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‘We are on the precipice of defeat’: Former IDF chiefs of staff, intel chiefs demand end to Gaza war

More than a dozen former senior security officials put out a joint video with a call to end the war in Gaza, arguing that Israel has racked up more losses than victories, and that the fighting has dragged on for political reasons rather than being based on strategic military decisions.

Among the 19 retired IDF chiefs of staff, intelligence chiefs, Shin Bet and Mossad directors and police commissioners are former IDF chief of staff and prime minister Ehud Barak, former chiefs of staff Moshe Ya’alon and Dan Halutz, and ex-Shin Bet director Yoram Cohen.

“Each of these people sat in cabinet meetings, operated in the inner circles, attended all the most sensitive decision-making processes, the most delicate,” says a voiceover at the start of the video by way of introduction. “Together, they have more than a thousand years’ experience in national security and diplomacy.”

Former military intelligence chief Amos Malka posits that Israel is “well over a year past the point where we could have ended the war with a sufficient operational achievement.”

Instead, supplies ex-Shin Bet director Nadav Argaman, “we are now mostly offsetting losses.”

“We are on the precipice of defeat,” concurs former Mossad director Tamir Pardo.

“What the world sees today is of our own creation,” he says of the dire humanitarian conditions in the Gaza Strip, brought about by long months of war with Hamas. “We are hiding behind a lie that we wrought. This lie was sold to the Israeli public, and the world has long since understood that it doesn’t reflect the real picture.”

“There are moments that represent a black flag in which one must stand firm and say: This far and no further,” Ya’alon declares. “Right now, we have a government that the messianic zealots have pulled in a certain, irrational direction.”

“They are a minority,” agrees Cohen, “but the problem is that the minority controls the policy.”