Yoav Gallant calls Benjamin Netanyahu liar, challenges pre-Oct. 7 docs
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is a liar,” his former defense minister Yoav Gallant charged in an interview with Channel 12’s Meet the Press on Saturday evening, directly challenging Netanyahu’s intelligence documents regarding the months leading up to the October 7 massacre.
The documents, released by the Prime Minister’s Office on Thursday evening, detail protocols from various defense and security meetings as part of Netanyahu’s response to the State Comptroller’s probes into October 7 – probes that were frozen by the High Court of Justice in late 2025.
In the documents, Netanyahu places the blame for Israel’s failed security policy in Gaza on his former defense ministers, including Gallant, as well as other senior defense officials, including former heads of the Shin Bet and the Israeli military.
Netanyahu trying to ‘engineer perception’ on October 7 failure
In response, Gallant accused the prime minister of attempting to “engineer the perception” of Israeli society.
“They take snippets of discussions and sentences from long periods of time, piece them together, and turn them into a news item,” Gallant said. “I respect the institution of the prime minister, but I never thought I would have to come here and say – we have a lying prime minister. The prime minister is lying.”
Gallant went on to argue that Netanyahu had made false claims about his own actions immediately following the October 7 attacks. “In the discussion protocols, he is quoted as saying he made decisions at 8 or 9 a.m. on the day,” Gallant said.
“The prime minister had not yet arrived at the Kirya. I arrived at 9 a.m., concluded a situational assessment with the IDF, and Netanyahu still had not arrived.”
He also disputed Netanyahu’s suggestion that the defense establishment was hesitant or averse to launching operations targeting terror leaders – an implication made repeatedly in the documents.
Gallant: Netanyahu tried to delay strike against Hezbollah’s Nasrallah
Regarding the targeted operation against former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Gallant said security officials from the IDF and Mossad had stressed the urgent need to act in a briefing held a day before the operation.
“The head of Military Intelligence said, ‘There is a chance he will leave his bunker, leaving us little time to issue the order,’” Gallant recalled. “Netanyahu replied, ‘We will discuss it when I return from the US on Sunday.’”
According to Gallant, his trust in Netanyahu was broken after the prime minister “stabbed [the defense establishment heads] in the back and fomented a revolt among government ministers against them.”
“This does not meet my standards… I have an order of priorities: the State of Israel, the defense establishment, the IDF and other security forces, and only after that, Yoav Gallant,” he said. “Netanyahu’s order of priorities is first and foremost himself.”
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