National Interest

by David Adesnik

    A recent book offers a strategic view of the Gaza War for the first time.

    Yonah Jeremy Bob and Elliot Kaufman. In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel’s Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis (Brentwood, Post Hill Press). 352pp., $32.50.

    In the immediate aftermath of the October 7, 2023 massacre, Israeli leaders seriously considered directing their main counter-attack not at Hamas, which perpetrated the atrocities, but at Hezbollah, Tehran’s Lebanese proxy force that celebrated the killing but did not participate. Three men would determine Israel’s course of action: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and former IDF commander and opposition leader Benny Gantz, who brought his party into a unity government formed only days after the massacre.

    Despite Hamas’ slaughter of 1,200 victims in southern Israel and the abduction of 251 others, Gallant believed that Hezbollah posed a far greater threat, with its arsenal of rockets and missiles capable of devastating northern Israel. On October 11, Gallant tried to present his plan to Netanyahu but found the prime minister’s aides keeping him at arm’s length.

    When Gallant pressed the issue with Ron Dermer, a top Netanyahu adviser, Dermer called US national security adviser Jake Sullivan. That led to a call between Netanyahu and President Joe Biden, in which the American president warned the Israeli leader not to strike Hezbollah. Netanyahu responded, “I hear you. You’ve been very clear. But I also want to be clear that we’re going to make our own decision.”

    Taken at face value, it would seem that Netanyahu, like Gallant, preferred to strike at Hezbollah. But the defense minister sensed that the disagreement with Biden had been carefully orchestrated. Dermer likely reached out to Sullivan precisely so Netanyahu could pose as the advocate of an aggressive course of action while deliberately eliciting a warning from the White House not to proceed. Netanyahu would resist that advice at first, but it would later provide him with the political cover to reject the Hezbollah-first option without seeming timid.

    As deliberations continued, Gantz entered the government as part of an arrangement in which he would form a troika with Netanyahu and Gallant, responsible for major security decisions. Gantz firmly opposed a strike on Hezbollah, balancing Gallant and giving Netanyahu the decisive vote. At a war cabinet meeting on the night of October 11, the prime minister put the issue to rest, stating “a pre-emptive strike could radically alter Israel-US relations.”

    Later, Netanyahu would insist he never supported the Hezbollah-first option. Biden’s advisors firmly disagree, insisting the Israelis were only minutes away from launching an attack until US intelligence showed them there was no imminent threat from the north.

    The seesaw debate over whether to strike Hezbollah forms the first chapter of In The War Room by Yonah Jeremy Bob of The Jerusalem Post and Elliot Kaufman of The Wall Street Journal. One of the book’s great strengths is that Bob and Kaufman conducted in-depth interviews with Netanyahu, Gallant, Gantz and numerous other key figures, including top military and intelligence officials.

    While several volumes have already recounted the events of October 7, Bob and Kaufman provide the first comprehensive, strategic-level account of the war from its outbreak to the Israeli ceasefire with Hamas in October 2025. While the authors’ reporting adds much to what is known about key moments in the war, readers are likely to find their judicious, balanced treatment of the full range of wartime controversies most compelling. The book’s prose is clear and its storylines advance briskly without needless tangents or trivia.

    A question on the book’s final page conveys a critical uncertainty that hangs over the narrative: “It is less clear than ever whether the legacy of Israel’s war room will be its military victories or its diplomatic fumbles. Which will last and which will prove ephemeral ”

    In the early months of 2024, Israel faced the decision of whether to complete its march from Gaza’s northern reaches to its southern edge, where the city of Rafah lies adjacent to the border with Egypt. Already, Israeli forces had mauled 20 of Hamas’s 24 battalions. The last four were holding Rafah. The Biden administration feared an unprecedented slaughter of civilians, as many as 20,000, if the IDF forced its way into Rafah. To deter the Israelis, it offered a diplomatic triumph—normalization with Saudi Arabia—in exchange for giving up the prospect of victory on the battlefield. The late Senator Lindsey Graham met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and told Biden that normalization was possible if Israel agreed to a full ceasefire.

    Initially, Gallant and Gantz resisted this enticement. Riding high in the polls, Gantz told US officials, “Finishing the war without demilitarizing Rafah is like sending firefighters to put out 80% of a fire.” Netanyahu agreed publicly but privately held reservations about the cost and risk of fighting for Rafah. American opposition gave him a pretext to delay action, but the authors contend that Biden “did not understand that Netanyahu was posturing.”

    What followed was an increasingly aggressive campaign to force the Israelis to hold back. In part, it worked. The prospect of a US-brokered normalization with the Saudis proved attractive to Gallant and Gantz, who also wanted to avoid a showdown with Washington. Meanwhile, the Israeli public had begun clamoring for a deal that would bring the hostages home. And was taking Rafah truly necessary  “Let’s maximize our gains and minimize our losses,” Gantz told the war cabinet.

    The question of why Netanyahu became more determined to take Rafah touches on one of the war’s most controversial questions: did he refuse to make peace because it would break his coalition, force elections and likely cost him the premiership  A ceasefire would almost certainly entail bringing the Palestinian Authority (PA) back to Gaza, prompting the most right-wing parties to bolt Netanyahu’s coalition. But Netanyahu began to emphasize Rafah’s strategic significance. He “often implied that the terrorist group would collapse after the city had fallen, which could lead to an end to the war.” The prime minister may also have doubted the optimistic scenario of Hamas agreeing to release the hostages, followed by normalization with the Saudis.

    Developments in Rafah confounded expectations in both Jerusalem and Washington. Despite Washington’s insistence that Israel had no credible plan to relocate civilians away from the fighting, the IDF achieved that goal quickly and with minimal friction. In the fighting, civilian casualties were barely a fraction of what the Americans projected. Yet Hamas never broke, instead regrouping in places the IDF already cleared. “Having to fight for the second or third time for the same neighborhood seemed to epitomize the problem with Israeli strategy in Gaza,” leading to heavy criticism on the domestic front, the authors observe.

    Israel’s diplomatic standing also suffered. A misguided decision to suspend humanitarian aid deliveries in March 2025 compounded the damage. The UN’s food security body declared that famine conditions existed in Gaza in August. Despite “strong evidence that the [body] had cherry-picked its data” to reach the desired declaration, Israel paid the reputational price. “We [f—ed] up royally on the PR with the aid,” a senior Israeli official told the authors.

    Yet Bob and Kaufman do not conclude that Netanyahu, whose government faces Israeli voters today, was necessarily wrong to keep fighting or that his motives were partisan. Extraordinary achievements would follow in the 12 months after the battle for Rafah. In September 2024, Israel would trigger the explosion of thousands of pagers its covert operatives had sold to Hezbollah, which distributed them up and down its command structure. Air strikes then decapitated the terror group’s leadership and destroyed much of its arsenal, after which Israel secured a ceasefire on favorable terms.

    The battering of Hezbollah also set in motion a chain of events that would culminate in the December 2024 collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, depriving Tehran of a client state on Israel’s border. Then, in June 2025, Israel would launch a 12-day war against the regime in Iran, setting its nuclear program back by years while proving its air defenses to be impotent. With President Donald Trump at the helm, Washington delivered the coup de grace on the final day of the war, employing massive bombs that could destroy targets too deeply buried for Israeli munitions to reach.

    The authors write, “There is no question that Israel’s options were limited by its prime minister’s political constraints—in part because he genuinely felt his government’s survival was essential for the country and no other leader would continue the war or take it to Tehran.”

    In The War Room succeeds not only as a measured, insightful intervention in the debates surrounding Israel’s war, but also as a first draft of history likely to have enduring value for those who will someday study its lessons.