‘You no longer have a government’

Six months into the war in the Gaza Strip, Benjamin Netanyahu was preparing to bring it to a halt. Negotiations were underway for an extended cease-fire with Hamas, and he was ready to agree to a compromise. He had dispatched an envoy to convey Israel’s new position to the Egyptian mediators. Now, at a meeting at the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv, he needed to get his cabinet onboard. He had kept the plan off the meeting’s written agenda. The idea was to reveal it suddenly, preventing resistant ministers from coordinating their response.

It was April 2024, long before Netanyahu mounted his political comeback. The proposal on the table would have paused the Gaza war for at least six weeks. It would have created a window for negotiations with Hamas over a permanent truce. More than 30 hostages captured by Hamas at the start of the war would have been released within weeks. Still more would have been freed if the truce was extended. And the devastation of Gaza, where roughly two million people were trying to survive daily attacks, would have come to a halt.

Ending the war would then have raised the chances of a landmark peace deal with Saudi Arabia, the Arab world’s most powerful country. For months, the Saudi leadership had secretly signaled its willingness to accelerate peace talks with Israel — as long as the war in Gaza stopped. The normalization of ties between the Saudi and Israeli governments, an achievement that had eluded every Israeli leader since the state’s founding in 1948, would have secured Israel’s status in the region as well as Netanyahu’s long-term legacy.

But for Netanyahu, a truce also came with personal risk. As prime minister, he led a fragile coalition that depended on the support of far-right ministers who wanted to occupy Gaza, not withdraw from it. They sought a long war that would ultimately enable Israel to re-establish Jewish settlements in Gaza. If a cease-fire came too soon, these ministers might decide to collapse the ruling coalition. That would prompt early elections that polls showed Netanyahu would lose. Out of office, Netanyahu was vulnerable. Since 2020, he had been standing trial for corruption; the charges, which he denied, mostly related to granting favors to businessmen in exchange for gifts and favorable media coverage. Shorn of power, Netanyahu would lose the ability to force out the attorney general who oversaw his prosecution — as indeed his government would later attempt to do.

As the cabinet discussed other matters, an aide hurried into the meeting room with a document summarizing Israel’s new negotiating position, quietly placing it in front of Netanyahu. He gave it one last read, ticking off various points with his pen. The route to a truce presented real danger, but he seemed ready to move ahead.

Then Bezalel Smotrich, his finance minister, interrupted the proceedings. As a young activist in 2005, Smotrich was detained for weeks — though never charged — on suspicion of plotting to blow up vehicles on a major highway in order to slow the dismantling of Israeli settlements in Gaza. Along with Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national-security minister, Smotrich was now one of the strongest advocates in the cabinet for re-establishing those settlements. He had recently called for most of Gaza’s Palestinian population to leave. Now, at the cabinet meeting, Smotrich declared that he had heard rumors of a plan for a deal. The details disturbed him. “I want you to know that if a surrender agreement like this is brought forward, you no longer have a government,” Smotrich said. “The government is finished.”

It was 5:44 p.m., according to minutes of the meeting. At that moment, the prime minister was forced to choose between the chance of a truce and his political survival — and Netanyahu opted for survival. There was no cease-fire plan, he promised Smotrich. “No, no, there’s no such thing,” he said. And as the cabinet discussion moved on, Netanyahu quietly leaned over to his security advisers and whispered what must have by then become obvious to them: “Don’t present the plan.”

‘A political resurrection’

The 12-day war with Iran in June has been widely understood as a moment of glory for Netanyahu, one that marks the culmination of a hard-fought comeback from the lowest point in his long political career, when he oversaw, in October 2023, the deadliest military failure in Israel’s history.

But in the aftermath of this apparent triumph, a more fateful reckoning awaits Netanyahu over the war in Gaza. The conflict has flattened much of the territory, killing at least 55,000 people, including Hamas combatants but also many civilians, nearly 10,000 of them children under the age of 11. Even if negotiations finally bring Israel’s strikes to a halt in the coming days, it is already the longest high-intensity war in Israel’s history — longer than the wars surrounding its establishment in 1948, longer than the Yom Kippur War that defended its borders in 1973 and far longer, of course, than the six-day Arab-Israeli war of 1967 that brought Gaza and the West Bank under its control.

As the war has dragged on, the global sympathy that Israel earned in the aftermath of the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust has instead transformed into growing ignominy on the international stage. The International Court of Justice is weighing claims that Israel has committed a genocide. In America, President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s failure to end the war split the Democratic Party and helped spur the upheaval that returned President Trump to power. And in Israel, prolonged war has heightened bitter disagreements about the nation’s priorities, the nature of its democracy and Netanyahu’s legitimacy as a leader.

Why, after nearly two years, has the war yet to reach a definitive conclusion? Why did Israel frequently turn away chances for de-escalation, instead expanding its military ambitions to Lebanon, to Syria and now to Iran? Why has the war dragged on, even as the leadership of Hamas was decapitated and more Israelis called for a cease-fire? For many Israelis, the war’s protraction is mainly the fault of Hamas, which has refused to surrender despite Palestinians’ suffering unfathomable losses. Most Israelis also see the war’s expansion to Lebanon and Iran as an essential act of self-defense against allies of Hamas that also seek Israel’s destruction. But many increasingly believe that Israel could have struck an earlier deal to end the war, and they charge Netanyahu — who wields ultimate authority over Israel’s military strategy — with preventing that deal from being reached.

To understand the role that Netanyahu’s own calculations played in prolonging the war, we spoke with more than 110 officials in Israel, the United States and the Arab world. These officials — both supporters and critics — have all met, observed or worked with the prime minister since the start of the war and sometimes long before it began. We also reviewed scores of documents, including records of government meetings, communications among officials, negotiation records, war plans, intelligence assessments, secret Hamas protocols and court documents.

For obvious reasons, one of the most sensitive accusations about Netanyahu’s conduct of the war is that he prolonged it for his own personal political benefit. Whether or not they thought he had, everyone we spoke to agreed on one thing: The war’s extension and expansion has been good for Netanyahu. When the war began on Oct. 7, 2023 — the day that Hamas and its allies killed roughly 1,200 people, both civilians and security personnel, and abducted some 250 — it seemed set to end Netanyahu’s political career. The general expectation was the war would subside early in 2024, Netanyahu’s coalition would collapse and Netanyahu would soon be held accountable for the disaster.

Instead, Netanyahu harnessed the war to improve his political fortunes, at first simply to survive and then to triumph on his own terms. Nearly two years after the catastrophic attack on Israel, and still facing serious charges of corruption, he has a good chance of governing Israel until a general election scheduled to occur by October 2026, when he will be 77 — and he could well win it.

It is of course impossible to say that Netanyahu made key wartime decisions entirely in the service of his own political survival. His personal quest for power is often inextricably enmeshed with genuine patriotism and the belief, which infuses his public pronouncements, that he alone knows how best to defend Israel. Beyond his own motives, war is a complex, chaotic process with many daily variables that take a course of their own. Like all Israeli prime ministers, Netanyahu lacks full executive control over a sprawling administration full of competing factions and interests. His enemies in Lebanon and Iran posed genuine threats to Israel, and their defeat has strengthened Israeli security. And his adversary in Gaza, Hamas, has blocked or slow-walked cease-fire negotiations during key stretches of the war, including at a point early last summer when Netanyahu appeared more willing to reach a truce.

Yet for all these caveats, our reporting has led us to three unavoidable conclusions. In the years preceding the war, Netanyahu’s approach to Hamas helped to strengthen the group, giving it space to secretly prepare for war. In the months before that war, Netanyahu’s push to undermine Israel’s judiciary widened already-deep rifts within Israeli society and weakened its military, making Israel appear vulnerable and encouraging Hamas to ready its attack. And once the war began, Netanyahu’s decisions were at times colored predominantly by political and personal need instead of only military or national necessity.

Through his office, Netanyahu declined several requests for interviews and did not respond to a detailed list of the findings in this article.

We found that at key stages in the war, Netanyahu’s decisions extended the fighting in Gaza longer than even Israel’s senior military leadership deemed necessary. This was partly a result of Netanyahu’s refusal — years before Oct. 7 — to resign when charged with corruption, a decision that lost him the support of Israel’s moderates and even parts of the Israeli right. In the years since his trial, still ongoing, began in 2020, he instead built a fragile majority in Israel’s Parliament by forging alliances with far-right parties. It kept him in power, but it tied his fate to their extremist positions, both before the war and after it began.

Under political pressure from those coalition allies, Netanyahu slowed down cease-fire negotiations at crucial moments, missing windows in which Hamas was less opposed to a deal. He avoided planning for a postwar power transition, making it harder to direct the war toward an endgame. He pressed ahead with the war in April and July 2024, even as top generals told him that there was no further military advantage to continuing. When momentum toward a cease-fire seemed to grow, Netanyahu ascribed sudden significance to military objectives that he previously seemed less interested in pursuing, such as the capture of the southern city Rafah and later the occupation of the Gaza-Egypt border. And when an extended cease-fire was finally forged in January, he broke the truce in March in part to keep his coalition intact.

The cost of delay has been high: With each passing week, the delay has meant death to hundreds of Palestinians and horror to thousands more. It also meant that at least eight more hostages died in captivity, deepening the divisions in Israel between those who sought a hostage-release deal above all else and those who thought the war should run until Hamas was destroyed. It delayed the Saudi deal and sullied Israel’s image abroad. And it led prosecutors at the International Criminal Court to call for Netanyahu’s arrest.

But for Netanyahu, the immediate rewards have been rich. He has amassed more control over the Israeli state than at any other point in his 18-year tenure as prime minister. He has successfully prevented a state inquiry that would investigate his own culpability, saying that the fallout must wait until the Gaza war ends, even as the defense minister, army chief, domestic spymaster and several top generals all either have been fired or have resigned. As he attends court up to three times a week for his corruption trial, his government is now moving to fire the attorney general who oversees that prosecution. The war’s continuation has also shored up his coalition. It gave him time to plan and enact his attack on Iran. Above all, as even his strongest supporters note, it kept him in office. “Netanyahu pulled off a political resurrection that no one — not even his closest allies — thought possible,” said Srulik Einhorn, a political strategist who is part of Netanyahu’s inner circle. “His leadership through a prolonged war with Hamas and a bold strike on Iran has reshaped the political map. He’s now in a strong position to win elections again.”

This is the inside story, containing many details that have never been previously reported, of Netanyahu’s role in the events that led to the Oct. 7 attacks and of the way that his political calculations affected the conduct of the war that followed. It reveals how — in cabinet meetings, closed-door sessions with his top advisers and phone calls with international allies — Netanyahu made a series of decisions that prolonged a cataclysmic war in part to keep himself in power.

‘The internal crisis’

In late July 2023, Israel’s military-intelligence directorate produced an alarming report that synthesized all intercepts gathered by Israeli intelligence in recent months. Its conclusion was dire: Israel was in grave danger. The country was convulsed by intense domestic turmoil over a divisive plan, pushed by Netanyahu’s government, to exert greater control over the country’s judiciary. For months, hundreds of thousands of citizens, including a growing number of military reservists, had joined weekly protests against the plan. The report said that Israel’s chief enemies — Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the government in Iran — had observed the growing divisions within Israeli society and particularly the armed forces. Now those foes were secretly discussing whether Israel was vulnerable enough to attack.

“I will start with the bottom line,” wrote Brig. Gen. Amit Saar, the army’s top intelligence analyst, in a letter introducing the report. “The deepening of the internal crisis, in my view, further erodes Israel’s image, exacerbates the damage to Israeli deterrence and increases the likelihood of escalation.”

By July 23, 2023, the protests had reached a climax. At least 10,000 military reservists, including scores of reserve pilots who formed the backbone of Israel’s flying corps, had threatened to stop serving if Netanyahu went ahead with a vote in Parliament, planned for the next day, to enact the first part of the overhaul.

Sensing disaster, Herzi Halevi, the commander in chief of the Israel Defense Forces, tried to reach Netanyahu, in a previously unreported effort to get the prime minister to read Saar’s findings. Halevi and other senior officials, including the defense minister, had presented similar findings to Netanyahu in previous months and weeks, to no avail. This was the fourth written warning that Saar had sent since the start of the year, all of which had been ignored. Back in March, Netanyahu even fired the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for issuing a public warning about the growing dangers, before reversing his decision under public pressure. Still, this new report was so dire that Halevi decided to try again.

The problem was that Netanyahu had just been admitted to the hospital. Days earlier, he fainted. Now he was being fitted with a pacemaker at a medical center outside Tel Aviv. Halevi had no means of reaching him. Instead, he persuaded Netanyahu’s top military adviser, Maj. Gen. Avi Gil, to take the alarming intelligence to the prime minister’s ward. It was 8 p.m. by the time the aide arrived — just 16 hours before Netanyahu’s coalition was set to vote on the bill in Parliament.

Netanyahu sat in his pajamas at a table, tired but alert. Gil presented him with the general’s letter, summarizing its contents. But Netanyahu remained unmoved. His alliance had two factions that saw the vote as a top priority. Hard-right ultranationalists, including Bezalel Smotrich, saw the Supreme Court as an obstacle to their efforts to increase the number of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Ultra-Orthodox Jewish members, meanwhile, resented how the court had pressed to end their voters’ exemption from military service. Netanyahu did not want to alienate these allies by stopping the legislation. With their support, he would remain prime minister. Without them, he was merely an opposition lawmaker on trial for corruption.

Moments later, Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal intelligence agency, made his own attempt to press Netanyahu. Bar had also been unsuccessfully trying to reach him for days. Knowing Gil would be with Netanyahu that evening, Bar seized the moment, called Gil’s encrypted phone and asked Gil to pass the handset to the prime minister. Once Netanyahu was on the line, Bar told him that the country was at a “point of crisis” and faced imminent peril. The details were not clear, Bar said, but the danger was real. “I am giving you a strategic alert for war,” he said. “I don’t know when, and I don’t know where, but I’m giving you a strategic warning for war.”

Netanyahu was again unmoved. For years, he had been encouraging the Qatari government to send more than $1 billion in economic aid to Gaza, and he was confident the strategy had bought him quiet in the territory. In his view, Israeli civic unrest was the more pressing problem. “Deal with the protesters,” Netanyahu told Bar.

When the vote passed the next day, the effect on the Israeli public was immediate. More clashes flared that night between Netanyahu’s supporters and critics, in one case breaking out in gunfire. Military reservists began to make good on their promises to resign.

Two days later, Hamas made its own assessment of the situation. For many years, its leaders had planned a major attack on Israel, and now — as they recorded in the minutes of a secret meeting in Gaza led by Yahya Sinwar — the time was right to put the plan into practice: “The condition of the occupation government and its domestic arena compels us to move forward with a strategic battle.”

‘We are at war’

Netanyahu first learned of the Oct. 7 attack that morning at 6:29 a.m., when he was woken by a WhatsApp call from Gil, his top military adviser. It was a brief exchange. As air-raid sirens blared in the background, Gil told Netanyahu that Hamas had just launched some kind of strike. He asked the prime minister to shake himself awake and promised to call back in a few minutes — this time on Netanyahu’s encrypted phone, which is set up to record conversations for posterity.

At 6:40 a.m., Gil called that secure line with more details. Overnight, intelligence officers had detected scores of Hamas fighters inserting Israeli SIM cards into their phones, an indication of some kind of imminent maneuver requiring access to Israeli phone networks. Commanders tracked that activity through the night, assuming that it was a rehearsal — similar moves in the past had turned out to be false alarms. This time, it was not.

Gil stopped speaking, and Netanyahu, in a response that has never previously been reported, replied with a series of questions: “What happened? Why did they open fire? With what?”

“We don’t know, Prime Minister,” Gil replied.

“Not why,” Netanyahu said. “What are they firing?”

“For now, they’ve fired heavy barrages across the entire country,” Gil said, noting several locations in central and southern Israel.

“All right,” Netanyahu said. “Can we take down their leadership?” In the summer, Netanyahu had resisted a push from his security chiefs to assassinate Hamas’s leaders with airstrikes. Now, in the heat of battle, he was giving the order.

“The army is starting that now,” Gil replied, running through the state of play and concluding definitively, “We are at war.”

Immediately, Netanyahu turned to the question of responsibility. “I don’t see anything in the intelligence,” he said pointedly.

Minutes into the war, this was the first hint of how Netanyahu would try to prolong his political life. The security chiefs had given him a strategic warning for war, but Netanyahu was careful to emphasize in this recorded call that it was not specifically about a frontal invasion from Gaza.

Later in the war, Netanyahu would complain publicly that he was woken too late and that if only he had been alerted sooner, the catastrophe would have been averted. The reality is that once he was awake, he had little effect that morning on Israel’s initial response. Gallant, the defense minister, and Halevi, the head of the military, ran the immediate order of battle several floors beneath the military headquarters in Tel Aviv, in an underground command center known as the Pit.

Netanyahu briefly visited the Pit for an operational update around 10 a.m., more than three hours after the attack started. No one had a clear grasp of the scale of what was happening down south, partly because so many military bases had been overrun. The commanders in Tel Aviv thought that only about 200 infiltrators had crossed the border. In reality, at least 2,000 militants — riding pickup trucks, motorcycles, speedboats and hang gliders — had penetrated Israel from roughly 60 points along a 37-mile border. They had attacked more than 20 villages and army bases, burning homes and shooting civilians in the street, and advanced 15 miles inside Israel. They had gunned down more than 360 people at a music festival and were on their way to abducting roughly 250 hostages — including Arab citizens of Israel and Thai farmworkers.

Netanyahu’s first substantive decision was to order the generals to bomb Gaza with a new level of force. He re-emerged after the briefing to record a video for distribution online. In a dark jacket and open-necked white shirt, Netanyahu said he had instructed the military to “return fire on a scale that the enemy has not known. The enemy will pay an unprecedented price.” Shortly afterward, the generals significantly loosened their rules of engagement, expanding the set of military targets that their subordinates could hit in pre-emptive airstrikes, while exponentially increasing — sometimes by a factor of 20 — the number of civilians that officers could endanger in each attack. When Halevi later told him that the air force had hit one thousand targets in Gaza, Netanyahu pushed him to strike even faster. “One thousand?” Netanyahu said dismissively. “I want 5,000.”

The mood inside his political coalition and the military high command was despondent and even ashamed, as leaders took stock of how their failures and actions had led Israel to this point. Preparing to brief a gathering of ministers, General Saar said almost in passing, and certainly in dark humor, that Hamas had made its move for two reasons — to disrupt prewar efforts to persuade Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia to forge formal ties with Israel and to punish provocative efforts by far-right ministers to entrench Israel’s control over the West Bank and a holy site in Jerusalem. “Why did they attack?” Saar asked rhetorically. “Because of Bin Salman and Ben-Gvir,” he answered.

Having spent nine months ignoring external threats to pursue contentious domestic goals, some ministers struggled with the overwhelming horror of the moment even as its political consequences loomed. Yariv Levin, the justice minister and architect of the judicial overhaul, sat on a staircase in tears, according to two witnesses including Moti Babchick, a senior ministerial aide. (Through a spokesman, Levin denied crying.) At a cabinet meeting that day, Bezalel Smotrich summed up the mood. “In 48 hours, they’ll call for our resignations because of this mess,” Smotrich said. “And they’ll be right.”

Yet even at the nadir of his political career, Netanyahu was already charting his route to political survival. Over the chaotic next days, the military repelled Hamas’s attack, dealt with the remaining Hamas infiltrators and began to plan an invasion of Gaza. In the background, Netanyahu was working out how to bring more parties into his coalition government.

His first chance came when Yair Lapid, his chief political opponent, offered to form a wartime unity government. They were unlikely partners. Lapid had fiercely opposed Netanyahu’s attempt to defang the judiciary. He was also far more open than Netanyahu to the idea of Palestinian sovereignty. Yet Lapid was prepared to put aside these differences in the national interest — if Netanyahu agreed to fire Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, who was once convicted of supporting a Jewish terrorist group. Lapid feared the far-right leaders would make it harder to steer a rational path through the war. It was likely, even then, that they would try to drag out the coming war to serve their dream of annexing Gaza and resettling it with Israelis. Netanyahu refused Lapid’s demand. He knew that once the war was over, the far right would be more likely than Lapid to let him stay in power.

Netanyahu found more pliant partners on Oct. 11, as the military prepared to attack Hezbollah, the powerful militia that was Hamas’s ally in Lebanon. Hezbollah, backed by Iran, had been firing rockets at Israeli troops since the second day of the war. Israeli leaders feared that the well-armed group was planning a ground invasion from the north. Gallant, working down in the Pit, was ready to enact a plan aimed at pre-empting such an invasion: The Israeli Air Force would decapitate Hezbollah’s leadership in Beirut with a barrage of airstrikes. But he needed Netanyahu to sign off. The problem was that Netanyahu would not return his calls. With the planes in the air, Gallant went in person to Netanyahu’s office. He found Netanyahu focused on a completely different matter — domestic politics.

Sitting with Netanyahu were Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, centrist former military chiefs who had served in leadership roles through decades of conflict. Minutes earlier, Gantz and Eisenkot agreed to bring their party into Netanyahu’s wartime coalition. The deal threw Netanyahu a lifeline at the weakest moment of his career, just as the first post-Oct. 7 polls were about to be released, showing what everyone had expected: Support for Netanyahu’s party had plummeted. Unlike Lapid, Gantz and Eisenkot joined the government without demanding the ouster of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. In doing so, they ensured that the hard right would continue to shape the government’s wartime course — while allowing Netanyahu to pool the blame for anything that went wrong. Netanyahu, Gantz and Gallant soon began wearing matching black outfits, underscoring a sense of shared fate.

As the new ministers joined the government, Israeli fighter jets were already circling over the Mediterranean Sea, some 30 miles from Beirut. The new cabinet needed to decide: Should the pilots proceed with the attack?

The United States — Israel’s biggest ally, whose support would be crucial to maintaining the war effort — cautioned against it. Biden and his advisers said they had seen no evidence that Hezbollah intended to invade Israel, and they feared that an Israeli strike would prompt a regional escalation involving Hezbollah’s benefactor, Iran. Netanyahu had long sought a pretext for an attack on Iran, and a year later he would, following a sequence of unforeseen events in Lebanon, finally dare to launch a full broadside against Hezbollah and then subsequently attack Iran. But at that early stage in the war — fighting for his political life, eager to sustain Biden’s support and pessimistic about Israel’s military capabilities — a multifront conflict was not Netanyahu’s priority or his intention.

As Netanyahu weighed the advice from Biden against the pressure from his military chiefs, an alarming announcement focused his mind. Radar signals suggested Hezbollah drones or paragliders were flying over northern Israel. General Halevi urged the ministers to reach a decision. The jets were 19 minutes from striking Beirut, Halevi said.

Just as ministers seemed poised to sign off, an officer arrived with a new intelligence update. The radar had been misinterpreted. The drones were in fact a flock of birds. The attack was called off, averting — for the moment — a broader war.

‘I don’t know what to do’

Throughout the opening months of the war, Netanyahu’s survival was dependent on pulling off an almost impossible balancing act. He needed to do just enough to assuage Biden, whose diplomatic support and military assistance were essential to prolonging Israel’s war effort, while doing little to alienate the far right, on whom Netanyahu’s political career depended. The challenge of pleasing both became clear after midnight on Oct. 17, 10 days after the attack. Four floors beneath the military headquarters in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu was paralyzed by the need to choose between the wishes of an American delegation, sitting in one subterranean room, and those of his cabinet ministers, sitting in another room nearby.

The Americans, led by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, were pushing Netanyahu to ease a blockade of Gaza that Israel had enforced since the beginning of the war. Food, medicine and fuel stocks were running down, and a humanitarian disaster was taking shape. Biden was refusing to visit Israel until the blockade was eased. Yet most members of the Israeli cabinet were pushing Netanyahu to keep it in place. Deeply traumatized by the atrocities committed on Oct. 7, Israeli society was largely opposed to any humanitarian gestures. Netanyahu’s far-right allies were among the most resistant.

Netanyahu and Ron Dermer, a cabinet minister and his closest adviser, rushed between the two rooms, struggling to reach a compromise. To the Americans, Netanyahu appeared desperate. He told them that any images of aid trucks entering Gaza would collapse his coalition. Fidgeting in his seat, he turned to Dermer. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “Ron, you’re creative, come up with something.” Finally, around 1 a.m., after hours of negotiations, Netanyahu capitulated — to the Americans. For now, his need for Biden’s support outweighed his domestic interests.

The balance began to shift after Israel launched a ground invasion of Gaza in late October 2023. Both the Biden administration and top Israeli commanders began pressing Netanyahu to begin planning for how Gaza might be governed after Hamas was defeated. In Iraq, the United States had learned the hard way that without a postwar plan, it was hard to bring wars to an end. Yet time and again in meetings with American officials, Netanyahu avoided detailed discussion about his endgame in Gaza. When mid-ranking U.S. diplomatic and defense officials met with their Israeli counterparts, they found that the Israelis had been barred by the government from discussing Gaza’s long-term future.

Privately, the Israelis said Netanyahu feared that such plans would destabilize his coalition. To talk about postwar governance meant discussing Palestinian alternatives to Hamas. But ministers like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir rejected returning Gaza to any kind of Palestinian control. “​​Netanyahu was not interested in having a serious day-after conversation,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a Mideast adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris who was involved in those talks. “He was constraining his entire system from doing so because he knew it would force kinds of conversations about Palestinian long-term control of Gaza that could bring down this coalition.”

American frustrations heightened after a brief cease-fire in late November 2023, when more than 100 hostages were freed in a deal that included the release of 240 Palestinian prisoners and detainees. Until then, the broad expectation within the American and Israeli hierarchies was that Israel’s operation would start to wind down by the end of the year and that another truce would be reached within weeks. Instead, the truce talks were now stalled. Netanyahu told the Americans that Israel needed more time to capture Khan Younis, a key city in southern Gaza, because the Israeli soldiers fighting in the city had found that Hamas’s tunnel network there was much more extensive than expected. All the while, the Palestinian death toll was mounting, prompting accusations of genocide, and about four-fifths of Gazans had been forced to flee their homes. By Dec. 21, the toll had passed 20,000, including both civilians and combatants.

Biden lost patience with Netanyahu two days later. Smotrich, in his capacity as finance minister, had blocked funds earmarked for the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank, putting it at risk of bankruptcy. The government of Norway had offered to act as a guarantor for the money, in order to deflect Smotrich’s claims that the money would be used to fund terrorism. After a long call, mostly about Gaza, Biden pressed Netanyahu to override Smotrich and work with Norway. If the Palestinian Authority collapsed, the West Bank might erupt with violence, creating yet another front that would benefit only the extremists on either side. Netanyahu demurred, saying that Norway couldn’t be trusted. Biden snapped. “If you can’t trust Norway,” Biden said, “then there’s no point in continuing the conversation.” Biden put the phone down.

As the war continued into early 2024, senior officials in Washington began to roll their eyes whenever Netanyahu or his team said they needed “two more weeks” to complete one final military objective. It was clear to them that Netanyahu was looking to drag out the war against the advice of the Americans and the Israeli military high command.

If Netanyahu had wanted it, a new truce was within reach — mediators from the United States, Egypt and Qatar had found a framework that bridged the gaps between the sides. On the battlefield, the army was on the verge of completing its initial battle plan and was preparing to withdraw its last reservists from Gaza. Eisenkot, the centrist former general who joined the cabinet in October 2023, said in a rare television interview that the hostages would be freed alive only through negotiations and that Israel should prioritize their release above the killing of its enemies. Halevi recommended to the political leadership that they seal a second hostage deal. He saw little immediate benefit to capturing Rafah, a city south of Khan Younis, and wanted Israel to pivot to the low-level battle with Hezbollah on its northern border with Lebanon.

But under pressure from Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, Netanyahu was taking Israel in a different direction. He returned to wearing a suit and tie, creating a visual juxtaposition with the centrist ministers in his cabinet, who still wore their black outfits. He began to talk about achieving “total victory,” a maximalist goal that seemed to foreclose the idea of a swift truce. He shifted his military tactics. After telling American officials in October that Rafah was not a target, he now started to present its capture as a strategic imperative. And in the cease-fire talks, Netanyahu began to make new demands.

On the battlefield, with no endgame to aim for, the Israeli military began to go around in circles, almost literally. Troops began withdrawing from areas they had captured, allowing Hamas to re-establish control. Weeks later, Israeli troops were often therefore forced to return, in order to curb Hamas’s resurgence. Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which Israel had captured and then relinquished in November, was the first notable example. In March, Israeli troops returned to reoccupy the hospital; the ensuing battle largely destroyed it. The death toll topped 30,000, and aid agencies warned of a looming famine.

When Netanyahu did come close to compromising, in the buildup to the cabinet meeting in April 2024 disrupted by Smotrich, he reversed course under pressure from the far right. Between them, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir controlled 14 of the 72 lawmakers in Netanyahu’s multiparty coalition; without them, Netanyahu’s party, Likud, would still be the largest party in the Parliament, but his wider alliance would slip below the 61 seats required for a majority. That would most likely have prompted a snap election, which polls suggested Netanyahu, still trailing badly to Gantz and Eisenkot, would lose.

American officials failed to persuade Netanyahu that a truce might win him favor in Israel. In one conversation with Netanyahu, White House officials cited polls showing that more than 50 percent of Israelis now supported a hostage deal rather than continued war.

“Not 50 percent of my voters,” Netanyahu replied.

‘Let’s finish this’

Even as Netanyahu defied Biden and sent troops into Rafah, the Americans kept trying to find a formula that might tempt him to end the war. The Biden administration, facing a divided Democratic Party in a presidential election year, could little afford to be seen as abandoning Israel. It froze one arms shipment but ultimately sought to use more carrot than stick. Against that backdrop, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national-security adviser, flew to Saudi Arabia in mid-May to accelerate efforts to open the first formal ties between Jerusalem and Riyadh since Israel’s founding in 1948. Such a deal had been within reach before the war began. The American hope was that if Riyadh could be persuaded to offer such a pact, in exchange for Israel’s ending the war and promising sovereignty to the Palestinians, Netanyahu might be persuaded to disappoint his far-right allies and agree to a truce in Gaza.

It was the night of Saturday, May 18, 2024, in Dammam, eastern Saudi Arabia. Global outrage at Israel’s devastation of Gaza was at its height. Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in The Hague were preparing to request arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, accusing them of using starvation as a method of war and intentionally directing attacks against civilians. The reported death toll in Gaza had just topped 35,000. It was a bad moment for an Arab leader to be moving toward a formal relationship with the Jewish state. Yet at this meeting, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler — moved firmly in that direction.

The deal under discussion was a triangular arrangement among Riyadh, Jerusalem and Washington. To normalize ties with Israel, Prince Mohammed wanted concessions not only from Israel but also from the United States. Sullivan had flown to Dammam, near the home of Aramco, the Saudi national oil company, to fine-tune those parts of the deal that related to American-Saudi bilateral relations.

The crown prince arrived at the nighttime meeting focused and energized. “Let’s finish this,” he said to the Americans, opening up a thick ring binder full of documents. Several hours of discussions followed, related mostly to a mutual defense treaty between Washington and Riyadh, in which the two countries would commit to defend each other from attack. By the time the leaders broke for a late dinner at around midnight, many of the outstanding issues had been resolved. But the deal needed Netanyahu’s buy-in, as the Saudis reminded their American counterparts over the dining table. And that required Netanyahu to stop the war and commit to the principle of Palestinian statehood.

The next day, Sullivan and his team flew to Israel to convey this message to Netanyahu. Suddenly there was a new window of opportunity for a truce in Gaza and perhaps an end to the war. Netanyahu promised Sullivan nothing in person. Within days, though, Netanyahu quietly began to make practical moves toward a cease-fire.

On May 22, he finally approved the compromise that he abandoned a month earlier, ignoring threats from the far-right ministers. Dermer, his right-hand man, worked into the small hours of the next morning with one of Israel’s negotiators, finalizing Israel’s proposed concessions. They removed certain conditions that Hamas previously rejected, including restrictions on civilian movement during the truce. They settled on language that accepted Israel’s full, if gradual, withdrawal from Gaza. And they agreed to a promise that Israel would begin negotiations for a permanent truce once the temporary cease-fire began. On May 27, the Israeli negotiation team emailed Israel’s revised position to the Egyptian and Qatari mediators, who greeted it enthusiastically. The stage was set for a cease-fire, as long as Hamas also cooperated.

But Hamas still wanted the guarantee of a permanent truce, not just the possibility of one — they wanted to survive the war and remain in charge of Gaza, an outcome inconceivable to many Israelis. So another month went by as negotiations continued. In the background, Netanyahu’s team was nevertheless finally preparing a plan for postwar Gaza. Dermer was scaling up secret talks with the United Arab Emirates, another influential Gulf state that had already normalized relations with Israel. Quietly, Dermer and the Emirati foreign minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, were meeting in Abu Dhabi to discuss a joint plan for Gaza’s postwar governance. As Dermer departed for one such meeting in early July, he received a call from Netanyahu. Netanyahu told him that Hamas had finally softened its negotiating position. “We may have a deal,” Netanyahu said. Now Israel’s negotiators needed to wrangle the final details before something else went wrong.

Ben-Gvir swiftly intervened to make sure that it did. Incensed that Netanyahu had refused to send him the draft cease-fire text, he headed unannounced to Netanyahu’s offices in Jerusalem, arguing his way inside with a group of aides. Surrounded by a gaggle of advisers, Ben-Gvir noisily made his way to the “Aquarium,” the area on the second floor that houses Netanyahu’s personal office. Netanyahu refused to come outside. Ben-Gvir turned to social media to condemn what he described as “a reckless deal,” adding, ominously, that he was “working to ensure the prime minister has the strength not to fold.”

A summit to finalize the deal was set for July 28 — at the rural home of the Qatari ambassador to Italy, a villa just outside Rome. David Barnea, Israel’s lead negotiator and spy chief, was joined there by Bill Burns, the American C.I.A. director; Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, the Qatari prime minister; and Abbas Kamel, the Egyptian spy chief. Most of the mediators arrived assuming that they were there to close out the deal. Barnea, however, did not. Looking sheepish and apologetic, he instead handed out copies of a letter that once again derailed the process.

The document set out six new demands from Netanyahu. The most problematic demand concerned the Gaza-Egypt border, sometimes referred to as the Philadelphi corridor. In May, Netanyahu had agreed to a framework that suggested Israeli troops would withdraw from that corridor during any truce. Now, against the advice of Israeli military and intelligence chiefs, he was refusing to leave it. The air drained out of the room. These were deal breakers that Hamas already rejected in May. The meeting broke up soon afterward, closing another window for a cease-fire.

Within days, a sequence of attacks in Israel, Lebanon and Iran made a deal even less likely. First, a rocket from Lebanon killed 12 Arab children and teenagers in an Israeli-controlled town in the Golan Heights, an area that Israel captured from Syria during the 1967 war. Netanyahu retaliated by ordering a strike on a top Hezbollah commander in a suburb just outside Beirut. Hours later, Netanyahu also signed off on the assassination of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, as he visited Iran. Instead of a deal in Gaza, the region now seemed on the brink of all-out war between Israel and the Iran-led axis.

Furious at the growing mess, Biden once again lashed out at Netanyahu in a phone call on Aug. 1. “Stop bullshitting me,” he said.

‘The boss is satisfied’

From the earliest days of the war, Netanyahu had fought, both publicly and behind the scenes, to deflect blame for the October attack onto the security establishment. As fighting still flared in southern Israel, Netanyahu’s team briefed sympathetic influencers and commentators that it was the generals who should take the blame for Israel’s worst-ever defense failure. It was the military that failed on Oct. 7, Jacob Bardugo, a leading right-wing commentator who is close to Netanyahu, said on a television talk show on Oct. 8, 2023. “The time of reckoning will come later, but the narrative should be cemented,” he said. “Where was the air force for five to six hours yesterday?”

Within weeks, Netanyahu was making the same argument himself. “Under no circumstances and at no stage was Prime Minister Netanyahu warned of war intentions on the part of Hamas,” he wrote in a long diatribe posted to his official account on X, just days after the military invaded Gaza in late October 2023. “On the contrary, the assessment of the entire security echelon, including the head of military intelligence and the head of Shin Bet, was that Hamas was deterred,” Netanyahu added. Hours later, after opponents accused him of fostering disunity at a critical time, he deleted the post.

But behind the scenes, he and his close aides continued to keep their eye on his historical legacy and to find ways of undermining his contemporaries. That same month, his chief of staff, Tzachi Braverman, requisitioned transcripts of classified security discussions about Gaza since 2021. The move contravened government protocol and was halted following an intervention by the attorney general. It was perceived as a push for material that would prove embarrassing to Netanyahu’s rivals A lawyer for Braverman said he never received the documents and his intent in requisitioning them was not malicious.

At the same time, Netanyahu’s aides tried to prevent the leaking of conversations that might prove problematic to him. At first they ordered the military to switch off a machine that made official recordings of meetings between Netanyahu and the generals. Later in October, those meetings were moved to another room with no permanent recording device, allowing Netanyahu’s aides to use their own devices to record the meetings, even as they prevented the military from making their own recordings. They ordered Netanyahu’s guards to search generals including Halevi, the army chief, for hidden microphones.

Then came an even more brazen intervention: Braverman instructed archivists to change the records of Netanyahu’s phone conversations on Oct. 7. According to a written complaint about his actions, Braverman insisted that the archivists alter the time stamp for Netanyahu’s second call that day. In reality, it began at 6:40 a.m. Braverman demanded that change to 6:29 a.m., the time of the first, unrecorded call that alerted Netanyahu to the attack. To officials briefed on the change, which remains the subject of a legal investigation, it seemed that Braverman wanted future historians to conclude that Netanyahu’s first response to the Oct. 7 attack was the longer conversation on his encrypted telephone in which he decisively directed Gil to assassinate Hamas’s leaders. Braverman’s lawyer said he had no ulterior motive and simply misunderstood when the call was made.

As the war dragged on, the need to shift blame seemed to intensify. The most revealing example of Netanyahu’s influence operation against fellow Israelis came in late August 2024, as he tried to quell growing domestic fury over his failure to broker a cease-fire. On Aug. 31, Israeli soldiers found the bodies of six slain hostages in a tunnel in southern Gaza. Hamas militants shot and killed them days earlier before fleeing the Israeli advance. The discovery caused an eruption of outrage in Israel — against Netanyahu as much as Hamas. Some of the dead hostages would have already been freed if Netanyahu had proceeded with a cease-fire in July. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators gathered across the country. An angry crowd broke through police lines near Netanyahu’s private residence in Jerusalem, imploring him to compromise before more hostages were murdered in Gaza.

Netanyahu’s team quickly moved to discredit the protesters in the news media. Eli Feldstein, a spokesman hired by Netanyahu’s office at the start of the war, led that effort by attempting to leak the contents of a sensitive document to the press. The document in question was a strategic memorandum, written by a Hamas intelligence officer, that had been intercepted by the Israeli military. The text had been a closely guarded secret within the Israeli military because its publication might reveal to Hamas how Israel monitors its communications. Feldstein had himself been leaked the paper by a contact in the military who felt it might benefit Netanyahu.

The memo was a complex document that was hard to summarize. Part of it suggested Hamas was willing to compromise in the cease-fire talks. A second section said that Hamas should use psychological warfare to upset the families of Israeli hostages, thus increasing pressure on the Israeli government to make its own concessions in the negotiations. To Netanyahu’s communications team, this second part was the useful bit of the document. If published in the media, it could be cited by Netanyahu to argue that those demonstrating for a cease-fire were the unwitting lackeys of Hamas.

The challenge for Feldstein was that it was impossible to leak such a document to an Israeli outlet. Israeli journalists must send their work to the army’s censorship department before publication. After the censor declined to approve the article for publication in Israel, Feldstein decided to send the material to a foreign outlet. Feldstein asked Jonatan Urich, Netanyahu’s communications chief, who could help with publishing it abroad. Urich suggested Srulik Einhorn, the former Netanyahu strategist. Shortly after, Einhorn sent a translation of the document to Bild, a widely read right-wing German broadsheet with the tone of a tabloid. On Sept. 6, Bild published excerpts from the document, ignoring parts that suggested Hamas was amenable to a cease-fire. Instead, Bild used the document to accuse Hamas of “barbaric psychological torture with only one goal: to make the hostages’ relatives so desperate that they’ll do ANYTHING to free their loved ones, even if that means going against their own government.”

“The boss is satisfied,” Urich texted Feldstein, and it was soon clear why. Two days later, on Sept. 8, Netanyahu cited the Bild article to argue that his critics were unwittingly doing Hamas’s bidding. “Last weekend,” Netanyahu said in a speech to his cabinet, “the German newspaper Bild published an official Hamas document that revealed its action plan: to sow discord among us, to use psychological warfare on the hostages’ families, to apply internal and external political pressure on the government of Israel, to tear us apart from within.”

Netanyahu’s rhetoric won out. The protests dissipated, and the pressure for a cease-fire ebbed. For Netanyahu, it was the start of a remarkable sequence of victories that helped restore some of his lost prestige, secure his coalition and extend his political life. First he oversaw a stunning defeat of Hezbollah in which Israel decimated the group’s leadership, reduced its influence over Lebanese society and destroyed much of its arsenal. Then, in a brief battle with Iran in October 2024 that preceded the full-on conflict this June, Israel managed to wipe out much of the Iranian air-defense system — significantly undermining the Iranian threat. In Gaza, a chance encounter rounded off an extraordinary run of luck for Israel and Netanyahu. During a skirmish with Hamas fighters in southern Gaza in mid-October, Israeli soldiers found that they had killed Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza and a key architect of the Oct. 7 attack. With Hezbollah and Iran weakened by Israel’s attacks, neither could protect President Bashar al-Assad of Syria from a rebel advance in early December, leading to the ouster of another longtime nemesis of Israel.

When Netanyahu finally took the stand in his corruption trial two days later — for the first time since the police began investigating him in 2016 — he looked and sounded as if he was enjoying himself. His speech to the court seemed almost like a catharsis: a chance not only to defend himself against the corruption charges but also to present the state’s future as dependent on his own. “I am shocked by the magnitude of this absurdity,” Netanyahu told the court. “I am the prime minister, I am running a country, I am running a war,” he continued. “I am not occupying myself with my future, but rather with that of the state of Israel.”

‘This whole process is not legal’

Netanyahu’s biggest domestic political boost came in September 2024, when Gideon Saar, an opposition leader, agreed to shore up Netanyahu’s majority by bringing his small party into the governing coalition. Suddenly it was far harder for Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to make ultimatums: The government would more easily survive if one or the other departed.

With far greater room to maneuver, Netanyahu finally agreed to a truce in January 2025 — encouraged by the incoming President Trump and his Mideast envoy, Steve Witkoff. The text of the deal was almost identical to the version that Netanyahu rejected the previous April. Ben-Gvir resigned in protest, taking his small group of lawmakers with him. But with Saar on board, Ben-Gvir was no longer essential to Netanyahu’s survival — at least for the moment.

By March, however, Netanyahu’s political calculus changed once more. Ultra-Orthodox coalition members were threatening to bring down the government, angry at the lack of concessions for their community in a new national budget. Ben-Gvir offered to return to keep Netanyahu’s alliance afloat, as long as the war resumed. On March 18, the Israeli Air Force began a major bombardment of Gaza, breaking the cease-fire. A day later, Ben-Gvir returned to the coalition. Netanyahu’s budget passed. The government survived. The war continued.

Next began the power grab. Comparing himself to Trump, Netanyahu revived the divisive judicial overhaul, advancing plans — derailed by the outbreak of war — to give politicians greater control over the appointment of judges to the Supreme Court. Above all, he sought to fire or restrain officials who either threatened his personal future or blocked his government’s policies. “In America and in Israel when a strong right wing leader wins an election, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people’s will,” he wrote in March on X. “They won’t win in either place!”

Ronen Bar, the Shin Bet director, was the first in the cross hairs. On March 20, the day after Ben-Gvir returned, Netanyahu convened a cabinet meeting to fire Bar. The ministers gathered around a long wooden table in the cabinet room in Jerusalem, beneath a portrait of Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, and a copy of Israel’s declaration of independence. Then Netanyahu gave a speech that amounted to a declaration of war against the watchdog institutions of the Israeli state.

Netanyahu portrayed the decision to sack Bar as a professional one. He alluded to how Bar failed to prevent the Oct. 7 attack, and despite detecting signs of an imminent threat, also failed to wake Netanyahu in the hours before the attack took place. As the war went on, Netanyahu said, Bar failed to represent Israel’s interests properly in the back-channel diplomacy he had been involved in throughout the war. Finally, Netanyahu added, Bar overstepped his professional authority by calling for a state commission of inquiry into the failures of Oct. 7. “I have no personal or professional confidence in the ability of the Shin Bet director,” Netanyahu told the ministers.

Yet Netanyahu had omitted a key detail: His decision to fire Bar represented a conflict of interest. For months, Bar had been investigating several aides to Netanyahu, and Netanyahu was trying to dismiss Bar before those investigations had finished. Two of the investigations centered on the document leaked to Bild, the German newspaper. Another inquiry was about whether Feldstein, Einhorn and Urich, Netanyahu’s communications director, had all been paid by a lobbyist for Qatar while working for the Israeli government. Separately, the Shin Bet was assessing whether Ben-Gvir’s ministry, which oversees the police, had been infiltrated by supporters of a Jewish terrorist group — even as the police were investigating the alteration of Netanyahu’s phone records from the morning of Oct. 7.

At the cabinet discussion, which is reported here for the first time in such detail, Netanyahu and his ministers ignored all this. Each spoke without equivocation in support of firing Bar. Smotrich went even further. According to minutes of the meeting, he called for the Shin Bet to be stripped of its mandated requirement to protect Israel’s democratic institutions: “It is time to remove the protection of democracy from the Shin Bet law. The people protect the democracy,” he said. (Through a spokesman, Smotrich said he was misquoted and that he simply meant that the Shin Bet should focus more on security and meddle less in court cases.)

In the end, only one person spoke against the proposal — Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, a civil servant who oversees state prosecutions, advises the Netanyahu government on whether its actions are legal and has regularly ruled that they are not. Baharav-Miara was clear: In trying to fire Bar, Netanyahu faced a conflict of interest. “This whole process is not legal,” she concluded. Netanyahu ignored her and turned instead to the justice minister, Yariv Levin. “You need to deal with the confrontational attorney general,” he told Levin. Baharav-Miara’s deputy, Gil Limon, intervened to defend his boss. Because the attorney general oversees Netanyahu’s prosecution, Limon reminded the ministers, the prime minister is personally barred from taking disciplinary action against her. Netanyahu ignored him, the vote went ahead and the cabinet unanimously decided to fire Bar.

Three days later, the cabinet unanimously passed a vote of no confidence in Baharav-Miara, the first step in a monthslong process toward her dismissal. The government openly presented this as an attempt to remove an independent-minded official who had repeatedly blocked its decisions on legal grounds. Others also saw an ulterior motive: to prevent Netanyahu’s imprisonment. A new and malleable attorney general could offer him a favorable plea deal in the corruption proceedings. As Netanyahu attends court up to three times a week, his government is simultaneously trying to sack the person who holds one of the keys to his freedom.

Emboldened and empowered, Netanyahu chose this moment to prepare for one of the riskiest military missions in Israeli history. For decades, Netanyahu had dreamed of destroying Iran’s nuclear program. During a previous stint as prime minister, he planned but ultimately called off a major assault on Iran, amid concerns that the military might struggle to pull off such a feat. At the start of the war, he canceled a strike on Hezbollah, amid fears that it would start a regional conflict with Hezbollah’s ally Iran. Throughout 2024, Israel traded sporadic blows with Iran but avoided all-out war.

Now, as he waged an internal war against his domestic critics, the time was ripe to open another front abroad. Iran was in an unusually vulnerable position. Its regional allies were defeated or weakened, and its own air defenses were damaged by the earlier one-off Israeli attacks. And the clock was ticking: Trump had started negotiating with Iran to curb its nuclear program, and — like all American presidents before him — he opposed a strike. If an agreement was reached, the window could close entirely.

But as the negotiations dragged on, Trump began to reconsider. In early June, Netanyahu decided to proceed with an attack. Having presided over the worst failure in Israel’s military history, Netanyahu was edging toward political redemption.

Yet before the warplanes took off for Iran, Netanyahu needed to solve a problem at home. Several lawmakers in his fragile coalition, ignorant of the secret plans, were set to bring down his government. As in the crisis in March, the lawmakers were ultra-Orthodox Jews, known in Hebrew as Haredim. This time, they were furious at proposals to end the exemption from military service for the ultra-Orthodox minority. They planned to join the opposition in a vote to dissolve Parliament, triggering new elections, and the vote looked set to pass. As a caretaker prime minister, Netanyahu could still order the Iran attack, but its legitimacy would be undermined.

As the ultra-Orthodox leadership considered bringing down the government, Mike Huckabee, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, came to Netanyahu’s aid. He invited ultra-Orthodox politicians to the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, warning them in general terms that their maneuvers risked endangering Israel’s fight against Iran. He also told them that U.S. support for Israel’s campaign would wane if the government collapsed, because the United States would be less willing to back major moves by an interim leader.

A few days later, on Monday, June 9, Netanyahu made the kind of political maneuver that has allowed him to survive for so long as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. Sitting in his small office at the army headquarters in Tel Aviv, where he spends part of the week, Netanyahu asked an aide to call Moshe Gafni, the leader of one of the restive ultra-Orthodox parties in his coalition. Once Gafni picked up, the aide handed the phone to Netanyahu, who summoned Gafni to meet him immediately.

After Gafni arrived at the office around 6 p.m., he was presented with a sheet of paper and told to sign it. This was a confidentiality agreement, often used in the Israeli military, that obliges the signatory to keep a military secret. Anyone briefed on highly sensitive information in Israel is required to sign such a document, which allows for legal action against those who leak classified information. Gafni signed — and Netanyahu revealed the plan to attack Iran in four days’ time.

Gafni left the room worried. He wondered if Netanyahu, the consummate politician, was playing him. He also feared that Netanyahu was in fact sincere and that a vote to dissolve Parliament might prevent this historic attack from going ahead. Two days later, Gafni’s party voted to preserve the government, and Netanyahu survived as prime minister. Less than 24 hours later, Israeli warplanes set off for Iran, beginning the greatest episode of Netanyahu’s political career.

The multipronged maneuver showed Netanyahu at the height of his political powers. It highlighted his constant quest to ensure his political survival by placating and manipulating allies within his coalition and benefactors in the United States government, often all at once. It showed the frequent overlap among his personal goals, his political needs and the national interest. Above all, it highlighted how Netanyahu has instrumentalized war — whether in Gaza, Lebanon or in this case Iran — in part to stay in office. “The plan to strike Iran was the only thing that kept the Haredim from dissolving the government,” said Israel Cohen, a Haredi radio host and confidant of Gafni’s. “And Bibi knew that.”

‘The tremendous achievements in Gaza’

Over 12 days of war with Iran, Israel inflicted lasting damage on Iran’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs, ultimately persuading Trump to send American warplanes — the most powerful in the world — to finish the job. Though the extent of the damage is still unclear, the attack was quickly construed in Israel as a victory. Even Netanyahu’s sharpest domestic critics praised him for his boldness in initiating the attack and his ingenuity in persuading Trump to join it. Suddenly Netanyahu’s party was in a stronger polling position than at any point since the start of the Gaza war. In turn, that renewed speculation that he might finally have the political freedom to ignore his far-right allies, agree to a truce in Gaza, renew talks with Saudi Arabia for a transformative regional peace plan — and call a new election.

“On Oct. 7, we stood on the brink of an abyss,” Netanyahu said in a speech shortly after the end of the Iran war. “We endured the most horrific disaster in the history of our state. But thanks to the combined efforts of the government, the security forces and you — the people — we managed to recover and fight back fiercely.” He went on: “And to the bereaved families, I say: Your loved ones, our heroes, did not fall in vain. For it was their heroism and sacrifice that enabled us to break the Iranian axis.”

Yet even if his seeming triumph in Iran has bought him time and options in Israel, it is his actions in Gaza that may define Netanyahu’s legacy abroad. Whether the war in Gaza ends tomorrow or in several months, it has already killed more than 55,000 people. Roughly two million have been displaced. Most of the buildings have already been damaged or destroyed. Hunger is widespread. The daily search for food has become a dystopian deathtrap in which groups of civilians are regularly now killed as they approach the few sites that distribute aid handouts.

Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel was what triggered the war. By refusing to surrender, and by embedding itself in and under hospitals, homes and U.N. facilities, Hamas also bears responsibility for the horrors that followed. And in his initial responses to Hamas’s atrocities in October 2023, Netanyahu acted as any Israeli prime minister might have in his place. But as the conflict turned from an existential battle into a war of attrition — and as other Israeli leaders questioned the logic behind its continuation — it was Netanyahu who dragged it out. It was Netanyahu who refused to plan for a postwar power transfer, and it was Netanyahu who repeatedly delayed reaching a cease-fire. Fearing for his own political survival, Netanyahu hitched his fate to the dreams of Israeli extremists and prolonged the war to sustain their support.

Through a sequence of unforeseen events, Israel is by some interpretations safer as a result. Israel’s defeat of Hezbollah, the collapse of the Syrian government and the wounding of Iran — all these may not have occurred if the war had ended by the summer of 2024. And though Netanyahu did not initially intend to seek these victories, he was agile enough to identify windows of opportunity as they suddenly opened in Lebanon and Iran, and he took bold actions that rose to those moments.

In other ways, Israel is less safe than ever. Its reputation is at its lowest-ever ebb. The International Court of Justice is assessing whether Israel, founded in the aftermath of one genocide, is guilty of committing another. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu himself. Netanyahu has overseen one of the catastrophes of the 21st century, one that is likely to stain Israel’s name for decades.

But for Netanyahu, there has been one abiding benefit. He survived.

Adam Rasgon and Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.