, which is a majority against him in every measure, and his potential for him to stay in power,” says Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli pollster. “That doesn’t necessarily translate into losing power in elections.”

The country’s own fraught history suggests Netanyahu’s vulnerability. Prime Minister Golda Meir resigned months after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish year, killing over 2,600 Israeli soldiers. Netanyahu has himself been a harsh judge of leaders who oversaw military disasters. In 2008, after a damning report was published on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s management of the 2006 Lebanon war, he called Olmert unfit and incompetent. “The government is in charge of the military, and it failed miserably,” Netanyahu said at the time. “The political echelon and its leader refuse to take responsibility and exhibit personal integrity and leadership—which is what the decisive majority of the public expects them to do.”

In his office on Kaplan Street, TIME asks Netanyahu whether he intends to remain Prime Minister. “I will stay in office as long as I believe I can help lead Israel to a future of security, enduring security and prosperity,” he replies. And would he say an opposition leader who presided over Israel’s worst security failure should stay in power?

Netanyahu pauses to think through his answer. “It depends what they do,” he says. “What do they do? Are they capable of leading the country in war? Can they lead it to victory? Can they assure that the postwar situation will be one of peace and security? If the answer is yes, they should stay in power.”

“In any case,” he says, “that’s the decision of the people.” —With reporting by Vera Bergengruen/Washington and Leslie Dickstein/New York