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Yaakov Katz - While Israel Slept: Winning Tunnels, Losing Time
00:44:58
Yaakov Katz co-author with Amir Bohbot, of While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East, traces the failures that led to October 7 and how Israel's security establishment misread Hamas's strength and intent. He...
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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
Foreign It's Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2025, from Peach Fish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca. And a government shutdown is a lot of things. A line in the sand, taking a stance, an opportunity for executive overreach. But it's also, in some small part, a natural experiment. We do get to should we wish to go back and assess the logic of not shutting down the government last time. Now, if you remember back then, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer argued that if you give Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk permission to destroy vital government services, they will. He was very, very worried about the havoc the Trump administration, with the then assistance of Elon Musk, could bring about. Now, the experts look at the situation and they say indeed, still, Trump could use executive power to reshape federal agencies to force layoffs. In fact, this is what Trump has announced he wants to do.
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Yaakov Katz
We can do things during the shutdown.
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Mike Pesca
That are irreversible, that are bad for them and irreversible by them, like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like. But Chuck Schumer has made another calculation. Remember again, back then he said, quote, there is nobody in the world, nobody who wants to shut the government down more than Donald Trump and more than Elon Musk. I guess he found a couple of months later, wait, there is one person. It's me, Chuck Schumer. Why? What changed circumstance? Musk is no longer there. He would say that the calculus has changed because it is clear that Trump is going to try to do this anyway. Would he try to do it with as much chance of success? I don't know. That remains to be seen. It does seem, even allowing for the fact that the facts on the ground are slightly different, it does seem that this worry of the last time compared to the lack of worry, even though there are such similar circumstances this time, invites the question, is that really what changed? And I, I think we all know what really changed is the calculation and mostly the consideration of the left flank, which is to say most of the Democratic Party that objected to his not standing and fighting a few months ago. So again, it's a natural experiment. Back then, the concern was that Trump would have all these powers and he'd use them. That doesn't seem as much of a concern this time. And back then, the concern was that by not fighting, the Democrats showed that they were weak. Okay, by fighting now, do the Democrats show they're strong? Do the Democrats win this shutdown? No. I think that this is really the only thing that is going to change. And this is all with the caveat that the future is unknowable and Donald Trump is unpredictable. I think what has changed is that Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries just did did not like taking the caca from their brethren in the House, in the Senate, in the media and in most Democratic circles. And so now by signaling they will stay in fight, I don't think they're going to get much credit as fighters, but they will avoid the worst of the critique that their folders. I don't know how much the this will change anything. I know that the left, which is to say not just a small fraction, but probably by now the majority of the Democratic Party that would not stand for Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries to continue with the government being opened, they would not stand for this. They are at least if not placated, robbed of their greatest Ireland. And by the way, Trump can do a lot to hurt the very citizens that Schumer, I think sincerely articulated a belief in trying to protect just a few months ago on the show today. Well, the other big issue in the news is this 20 point plan that Hamas can accept or cannot accept. I will read some recent headlines and you will get a sense from these headlines where Hamas stands, which I'm still saying is kind of important. All right, here we go. News Nation reports Hamas likely to reject Trump's proposed peace plan. CBS News reports Hamas leaning toward accepting Trump's cease fire deal. Oh, New York Post Hamas signals it could reject Trump's Gaza peace plan. The independent Hamas inclined to accept peace deal if Netanyahu withdraws from Gaza. I have to say this was not a cherry picking of two on one side, two on the other. This was literally four of the first five articles I came across. The fifth being this Atlantic True, but beside the point headline Hamas is worst option except for all the others. I don't know. Do Atlantic writers consider martyrdom as much as your average Hamas member does? Worse option I think for from a non martyrdom could be a glorious thing. Perspective. Well, we're joined with an expert on the Israel military and in fact on what went wrong to bring about the October 7th attack and the subsequent war in which tens of thousands have been killed. That is in fact the name of my guest Yaakov Katz's book While Israel Slept How Hamas Surprised the most Powerful Military in the Middle East. We'll see if they're still up to their old surprises. Yakov Katz up next, Life got you down or just stressed out. If not, you're not doing it correctly. But you know, if you need to unwind a little bit, maybe you might consider cornbread hemps CBD gummies. Now in my house and I'm not going to get that much more specific, but cornbread CBDs deliver the goods. 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Oh, here's a great one. Iced tea copy. So what I did, a friend of mine runs an iced tea company and he asked me to help him write some copy. So I went through Walmart and I took photographs of every bottle of not just iced tea, but all the different kind of healthy snacks and granola. You can't sell a granola. Being honest these days it's all about the healthfulness. And I got the little branding statements on the back and I loaded them all, not even by copying them down, just by loading them all via photograph in to Claude. And I gave it prompts and I said what are the most common words? I created essentially a word cloud and I wanted to avoid cliche but also get some ideas. And then I said if you were to construct a very cliched granola, I didn't want to step on what I had to do personally, which was the iced tea stuff, granola copy, what would you say? And so I avoided that. And then I gave it more prompts such as what if Dave Barry and Walt Whitman combined to write copy for a healthy snack? Great thought starter. And it was all or some, I mean, you know, we're collaborators like I said. But it was all because of the Claude Mike collaboration. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. I think that story illustrates that it's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. Mm. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. That's what you want. That's what you want from an AI friend assistant thought starter ready to tackle bigger problems. Sign up for Claude today and get 50% off Claude Pro when you use my link Claude AI the gist. That's Claude AI the gist right now for 50% off your first three months of Claude Pro. That includes access to all the features that I mentioned previously. Claude AI slash the gist. Yaakov Katz is the former editor of the Jerusalem Post and he writes for Newsweek and the Jewish Chronicle. He's extremely plugged in with matters military and he has a new book, Looking Back. We will also Look Forward, by the way. You can't look forward without understanding what happened wrong when you look back. And it is called While Israel Slept How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East. Jacob, welcome to the gist.
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Yaakov Katz
It's great to be with you. Thank you for having me.
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Mike Pesca
So before we get to many of the lessons in the book, I want to ask you about what's going on now or now? Ish. We sometimes hold our interviews for a couple of days, so the very Latest is this 21 or now perhaps 20 with an apology to Qatar 20 point peace plan. So the question is, without Hamas buy in, does this mean anything?
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Yaakov Katz
You know, we all watched the ceremony at the White House or something of a ceremony, the celebratory announcement by the president alongside Israel's prime minister making it seem as if this long war that has dragged down way too long, you know, two years is finally over.
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Mike Pesca
I support your plan to end the war in Gaza which achieves our war aims.
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Yaakov Katz
And it's not right, it's not yet over because as we speak we're waiting to hear what Hamas answer is going to be to that 20 point plan and to the proposal that's on the table. I want to believe, because in this moment we still don't know. But I want to believe that the president would not have gone out on a limb to really say this is the end of a war that has gone on for thousands of years if he didn't know or have some sort of guarantee from the Qataris, the Egyptians and the Turks that they know how to bring Hamas into this deal. So let's hope that that's the case. But you're 100% right. If Hamas says no, the war continues. If Hamas says we're not giving up the hostages, Israel's not agreeing to stopping the war.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah, I actually thought the answer to the question might be something 90% of what you said, but maybe 10%. What it does is something like put the onus on Hamas or maybe even internally give Netanyahu that construct of a deal that might allow him to see a way to end the war. Could that even without Hamas, or with Hamas not agreeing to it, to that back foot Hamas? In a way, yeah.
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Yaakov Katz
No, also, I'll add even more to what you just said because I completely agree. I mean, the Europeans, the British, the Canadians, the French, the Australians, all these countries have been recognizing a Palestinian state because they say that Israel has been moving ahead with this war too aggressively and for too long. What do they want? Now? Israel has said we're willing to stop the war. We agree with Donald Trump's plan. The plan is supported by all the Arab countries. Why is the rest of the world then against Israel at this moment? So it actually gives Netanyahu now support and backing and breathing room for him to be able to say to the world, what do you want from me? I agreed to the deal and the deal has the support of the entire Arab world. It's not me who's on the offside, it's you guys and of course Hamas.
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Mike Pesca
Right. So I also think that the leaders of the world, I mean, many world leaders have many opinions. Ramaphosa in South Africa thinks differently than Keir. Starmer thinks differently than Macron. But I am of the opinion that the leaders more or less understand the real politic of it. The leaders that matter, the European leaders. But they do things like recognize a Palestinian state at a no cost, SOP to their public. So I wonder then how it all plays out when what you just said is probably true. The leaders now have a very good argument from Benjamin Netanyahu. But what does it really mean in terms of both their public and the impetus that recognized the Palestinian state, which is at best a aspirational gesture.
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Yaakov Katz
I mean, look, I think what we have to do is understand the complexity in the mixed bag here. These leaders who have called for Palestinian state and said and declared their recognition, even though there is no Palestinian state, and it doesn't really change any facts on the ground. They're Dealing with their local politics, they're dealing with Muslim immigration to their countries, they're dealing with their left wing base of constituents and voters who want to see them crack down even harder on Israel. That's definitely a piece of it. But I think also what we saw at the White House is that Donald Trump basically said to Benjamin Netanyahu, look, I know you're against a Palestinian state, but I do want to see an aspiration. I want to see a process that kind of leads in that direction. This war has to end in a way that really changes the dynamic of this region for a very long time. So part of that is going to be, yes, I'll give Israel that perimeter inside the Gaza Strip. Yes, we will give. We'll either force Hamas out of Gaza, give amnesty to those who remain in Gaza. We want to see a new governing entity, Israel. Israel will have freedom of operations as needed. But I also want to see a political horizon and a political process. And by the way, Mike, that political process is what could potentially get Israel back on track towards a normalization with the Saudis and towards a further regional integration, which is so important, which is where we actually were back on October 6, 2023, before Hamas attacked.
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Mike Pesca
Right. So you paint a number of things that went wrong, and we meet a number of characters, but there are three big ones, as I understand it. One was Israel didn't understand Hamas. And maybe the Hebrew word concepcia describes this, what Hamas really wanted and what they were up to. Second is operationally, Israel intelligence just underestimated the scope of Hamas's plan. So to talk about how those two things are different, One, they thought that Hamas wouldn't even have such a plan. And then when or if they were forced to consider it, they never thought they were considered such a big plan as October 7th. And then they thought their own defenses were, if not impenetrable, you know, an iron wall that was going to protect them much more than it did. Am I getting that about right?
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Yaakov Katz
You're, you're pretty much on the money here. And I think that, you know, this conceptia, that's the Hebrew word, I think it's best translated as a fairy tale, because that's essentially what it was. It was belief in something that just doesn't exist. It was belief that you can live alongside a genocidal terrorist organization on your southern border. And you will say to it, you know what? Actually know better than you what you want. And one of the best ways to maybe look at this is if I told you right now, you know what, Mike? We're going to end the war. We're going to ask Qatar to give every month $30 million to Hamas, and we're going to pay them money so that they'll be quiet. You would look at me and say, yaakov, you should be institutionalized. If you think that's the solution, there's something seriously wrong with you. But then I'll remind you, that's what Israel did for five years, from 2018 until 2023. So the question that really we tried, we grappled with was how did not.
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Mike Pesca
Well, to interrupt. It's a fairy tale. It's a fairy tale and a lullaby, because they lull themselves to sleep with that. Very nice.
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Yaakov Katz
100%. No, no, 100. But. So the question we wanted to understand is not only how did this happen tactically? Like, you know, what went wrong, what was happening during the night, how did they break through the defenses? Like, how did all that happen? But also how did we, over a period of, I would say, 30 plus years, come to incubate this policy of cont. Come to formulate it and then come to adopt it as policy that whenever someone. And like these, you know, the famous tats Pitanio, these are the female soldiers, those spotters who sit in the bases along the border watching their screens, seeing what's happening in Gaza. And they're going to their commanders and they're telling them, look, we're seeing things that are happening that are out of the ordinary. We're seeing more senior Hamas commanders in the field. We're seeing training that we didn't see in the past. And their commander said, don't worry about it. It's nothing. It's because everything was viewed through this prism. Everything was viewed through the prism of Hamas is deterred. And anyone who came with a different variant of a version of some other way of looking at that was shut down because it didn't fit the narrative that not from an evil place. I don't want to sound like people. People were not doing this from an evil place, but it just got so entrenched, as if this is the only way to look at things. And it was wrong.
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Mike Pesca
Right. So an example of this is it's really important to understand everything was filtered through that prism. So even when Israel saw signs, data, evidence that this was not the correct prism, it had to be explained through the prism up until the attacks started. And Israel said to itself, well, since we know that Hamas is more or less deterred and bought off, what can this attack mean, and they told themselves stories in the moment like, ah, what this means is they're trying to disrupt Saudi normalization or they're throwing up a flare or trying to be disruptive and they fear a preemptive strike, things like that.
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Yaakov Katz
The we looked at the night and one of the things that really shocked me was how much activity took place between October 6th and October 27th. Because when the attack commenced on the morning of October 7th, at 6:29am Rockets were fired into Israel. And under the COVID of those rockets, the Hamas initial forces stormed the border, cut through blue holes, went to the frontline bases, cut the communications, cut the cameras, cut the sensors, and then invaded those bases because they knew that the soldiers would be hunkered down in the safe spaces because of the rockets, and they knew they would be able to get them and catch them off guard. But what shocked us when we did the research on this book was how much was going on throughout the night. The chief of staff was on the phone with his operations commander, was on the phone with the head of the Southern Command, which is the regional command in charge of Gaza. There were alarm bells literally going off in intelligence headquarters. There were three things primarily that they identified. Number one was already on Friday, October 6, they saw that about 100 Israeli SIM cards suddenly went live inside the Gaza Strip. Now, that would mean one of two things. Either suddenly, 100 Israelis are in Gaza. That's not a good thing. Or somebody had a hundred SIM cards, they've replaced them. They took out their Palestinian cell cards, they put in the Israeli ones, and now they're planning to cross into Israel, and they want to make sure they have communications that could be a sign of an invasion. When they looked back though, they remembered that last year, the year before, around the same time, they tested 30. So maybe it's the annual oil check, right? It's just maintenance. Then throughout the night, they see them uncovering rocket launchers that would be a sign they're planning to fire rockets. They see them preparing underground bunkers for their top commanders, like Muhammad Def, the elusive Hamas military commander. But then they say, one second. Is this an attack or is this a drill? They intercept a conversation in them. This is all happening live. They intercept a conversation between an Islamic Jihad operative, that's another terrorist group with a Hamas commander. The Islamic Jihad guy says, listen, we're seeing you guys doing stuff. What's happening? The Hamas guy says, don't worry, it's just a drill. So Israel hears this call, right? They intercept this conversation, and they say themselves okay, it's just a drill. And they're debating all throughout the night. Is it a drill? Is it an attack? If it is an attack, okay, it may be. At the most it's a small scale attack. Maybe they'll infiltrate or try from one or two places or we'll stop them with the forces we have along the border. That was the mindset at the time.
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Mike Pesca
They keep telling themselves a story of minimization because they can't not, because that is their conception, that is their fairytale. Now, just to go back to one very small part, the women, the female soldiers who were off, many of them were killed, who were noticing this and were disregarded, do you think, and issued reports beforehand. Do you think sexism was a play?
- [21:44]
Yaakov Katz
You know, it's hard to know. I think if it might have been sexism, it would, was also probably they're just junior soldiers, right? They're not the top senior commanders who see all the intelligence. They had one job, watch a screen and see who's moving in that area that you're responsible for on the border. They're not sophisticated intelligence analysts. They were supposed to just report. I see some, a bush that was once here is now here. That could mean that now there's a tunnel or a rocket launcher there. That, that was their job. So it was probably a measure, a mix of sexism, a mix of you guys don't really know anything anyhow. And it also just didn't fit into the narrative which I think was the bigger right.
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Mike Pesca
Think of it in the context of everything else you've been saying. Much more actionable intelligence that was also disregarded. So that's, that's a good point, a good way to think about it. When the attacks occurred, what should have happened in the first few hours that could have very much changed the course of what would become a years long and unbelievably bloody war.
- [22:51]
Yaakov Katz
When I look at what happened in October 7th, I see three tactical failures, right? The failure number one was the intelligence. We misread it. Now that happens. I mean, you know, it's not, Israel's not the first country to misread intelligence. It's not the first country to make a mistake and not understand what it's saying. It happens all the time. Unfortunately. That was in Failure one. Failure two was you're supposed to have defenses, you're supposed to have an impenetrable border. You're supposed to have an ability to stop them multi layered. You're supposed to have troops deployed along the border that even if they if they're. If people are spotted coming and trying to cross in, these troops scramble there right away and they're able to stop whoever is coming across cross. That also did not happen. That was. They were smart with what they did with that rocket fire. Very heavy, unlike anything ever seen before. They were. They knew that everybody was going to hunker down and they could sprint and really make that crossing very quickly. But failure three, where was the idf? Why did it take so long for reinforcements to make it down to the border? We mentioned the female soldiers. It took hours for the military to get to their bases. Fifteen of them were massacred in the base. Another six were taken hostage to Gaza. One of them was miraculously rescued about a month into the war. Five others, it took over a year for them to come home. I mean, this was the epitome of failure and abandonment. And these women paid the price for it. And that's why we opened the book telling their story, because it really brings it all together in a very painful way of where Israel failed.
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Mike Pesca
So when you consider Israel's stunning capabilities and the operations they put off, they pulled off against Hezbollah and against Iran, and I'm not just talking about Fordo. And we could debate did it set the program back a year or so along with that operation was unbelievably impressive. Very, very targeted assassination of top officials who are inside the Iranian nuclear program. Of course, the Beeper operation, you look at this unbelievable intelligence success that the whole world marvels at, and you contrast it with this unbelievably backwards stupid failure. Is it too reductive to say that in the case of Hezbollah and Iran, Israel never fooled itself about the nature of the enemy, but in the case of Hamas, they did?
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Yaakov Katz
It's 100% part of the story. And let me just elaborate for a moment. When I look at the policy of containment, it had a couple of legs to it. One of the legs was technology. Okay, you're very familiar with Iron Dome. They developed rockets. We created a system to shoot the rockets out of the sky. The rockets were no longer a threat. In 2014, during an operation, one of the previous rounds against Hamas in Gaza, they suddenly are popping out of tunnels inside Israel. So what do we do? No problem. We dig down along the border, we build a wall to block the tunnels. We create a system with the best and brightest minds that we have with seismic and sonar and geologists and you name it, who come together and create a system to detect when a tunnel is being dug, where it's being dug, and Even what tool is being used to dig it? How many people crossed into Israel on October 7th in a tunnel? 0. But the technology gave us a feeling that you mentioned this word before, that we were impenetrable. That was leg one, leg two. And the prime Minister himself, Benjamin Netanyahu, in his book that came out, I think in 2021, called Bibi. Right? His, his Bibi, his own book that he wrote, writes there that back in 2014, when people in his coalition were saying, you got to go big into Gaza, you got to go take out Hamas, you got to finally bring them down, he writes, I wasn't going to do that because I had bigger fish to fry. I have Iran, I have Hezbollah. So you're 100% right that when you look at Hezbollah and we're talking, we're recording this almost to the day, a year after Israel killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. This, this Omnius character, the bin Laden of the Middle east, really a terrible, murderous person. The beeper attack. I mean, what, what Israel did to the nuclear scientists, to penetrating the Iranian facilities, to taking out the air defenses, you say, wow. But what it shows me is when we're focused and when we prioritize correctly, we know how to get stuff done. And Hamas was put at the bottom of the totem pole. And therefore it didn't have the focus, it didn't have the priority, and it did not have the resources.
- [27:37]
Mike Pesca
And we'll be back with Yakov Katz in just a minute.
- [27:49]
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- [28:51]
Mike Pesca
We're back with Yaakov Katz, author of While Israel Slapped. And I have to say that if you compare Israel's successes against its foreign adversaries versus its success or Arguably its lack of decisive victory against Hamas. You see a couple of different things. And maybe there's one set of circumstances I've been thinking. When the enemy, Iran has no real sympathy in the international community. There is the Sunni Shiite split, there is Iran's willingness to be a pariah state. But there is no narrative out there in the world that in this case Israel's enemy is the natural outgrowth of Israeli oppression. Remember, Iran doesn't even share a border with Israel. Iran really has no stake in Israel policy except to brand them the little Satan and use that to propagandize to the citizenry. But I also think it might be another thing that explains Israel's success against Iran and its proxies other than Hamas. It might be another thing entirely. When Israel's enemy is within its borders, borders that so much of the world community doesn't recognize, and when the enemy can bring about civilian casualties, that too has a giant impact on the world opinion. And that does constrain Israel in a way that did not apply to, say, the beeper attack or taking out Hassan Nasrallah.
- [30:23]
Yaakov Katz
I think there's that. And I also, you know, part of it is, look, the Palestinian file, right, or issue conflict is not a simple one. And we see what's happening around the world as we speak. We see the campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel. Israel being brought and dragged before the icc, the International Criminal Court, the icj, the International Court of Justice that claims accusations of genocide, of starvation, of mass murder, of intense intent to kill people. All of this together, Israel. I could have told you on October 7th, when we retaliate, this is what's going to happen because this is where the world is. This is how they view us. When it comes to the Palestinians, when it comes to Iran and Hezbollah, we're not looked at in the same way because the conflict is slightly different. There's not the view of a occupation, as people like to call what's happening between Israel and the Palestinians, even though I would argue Gaza has a 14 kilometer border with Egypt. So what exactly is the occupation that Israel has in Gaza? But put that aside for a moment. That's the prism to some extent, that the world views this conflict. So right away, even after such a massacre, and I don't have to tell you this, I mean, you're in the United States right away, on October 7th, you already people on the streets blaming Israel in America. I mean, that says something deeply corrupt that has happened to the Western world.
- [31:50]
Mike Pesca
What you just laid out about the world's opinion of Hamas. Not everyone was cheering Hamas, but I think the kind of de rigor explanation was, well, of course, in a system of oppression, there's going to be expressions of liberation that take ugly form. Something like this, something to excuse terrorism. But common knowledge would say Israel knows this about the world and about Hamas, Hamas knows this about Israel. That there is the world will give them much leeway in a way it wouldn't give terrorists of the Taliban or the guerrillas of the Shining Path or even whatever the Ethiopian forces did integrate. It just would be looked at differently. So shouldn't Israel know that Hamas knows this and know that Hamas is going to maximize the bad press, the horrors that the world sees? And did Israel do anything to constrain itself or to operate under the knowledge, the common knowledge that this would be the dynamic we're seeing now would be the dynamic.
- [33:04]
Yaakov Katz
You're, you're so right. And what you said is, is so 100% true. And, and it's a failure of the government and it's a failure of the country. And I think, though, we have to understand where this failure comes from. Right? Israel after October 7th was a country that was hurting. It was a country in trauma. It was a country where every single person knew someone murdered, knew someone taken captive. In my own family, Mike, I'm a father of four kids. My two older daughters had friends, kids they grew up with, from their youth group who were killed throughout this war. We knew two hostages on day one, one whose family we would go to synagogue with in Jerusalem. Another one who's still in Gaza now, who served in the same unit as my brother. The husband of my daughter's teacher was killed in this war. The rabbi of my son's school was kill in this war. So you look at that hurt and that pain. It's all across the country. And I'm just one family. And this year, just four kids out of millions that we have in the country now, try to say to them, listen, you got to also take into consideration how the world's looking at this. You got to think about what they're going to say in the way you respond. You got to keep in mind what's going to be on the front page of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or, you know, the Sydney Morning Herald. That's very difficult to do when you're still hurting. They do.
- [34:23]
Mike Pesca
They do they. They always have the conception that they're the world's most moral military. I don't know if they're still saying. Or Israel's still saying that about. It's a story that we tell, the level set.
- [34:34]
Yaakov Katz
Yeah, no, it's a story that we tell. And I think that's, for the most part, it's still true. But now you, you, you have to say, hold on a second if you go in there, because I would, I want to say what you said, even take it even farther, I think, to an extent, and let's see what happens with the Trump plan. But if I'm Hamas, I'm sitting in a tunnel now in Gaza and I'm saying to myself, one second, I still got 48 hostages. I got Israel more isolated than ever before. I got recognition of a Palestinian state from the French, the British, the Canadians, the Australians, the Spanish, the Belgians, you name it. Right. I got Israel demonized. I got, NETanyahu's got an ICC warrant against him that when he flew now from Israel to Washington to New York, he couldn't fly over France because if, God forbid, he has to make an emergency landing, they might arrest him because they're signatories of the Rome Statute, which created the icc. I mean, are you losing the war or are you maybe winning the war? And, and I'm not sure that Hamas would say it's losing the war. I think they might think that they might be winning because let's remember something very basic here. When 60,000 people are killed and let's go with that number, even though we don't know that it's the real one, but let's run with it, they don't care. To them, that is their purpose. The purpose of those civilians is to be killed so that Israel can be demonized and so Israel can be ostracized and they can get these other benefits that look at. They're actually getting them, they're getting rewarded.
- [36:03]
Mike Pesca
Right? Right. But Israel's calculation. There are a couple of things to say. One is Israel's also thinking, even when we do something that's net ethical, like a beeper operation that targets all of the worst people in Hamas and yes, kills perhaps a child or maims an innocent, but compare that to any other kind of military operation and the civilian death toll will be blamed by the world, there's this going on, we're going to be blamed no matter what. What. And that factors in the psychology. But do you think that given all.
- [36:41]
Yaakov Katz
That.
- [36:43]
Mike Pesca
Israel still, or a different leader of Israel still could have made different choices, perhaps even after the ceasefire that ascertained that assured the release of certain hostages was affected and ended in March. Isn't it plausible to say, even with all that and understanding the Israel mindset and reality, Benjamin Netanyahu still made different choices among above the objections of top military people. And this prolonged the war, suffering civilian casualties, et cetera.
- [37:20]
Yaakov Katz
I'll tell you two things on that point. And the answer, the short answer is yes, I completely agree. And I'll give you two instances. One is that when the ceasefire fell apart In March of 2025, Israel decided right away, we're stopping the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza. We had ministers who came out and said, not one grain of flour is going into Gaza. Several weeks later, the starvation, famine campaign begins. Now, because of what you just eloquently articulated, we should have known that was going to happen. You and I could have sat back and said, listen, guys, this is coming. It was obvious. And then when it came suddenly, like, what are you talking about? There's no starvation, there's no famine. I mean, you gotta, you gotta think a couple steps ahead. And by the way, Bibi sometimes is that person, he does know how to think a few steps ahead some in this war. We've seen a couple of instances where he, he dropped the ball. That's one. Two is where I think the. My biggest criticism of the way this war was managed was that if you were to go into any office of any minister or any decision maker in Israel over the last two years and say to them, guys, what's the plan? Where's it going? What are we doing? They would say, we can't tell you. We don't, you know, it's still being formulated. We can't articulate it. So they wouldn't reveal what the plan is. Now, if you ask the prime minister publicly at press conference, he would say, well, we have to eliminate Hamas. Okay, who comes next? And then you have ministers in his cabinet, Smutrich, Benvenor and others.
- [38:48]
Mike Pesca
Define eliminate. Right. When we got. He would never do that. When they killed Deef, when they kill one Sinoir, when they kill another Sinoar, at what point are they eliminated or sufficiently degraded?
- [38:57]
Yaakov Katz
And then you have ministers in his cabinet, though, senior ministers, who are saying, no, we're resettling Gaza, we're annexing Gaza, we're gonna control Gaza. So in the vacuum. There is no vacuum. It's filled by the extreme elements of your coalition. So then the world sees and hears one thing. It sees destruction. It sees a continued military operation and it hears that the purpose of it is to build settlements in Gaza and to annex parts of the Palestinian territories where they live. So it says to itself, oh, I know what Israel wants to do. This is what it wants to do. Now, as we saw this week, that's not the plan. Right. The plan is something else. New governing entity. Even with the Palestinian Authority disarming Hamas, why couldn't we say this from the beginning, outline a political horizon, a new reality, and say, this is what we're fighting for? And because this is what we're fighting for, people around the world might have said, okay, I get it, I don't like it. But I understand that it's a necessity to get to this new reality that they're trying to create. Create.
- [40:04]
Mike Pesca
So you said that Hamas does not care about the 60,000, let's stipulate 60,000 dead. They do care about. I would assume they care about the 20 something thousand. But I'd like you to give me the number of their own combatants who have been killed. Right.
- [40:19]
Yaakov Katz
It's about, according to Israeli estimates, it's about 20,000 people out of the cigarettes. So the Hamas health ministry, which is often laundered in the mainstream media, referred to as the Gaza Health Ministry, although you and I both know no one would ever quote the Al Qaeda health ministry or the ISIS health ministry in the media. But for some reason, the Gaza Hamas health ministry is okay. The out of the 60 now, 2 or 3,000 that they quote. And again, every loss of civilian life is a great tragedy. There's about 20,000 that are believed to be combatants, which means, and in every war you have this, you have the combatant civilian ratio. So for every combatant, how many civilians are killed? And if you look at the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, if you want to go back to World War II, it's even worse, Right? If you look at the last hundred years of warfare, it's terrible. But if you look at the last few decades, the United nations will even tell you that definitely in an urban setting. And Gaza is probably the most densely populated urban setting, you're looking at a ratio usually of about 1 to 6 right here in this war. I mean, this is where the genocide claim is just absurd that people spread it. We're looking at, if I'm taking the Hamas number, and I think the only real thing to do is if you take a terrorist group, you could take what the Israeli government says, then it's 1 to 2, and at the worst case, 1 to 3, that's nothing close to being genocide at all.
- [41:40]
Mike Pesca
But that's not. Point taken. But that's not actually why I raised it. My question. Well, I have two Thoughts about this. This one is there might, may well, and you would know this from your reporting, may well have been a thought that we're going to have to, or the Gazans are going to have to endure suffering and brutality. And we don't want that to happen, even if just for the public relations nightmare there. But if the ratio, if the one of that one to two is one to three is enough, terrorists will have won the war. That's point one. And point two, two is before the war. Or question two, what was the number that the intelligence community thought they had to get to for Hamas to be defeated?
- [42:25]
Yaakov Katz
Well, Hamas was believed to have about 30, 35,000 fighters. It was believed to have about 30, 35,000 rockets. The issue here, when fighting against a terrorist group, and this ties into your second question, is at what point does it do you say it's, it's destroyed? At what point do you say you've won militarily? And, and when you fight terrorist organizations, it's. There's no scientific answer here, right? Because there's no, there's no conquering of territory. There's no saying, okay, you have lost now the land and I'm in control, because that's not what the terrorist group is about. Unlike, let's say, a conventional adversary which has bases and centers of power. You destroy a parliament or an air force base or electrical grid, that can be something that you would say, okay, they've had enough. They don't have that either. So it makes it much more difficult. And that's why you always have to be fighting an enemy. And they knew this from the beginning. In Israel, you have to fight to weaken and degrade as much as possible, but to the point that you can create a counter force that can come and fill the vacuum for the governance of Gaza that we was filled until then by Hamas, and then also achieve three things. One, the reconstruction of Gaza, Two, preventing Hamas from rebuilding. And three, just as important, we see this also in the Trump plan de radicalize the Gaza Strip. Right. That's also a key piece of whatever comes next.
- [43:54]
Mike Pesca
Two quick concluding questions. One, is there is this thought that Benjamin Netanyahu doesn't end the war because he has this legal explanation, exposure. He also has politics, which is true. I don't know how much credence to give that it is true. He is facing legal charges and I hear a lot about the quality of them, the political motivation. But can you shed any light on that as an explanation for why the war continues?
- [44:20]
Yaakov Katz
Look, you know Netanyahu is A lightning rod. He has long been one. There is the I hate BB camp and there is the I love BB camp. There are very few people at all, even I don't even know if they exist, who are neutral or power of as we would say when it comes to Benjamin Netanyahu. But I think he's no different than any politician. He has the legal issues, he has his trial on graft and other issues that he's still has to go to court every once in a while, including during the war. And I think that of course he's going to be thinking about if I do a, what happens to my political career, does my coalition fall? And if my coalition falls, we go to an election. If I lose the election, that I might lose the trial and then go to jail. These are always going to be considerations, but at the end of the day, it's one of the considerations. I mean, I would argue that politically speaking, getting back the hostages, even if it means going to an election, that's a good way to go to an election. Right. So I mean, it's not exactly black and white in this. And I'll just say one other thing about Netanyahu, because in the book, our book really focuses on the failures that led to October 7th. And I've had people have said to me, why did you have to write, you know, 300 and something pages, 90,000 words, you could have written one word, Benjamin Netanyahu. I mean, he's the guy who's responsible. And you know, that's obviously over took.
- [45:42]
Mike Pesca
The title BB Right.
- [45:44]
Yaakov Katz
But you know, I think that obviously that's not the case. He's not the only one responsible. But b, yes, he is responsible. He was in charge. He was the man who set policies over 15 years that led up to this. But just as he's responsible for the war or for the failures that led to the war, sorry. He also, doesn't he deserve the credit for the re engineering of the Middle east since his ballot taken down? Assad has fallen in Syria. We might have a normalization agreement there. The Houthis have been beaten back in Yemen. Hamas is a shadow of itself in Syria. Look at the relationship now with the United States. Look at what's happening in Lebanon. The new government there might be rounding up the weapons. Iran has been beaten back and is on the defensive. I mean, you know, we could, you don't want to always look at things black and white because it's, it's, it's. And look, you're talking to a guy. Google Yaakov Katzen. Nathaniel. I'm not. I'm not the fan, right? I'm critical. But I can also recognize that where the blame is deserved, the credit is also deserved.
- [46:45]
Mike Pesca
So the last question is, before the war started, I talked a number of examples, experts, and I posed to all of them, what about this idea that Hamas cannot be defeated? And it mostly wasn't a tactical or military idea, though that would be hard. It was more that Hamas is an idea. And this never really appealed to me. It just would argue that any kind of insurgency that has somewhat popular support cannot be defeated. And we know they have, but we are seeing some amount of this, people who weren't militants recruited into Hamas. We are seeing just the intractability. And maybe this is just owing to the quality of their tunnel network and not the quality of their ideology. But what does everything we've seen in the last couple of years tell us about this idea? I was debating that Hamas cannot really be defeated.
- [47:35]
Yaakov Katz
I think an idea cannot be defeated. And I think in a territory like Gaza, so dense, so closed in, where they have very little access to the outside world, controlled by a radical Islamic terrorist group for so long, it's very difficult today for people to see that there is another opportunity, there's another way to live. And that's why in the aftermath of this war, and please God, that's where we're headed, you need to have a generational change. It's going to take time. We need a new education system in Gaza. The people there, people my children's age, in their 20s, they've been taught to hate us and to want to kill us. Now, I'm not going to get into whether it's right, it's wrong, I think it's wrong. But there are people who would say, well, you've occupied them. Forget about that for a second. If we want to take them and give them a new future and a new life, they have to be taught something else. Their newspapers have to be different, their cultural institutions have to be different. All of this has to change, and that will take a long, long time. And for that, we need patience. So I think that the idea can't be killed. It will always be there. But you have to present them with another idea. And if that idea can take hold, there is a real opportunity for change.
- [48:48]
Mike Pesca
Along with Amir Bobat, Yaakov Katz is the author of While Israel Slept How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East. Thank you so much.
- [48:58]
Yaakov Katz
Thank you very much, Mike. Appreciate it.
- [49:05]
Mike Pesca
And that's it for today's show. Cory Warra is the producer of the Gist, Ashley Khan is our production coordinator, Jeff Craig runs our Socials. Kathleen Sykes writes the Gist list with me and Michelle Pesca's the COO of Peach Fish Productions. Thanks for listening.
- [49:28]
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