Zohar Palti is the Andrew Viterbi Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Washington, D.C.; Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; and a consultant for private companies in the United States.
Palti retired from Israeli government service in 2022 after four decades in some of the most sensitive positions in Israel’s national security establishment. These included serving as the Director of the Policy & Political-Military Bureau at Israel’s Ministry of Defense, where his responsibilities included conducting and leading Israel’s defense ties with strategic partners around the world.
Prior to that, Palti led the Mossad Intelligence Directorate (in a rank equivalent to a major general), and before that, he was the counterterrorism chief of the organization. Prior to his service in the Mossad, he served for 25 years in the intelligence corps of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
CTC: Nearly two years after the October 7th attacks, what do you think are the most important operational, strategic, and organizational lessons that Israel has learned from the events of that day?
Palti: First, there was a failure, and the outcome was devastating. October 7 was the greatest strategic, intelligence, and operational failure since the establishment of the State of Israel. There will be many lessons, especially regarding our national security doctrines, the responsibility of the political leadership, the size of the IDF, its missions, and the same applies to the Israel Security Agency and many other areas as well. I’m not sure that we have truly commenced with the process of learning. For that to happen more systematically, the war needs to end, and now, we are still in the midst of it. Secondly, there is a need for a national commission of inquiry that will investigate all the questions related to the failure of October 7. Such a committee needs to examine the full spectrum of issues and problems related to the terror attack, going back [a] couple years before the attack; the day of the attack itself; and the Israeli response to it, at least in the initial days. The investigation will need to address the macro details at the tactical level all the way to the strategic level. The need to revisit the period before the October 7 attacks is critical in order to shed light on how Israel ended up with another “conception,” i.e., a widely held belief among members of the Israeli security establishment that Hamas was not interested in a war with Israel at the present time.
While Israeli society writ large is still undergoing a trauma, I do believe that Israelis are strong and mature enough to start the process of learning the lessons of this historic failure. Timing is also of the essence—every day that passes without the process having started is a day too much. Secondly, delaying the process of lessons learned serves the interests of some politicians.
CTC: Do you believe that the so-called “conception”—this false presumption held by Israeli political and military decisionmakers that Hamas was deterred from and uninterested in a full-scale conflict with Israel—was the overarching reason for the failure? Is that the organizing framework through which we should understand the failure, or is it just one of many problems?
Palti: The first thing to realize is that conceptions—or rather, misconceptions—are neither new nor unique. Israel found itself in a conception before the Yom Kippur War when, still basking in the glory of the dramatic military success of the Six Day War, it completely misjudged Egyptian intentions. At a more individual level, people constantly find themselves in conceptions with regard to their private lives, to their relationships with other people, and so forth. Our misconception about enemies is all the harder to grasp when compared with some of the more resounding successes that we Israelis have had in developing certain weapons systems such as the Arrow missile defense, or more recently in our campaigns against Hezbollah and Iran. Our mind is not able to digest how a country that is able to be so successful in some respects can witness such abject intelligence failures in others. It is simply too soon for us to truly understand this discrepancy.
On the question of how important the conception was in the grand scheme of the intelligence failure that led to October 7, the need of a national commission of inquiry that will shed light on this issue is obvious. The question of where the army was on October 7, however, is a major conundrum. The IDF’s slow reaction time can only be partially blamed on the conception. The problem runs deeper and extends into a culture of gradually diminishing levels of professionalism in the IDF. But again: We can point at this problem, yet gaining a satisfying answer is much more difficult, and will have to await a formal investigation.
CTC: The Israeli government has identified two war aims: dismantling Hamas and returning the hostages who were kidnapped to Gaza on October 7. Some have argued that these two war aims are in conflict with one another. Do you agree with this perspective?
Palti: First of all, [in] a democratic country like Israel or the United States, it is the political echelons who get to decide on what objectives we pursue in war. And yes, the dismantling of Hamas and the return of the hostages were the two war aims that the Israeli government declared.
In my personal opinion, I believe that there is indeed a tension between these two war aims and that there is an imperative to prioritize between [them]. It is somewhat easier for politicians to be inconsistent about these aims, but military generals need clarity on this front. Regarding the hostages, there now seems to be an opportunity where we can bring about their release, and even the IDF Chief of Staff [LTG Eyal Zamir] indicated to the Israeli cabinet that he believes that the government should move towards a release deal. From a military point of view, the Chief of Staff has a point: The army cannot pursue war objectives simultaneously and with the same commitment of resources and energy. To put it bluntly, if the IDF will enter Gaza City with full force, we run the risk of losing the hostages. The government may be hearing the IDF Chief of Staff, but they don’t seem to be listening.
CTC: Let’s turn to Israel’s current strategic position. How would you rate Israel’s current strategic position in the Middle East? Has that position improved when compared to October 6, 2023?
Palti: The short answer is yes, Israel’s strategic position in the region has improved. The longer answer, however, is more complex, because these accomplishments have to be weighed against the lack of internal cohesion in Israel, where the society is highly polarized. [Of course], such internal disagreements are also present in other countries, including the United States. But whereas the United States is a large country with a population of 350 million people, Israel is a tiny stretch of land with 10 million inhabitants. The vast majority of Arab Israelis and the Orthodox Jewish community are not serving in the military. The refusal especially of most—though not all—Orthodox Jews to serve is a major source of internal division in Israel, where those who are bearing the brunt of war—national religious and secular Jews—are increasingly vocal about the lack of fairness in national burden-sharing. In my opinion, this internal Israeli predicament is far more consequential for the future of Israel than the precise [details of the] military outcome in the wake of October 7.
The country’s regional position, especially following the heavy blow we delivered to Hezbollah and following the successful 12-day campaign targeting the nuclear and ballistic missile program in Iran, is without a doubt significantly better than on October 6, 2023. But we should ask ourselves whether we really ‘needed’ an October 7 in order to arrive at this new and improved strategic state. And perhaps an even more important question is, what will become of these many significant strategic accomplishments if the country will not overcome its internal divisions? What will have been the point of these strategic successes if our internal splits squander all these accomplishments?
Elevating the unquestionable successes of our military and clandestine services requires political courage. To truly improve Israel’s strategic outlook, these military victories have to be translated into political agreements so that they can advance the Abraham Accords, normalization, and ultimately peace in the region. As a first step, there is an urgent need to end the war to escape the deadlock in which we find ourselves.
CTC: Israel’s international standing is currently at a low point. How does Israel’s relative isolation in the international arena affect its strategic position, and how worried should Israel be about the crisis in public opinion?
Palti: This is a complex issue. The pressures on Israel are real. I just completed a trip to Europe, and even the closest friends of Israel were telling me that for a year and a half, they had given Israel carte blanche in its war in Gaza and everything that Israel had requested—but that now it’s enough. On the other hand, after the events of October 7—the wanton violence, the killing of women and children, the rapes, and the kidnappings—Israelis can be forgiven for dismissing calls on the part of the international community to show restraint. Israelis of all stripes—whether they were from the extreme right or whether they favored the two-state solution—felt that they were in survival mode, and that they needed to remove the terrorists once and for all.
Interestingly, there is a majority of Israelis who in fact concur with the Americans and the Europeans and who believe that the time has come to end the war and reach a compromise deal. This is an actual debate taking place inside Israel. For many months already, hundreds of thousands of Israeli protesters have blocked major roads in Israel, demanding that the government end the war. So, the truth is that Israelis do not need the international community to tell them that the time to end the war and reach a deal has come. It is important for the government to at least attempt to reach a deal in order to force Hamas’ hand. If Hamas will not be willing to release the hostages, Israel will find itself continuing with the war, only so as not to be left without having obtained either one of its war aims.
Ending the war and trying to reach a deal is the right thing to do, not because of the pressure on the part of the international community, which in any event has little impact, but from Israel’s own national security standpoint. International pressure is uncomfortable, but our obligation—and certainly my obligation as someone who has served his country for some 40 years—is to my country and its citizens. The question is whether the solution should be reached via a deal or through war. In my opinion, a deal is possible, and I think it is positive that the prime minister agreed to the [U.S.] president’s plan to end the war.
CTC: In mid-August, 18 Hamas militants tried to charge an IDF encampment in Khan Younis in an apparent attempt to kidnap IDF soldiers.1 Are you surprised that nearly two years after October 7, Hamas still has enough residual capability to be able to attempt such an operation? What is your sense regarding the current strength of Hamas?
Palti: The real question is not whether we diminished Hamas’ warfighting capabilities by 60 percent, by 70 percent, or by 90 percent. The real question is, how do you define victory? Sometimes, you raise a flag over a hill and declare, ‘We won!’ At other times, the enemy is approaching you with a white cloth and says, ‘I surrender!’
Israel is facing the question of how and when to declare victory, but the United States faced very similar dilemmas and debates. How would the United States know when victory in the global war on terror was achieved? There was no specific day when the leadership declared that al-Qa`ida no longer exists. The United States destroyed al-Qa`ida long before it caught bin Ladin. But bin Ladin was a symbol. I remember meeting with my U.S. counterparts during my time as chief of counterterrorism in the IDF, and later head of counterterrorism in the Mossad, and telling them: ‘Guys, you won. You’re now killing the seventh or the eighth iteration of al-Qa`ida leadership.’ Their answer was that the war was not over; they still needed to get bin Ladin. And after bin Ladin, there are two more key al-Qa`ida operatives. The problem with counterterrorism is that there will always be more. Sometimes, there will be two more [terrorists] and sometimes 20,000 more.
Remember how the United States exited Afghanistan, or how we Israelis left Lebanon: It’s never a happy pullout. It may be a failure; it may be a win—how do you define it? Politicians and military commanders sometimes have different ways to frame these pullouts. Politicians might say that the war ended in disaster. If you are a military commander, however, with responsibility for your soldiers, and you realize that your troops are like sitting ducks, then it does not matter if you can kill another 20 or another 200 terrorists. It will not make a difference. So, perhaps it’s better to just declare: ‘Guys, we won. Let’s get the hell out of here and go home.’
CTC: In your view, how does the fight against Hamas end?
Palti: We could, for all purposes, destroy Hamas in Gaza and still find ourselves facing suicide attacks from the West Bank, targeting Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. The challenge posed by Hamas and other militant groups is not going to go away. Unfortunately, Israel is not in a region where peace, love, and understanding are the norm. Not to sound pessimistic, but you only have to open the Bible to see that Gaza has been a problem since ancient times. My father was a pioneer who built the Kibbutz Nahal Oz—a kibbutz located just outside Gaza that was severely affected by the October 7 massacre. He used to tell me how the Egyptian Fedayeen used to cross to Israel via Gaza and attack Jewish communities in 1953, 1956, 1957. Then came the 1967 War, then the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Then we occupied all of Gaza, and then we pulled out of Gaza. The point is, this violence will not stop.
Without trying to predict the future, I see several broad options for Gaza. The first is that the government will understand that it lost its majority, and it will decide to reach a deal. The second option is that we will [hold] elections, which are due in any event in roughly a year from now. And the government is unlikely to want to face elections if the war is still ongoing and might go for a deal. A third option, of course, is that the government will decide to control Gaza completely and establish a civil government there under Israeli supervision, as was the case until 2005. This would amount to essentially returning to where we were 20 years ago. It sounds crazy, but in fact, Gaza history has been repeating itself for a long time.
CTC: In your assessment, how badly has the Iranian nuclear program been damaged, and how do you think the Iranians will respond in the next few years to the humiliating strikes that they endured in June 2025?
Palti: From the Iranian perspective, their situation is indeed dire. Imagine the discrepancy between the current state of the Islamic Republic of Iran and whatever it is that a succession of Supreme Leaders—from Khomeini to Khamenei—promised to do. They promised to turn Iran into a superpower, to develop a nuclear capability. They banked on their proxies and the Ring of Fire around Israel to overwhelm their enemies. They invested countless sums of money into their proxies. They built up Hezbollah into the world’s most dangerous non-state actor with over 100,000 rockets and missiles and invested heavily into building up client armies in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and other places. The Islamic Republic wasted hundreds of billions of dollars selling the Iranian people a dream that evaporated.
The Islamic Revolution in Iran has not accomplished anything. Economically, Iran is a disaster zone that lacks electricity and is plagued by shortages in water supply. Hezbollah collapsed completely without firing as much as a rocket or missile. The beeper and walkie-talkie operations were of course successful, but the true strategic transformations happened in Syria, with the collapse of the Assad regime, and in Iraq, which is completely controlled by the U.S. and its coalition. Sure, the Houthis are a nuisance, but they don’t pose a strategic threat to Israel.
The 12-day war with Iran was the icing on the cake. Israel dominated Iranian airspace completely using mostly tactical UAVs. Israel achieved within 36-48 hours what the Ukrainians and Russians haven’t achieved in three years. I am not trying to get carried away—and, believe me, I know how to criticize my country, which I just did in this very interview—but it is also important to acknowledge the sensational moments when they happen. It is stunning what the Israeli Air Force has been able to achieve 1,500 km away from its border. Israel has proven that its technology and U.S. technology are far superior to other superpowers, and of course Iranian technology. Israelis and their American allies have also proven, in those 12 days, that they are willing to back up their threats with force—that they mean business and are no longer bluffing.
Whether Iran will develop again its nuclear program, I don’t know. But it’s not a good idea because there is already a proof that when the Israelis and Americans say something, we mean business. We’ve done it, so we’re not bluffing anymore. Speaking about conceptions again, some Americans were under the impression that the Israelis were not capable of acting alone. And while of course the United States has many capabilities that Israel does not possess, look at what Israel accomplished in the first 11 days of the war, before the Americans joined. This is not, of course, to understate the American contribution to the war, but Israel underscored that it has fantastic capabilities as well as the means to use them. Not in wars that last 12 years perhaps, and not with B-2 bombers, but in the Israeli way, based on Israeli thinking and our national DNA. Israel conducts war differently from the United States. The fact that we are flying the same aircraft doesn’t mean that we’re flying them in the same way, or that we are using the munitions in a similar fashion. We have our own methodologies.
So, to sum it up, when the Iranians are running their battle damage assessments, they realize that they’re in a very problematic situation. Of course, they are a large country, and they are not facing any existential threats like we do. But they are facing serious problems.
CTC: When it comes to its counterterrorism response, Israel has been tremendously successful in a variety of different ways. Is there anything in terms of the Israeli counterterrorism campaign since the 7th of October that has surprised you?
Palti: Dominating Iranian airspace in a span of 36-48 hours is something that I have never dared dreaming of. I was part of many preparations for this campaign, and I knew we were good, but we were even better than I had imagined. I believe that the Israeli Air Force has accomplished successes that no other Air Force in the world has achieved. The second thing that I was impressed by was our defense in the face of the Iranian attack using several hundred ballistic missiles and drones in April 2024. No democratic country has ever had to face such an attack in modern times, and our success was resounding. We intercepted nearly every incoming projectile, save for the ones that our computer systems knew were going to land in open, uninhabited space. Of course, this could not have been accomplished were it not for the tremendous support provided by CENTCOM under General Michael Kurilla. The advance warning that CENTCOM provided was deeply impressive, and recalled the tremendous intelligence capabilities that the United States had put on display when it warned the world community weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine that the Russians were planning to make this move.
The United States and Israel have both adopted a new intelligence doctrine of sorts that allows for a much more tailored approach in terms of revealing and sharing intelligence with the broader public. Per this doctrine, these intelligence services were able to keep the Israeli public informed in real time that Iran was planning an attack, thereby enabling the Israeli public to prepare itself for an attack in a more orderly fashion, practically continuing with their life as usual, knowing that they will receive sufficient advanced warning of an incoming threat. This is evidence of states that are extremely confident about their intelligence capabilities, because the natural inclination of these services is to play it safe and cover their rear ends.
General Kurilla also deserves an enormous amount of credit for his capable management of the coalition. A few hours before the Iranian attack, the CENTCOM commander called on its allies in the Middle East to ensure a halt to all commercial flights above Middle Eastern skies—and this is what happened. Only the Americans can accomplish such a feat, and you can be sure that this capability did not go unnoticed by the Russians and the Chinese. And then, like in a science fiction movie, the radar is completely empty, and then we witness the Iranians launching their projectiles. Witnessing how the CENTCOM coalition erected several lines of defense against this threat was breathtaking.
CTC: Is there anything from the mix of Iran’s proxies, in terms of how they responded, that surprised you? For example, were you at all surprised or have you been surprised at what the Houthis have been able to do and achieve over the last two years?
Palti: The Houthi attacks came to us as somewhat of a surprise, but not as a major surprise. The reason being that we did not invest any intelligence capabilities in this regard, and if you’re not studying the enemy, you shouldn’t be surprised by his actions. Part of our decision not to invest capabilities to better understand the Houthi threat is that the U.S. and coalition forces indicated that this was their mess, and they are responsible for handling it.
Broadly speaking, threats appearing in different theaters are handled by partners with pertinent responsibilities. Americans pay much attention to threats in Southeast Asia and South America, where they work with local partners. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen are not exactly in Israel’s backyard. Lebanon and Syria are, of course, and hence we were paying close attention. We should have paid more attention to Gaza of course, but we blew it.
Now that Israel is facing ongoing missile attacks from Yemen, we will invest more capabilities into understanding the threat, and we will deal with it. We will probably find a solution down the road, but it will take some time because Yemen is quite far away from Israel.
As far as Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran are concerned, I was not surprised, because these states and actors were our focus for the last 20 years, and we knew that there would come a day when we would have to take our enemies on. Operations such as the beeper operation are not planned in the short term and then executed due to October 7. Somebody worked on it for 10, 15 years. Penetrating Iranian air defenses, striking IRGC targets, hitting ballistic missile silos and launchers, such moves are the product of long preparation and significant investment into technological and human resources.
CTC: Do you think it’s fair to say that the Iranians are going to double down on their missile production now because they saw that this is one way in which they can really hurt Israel?
Palti: The Iranians had already reached this decision before our attack in June, and this was one reason why we decided to act when we acted. Like the famous line in The Matrix where the protagonist asks for “Guns; lots of guns,” the Iranians craved more missiles than the Israelis would have been able to defend against in an effective manner. When it was clear to us that the Iranians were stockpiling their missile capability to unforeseen numbers, we conducted a risk assessment on when and how to act. In my mind, there is no doubt that Iran will keep increasing its missile stockpile.
CTC: Do you think that the threat posed by the Houthis will grow, now that they are the last Iranian proxy standing that can still pose a credible threat to Israel?
Palti: I will answer this question with a rhetorical question: Should we handle the Houthis as they escalate conflict, or should we take the fight to whomever is sponsoring the Houthi regime and supplying it with weapons? We and our American partners have taken the fight to the Iranian sponsor before, and we can do it again. In my opinion, the Europeans would be wise to include the Houthi question among the issues to discuss as they are meeting with the Iranians on the snapback sanctions and the nuclear program more generally.
CTC: Would it be fair to say that one of the lessons for Israel from the October 7th war is that it has moved away from a strategy of deterrence to one of threat removal?
Palti: The short answer is yes, but we are a democratic country that is not interested in fighting wars forever. We cannot afford long wars. After two years of war against Hamas, we are already paying a price. Prolonged wars will paralyze the Israeli civil markets, our cyber companies, the AI and technology industries, our startups, and so forth. If this is the kind of life I would like to live, I would go live in North Korea. So, with all due respect to our leaders who are trying to tell us that Israel will now be preempting each and every threat, this is untenable for a country that is dependent on its reserve soldiers. These are not soldiers who can be expected to be on call 24/7/365. These are parents who have day jobs and cherish their civilian lives. They will sign up for duty when needed, as they did in massive numbers after October 7, but I advise the government not to overdo it in terms of placing demands on them. Hence, a full-fledged adoption of a strategy of threat removal would be mistaken. We fight when we need to fight. But if we can kick the can down the road occasionally so that we won’t have to deal with it every day, that strikes me as the wiser course of action, and indeed an essential one in a free and democratic country. CTC
Citations
[1] Yaniv Kubovich, “Hamas Militants Attack IDF Post in Gaza’s Khan Yunis in Apparent Attempt to Kidnap Soldier,” Haaretz, August 20, 2025.
