The Israeli military intelligence chief has stepped down after owning up for the failures leading to the Hamas attack on October 7, according to the military report on Monday.
This development is coming as Israeli forces carried out more shelling in downtrodden Gaza overnight.
General Aharon Haliva has made history as the first top Israeli official to resign for failing to prevent the Hamas attack, which led to the war in Gaza and brought the government and military under extreme scrutiny in Israel.
Haliva had said in his resignation letter: “The intelligence division under my command did not live up to the task we were entrusted with.
I [still] carry that black day with me ever since.”
Israel has meanwhile attacked the reports that its top ally, the United States, was mulling over sanctioning the military’s ultra-Orthodox Netzah Yehuda battalion over purported human rights abuses in the West Bank from before the war.
Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu had posted on X:
“At a time when our soldiers are battling the monsters of terror, the intention to impose a sanction on a unit in the IDF (army) is the height of absurdity and a moral low.”
On Sunday evening, Netanyahu revealed that the Israeli military would increase military pressure to “deliver additional and painful blows” to Hamas in the coming days, but he had nit elaborated further on this.
It is no longer news that the prime minister has said that Israel will launch a ground assault on Gaza’s southernmost city, Rafah, despite international worries about the majority of the territory’s population who have taken refuge there.
