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A 30-year veteran of the Israel Defense Forces — and former head of the country's military intelligence unit — accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of caring more about his own political "survival" than the actual war he's waging in Gaza.
Speaking to an Israeli radio station, 103FM, in an interview that aired Thursday, retired Maj. Gen. Amos Malka said Netanyahu was only looking out for himself.
"His judgment in the conduct of the war is flawed and leans towards the blame game and a plan to evade responsibility," Malka said.
Malka served in the IDF for three decades, retiring in 2002 after serving as its director of defense intelligence. Last year, a state news agency in Iran identified Malka as one of five Israelis it said were targets for retaliation over Israel's assassination of Iranian military officials.
In retirement, he has emerged as an outspoken critic of Israel's current government, the most far-right in the country's history. Earlier the summer — amid mass protests over controversial judicial reforms — Malka said that if he were still serving, he'd rather resign from the IDF than serve an "extreme messianic dictatorship."
In the interview published Thursday, Malka argued that Netanyahu is preoccupied with political considerations — namely, an inquiry into the failings on October 7 and what form it should take. If he has time to worry about that, Malka charged, "I can see that he is not focused on managing the war, but on survival."
Malka's intervention comes amid fierce criticism of Netanyahu, who has been in and out of power repeatedly over the last 20 years, for presiding over what is arguably the worst intelligence failure in Israel's history and the killing of more than 1,400 people by Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants from Gaza.
The Israeli response, under a unity war-time government formed by Netanyahu that now includes members of the center-left opposition, has so far killed more than 8,800 people, according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry.
A week after the October 7 attack, protesters expressing solidarity with the more than 240 hostages in Gaza had harsh words for their country's leadership. Critics of the Netanyahu government have accused it of propping up Hamas to damage the prospects of a final peace agreement with the Palestinians and of diverting military resources from southern Israel to the occupied West Bank, where soldiers have been charged with defending extremists in illegal Israeli settlements.
"I want Benjamin Netanyahu and all his people to go home because they've abandoned residents of the south and they're not interested in the lives of residents there and instead they're obsessed with small politics," protester Monica Levy told The Times of Israel earlier this month.
