The top Democrats on the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees are demanding that President Donald Trump preserve his conversations with artificial intelligence chatbots as part of an inquiry into whether Elon Musk’s AI system Grok has influenced official White House policy. The demand offers a preview of the intense scrutiny Trump would face in the final years of his presidency if Democrats reclaim the House in next week’s midterm elections.

In a letter to Trump, unveiled Oct. 30, Representatives Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Robert Garcia of California call on the President to preserve “any prompts” submitted to AI chatbots, including Musk’s Grok, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Anthropic’s Claude, while “carrying out your constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties,” along with the responses the chatbots generated. They also request a briefing on the matter by 5 p.m. on Nov. 11. Raskin and Garcia would be in line to chair the Judiciary and Oversight Committees, respectively, if Democrats win the House.

The request stems from a TIME report earlier this month detailing a previously undisclosed December 2025 meeting between Trump and Musk in the Oval Office. According to an official who was present, Trump spent hours asking Grok questions about his presidency and legacy.

At the time, Trump was ordering missile strikes on Venezuelan boats he alleged were smuggling drugs into the United States. He asked Grok how Venezuelans would react if the U.S. captured President Nicolás Maduro. The chatbot responded that Maduro was a repressive and deeply unpopular dictator whose downfall many Venezuelans would likely celebrate, the official said. The following month, Trump ordered a military operation to seize Maduro, and celebrations erupted in the streets of Venezuela. Trump came away convinced that Grok was ingenious, according to officials familiar with his thinking.

The lawmakers cited TIME’s reporting that Trump sought Grok’s “advice on carrying out some of your presidential duties,” including asking it to opine on how Venezuelans would respond to Maduro’s capture. Just “weeks later,” they noted, Trump “ordered the U.S. military, without congressional authorization, to attack Venezuela and capture President Maduro.” 

They called the episode “deeply troubling,” arguing that Trump “consulted Grok—but not Congress—on your military deployment to Venezuela, circumventing Congress’s constitutional power to declare war and introducing instead into American foreign policy decision making a technology that is highly manipulable and demonstrably error-prone.” The White House’s use of AI chatbots, they warned, “exposes the United States to acute national security risks” and leaves the country vulnerable to “malign influence from unknown and unaccountable third parties.”

A Trump Administration official says that the White House “preserves all required records in accordance with the law” but declined to answer specific questions stemming from the letter. A spokesperson for Musk did not respond to requests for comment. 

The preservation demand rests on the Presidential Records Act, enacted in the wake of the Watergate scandal, which makes presidential records the property of the public and requires that they be filed separately from personal materials. In 2014, lawmakers passed amendments that extended the law to include electronic records. The principle of preservation, the statute said, applied to the content of the information rather than the medium that holds it, a standard that on its face would seem to reach chatbot exchanges tied to official duties. 

But the statute itself does not mention AI, and the most direct federal guidance, from the National Archives, covers agencies under the separate Federal Records Act. That language treats prompts and outputs as likely records only if they are captured and saved in an agency system, a caveat critics say limits its reach for commercial chatbots. In April, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel declared the Act unconstitutional, although the White House has told a court its staff are still preserving materials related to their work. A federal judge ordered the administration in May to preserve presidential records for now.

The dispute comes as Democrats are preparing for the possibility of reclaiming congressional investigative powers after two years in the minority. A Democratic-controlled House could use committee hearings, document requests, and subpoenas to examine how Trump and his advisers have conducted official business, including the extent to which emerging technologies have entered the administration’s decision-making process.

Whether the White House complies with the Democrats’ demand, ignores it, or fights it could offer an early glimpse of the confrontations that await Trump in the final years of his presidency.

The Israeli settlement of Neve Daniel sits south of Jerusalem, atop one of the highest ridges in the West Bank, nearly 1,000 meters above sea level. The view to the east stretches to the mountains of Jordan, and to the west across the Mediterranean coastal plain—where most Israelis live. But the tranquility of the landscape belies the political fervor animating the Oct. 27 election, a contest with stakes as great as any in the 78-year history of the world’s only Jewish state. When I ask three residents what will ultimately determine their votes, one responds with particular ferocity.

“Seven hundred trucks were delivered to Hamas today by Israel,” says Barak Moore, who has lived in Neve Daniel for 14 years. He’s referring to commercial goods and international aid entering the Gaza Strip. “We’re paying a terrorist organization that committed the greatest atrocity against the Jewish people since Auschwitz.”

While much of the world has come to define Israel by its military actions in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, Moore’s views reflect the passions coursing through a society still traumatized by that day. Israelis tend to be less preoccupied by the nearly 75,000 Palestinian fatalities in Gaza since the war began, than by the 1,200 people killed in Israel and 251 hostages taken by Hamas—the women subjected to sexual violence, the children shot at point-blank range, the families burned alive in their homes. In a country so small and intimately connected, scarcely anyone was untouched by events that shattered the assumptions of a people whose nation was founded to give Jews a safe haven in their ancestral homeland. 

Both the Hamas massacre and the wars that followed loom over a vote shaping up not only as a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu, but also the nature of the country that, as Israel’s longest serving prime minister, he has done so much to shape. 

Arrayed against Netanyahu is a fractured field of challengers. There is Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief whose reputation for honesty, sobriety, and competence contrasts with Netanyahu’s polarizing leadership; Naftali Bennett, the right-wing former prime minister seeking a comeback; Yair Lapid, the centrist former premier who has spent years trying to dislodge Netanyahu; and Avigdor Lieberman, the hawkish secular nationalist who has become one of Netanyahu’s fiercest adversaries.

Also on the ballot: Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, far-right extremists whose parties made possible Netanyahu’s current coalition, and whose ambitions to annex the West Bank and resettle Gaza constrain his room to maneuver while damaging Israel’s standing abroad. The next government will either push Israel further down the path of religious nationalism, permanent conflict, and international isolation—or toward a new generation of leadership.

According to the polls, Netanyahu’s strongest challenger is Eisenkot, a soft-spoken, heavyset career soldier running as a centrist. His son, Gal, was killed fighting Hamas in Gaza, and one of his nephews also died in the war. Eisenkot is campaigning on a promise to restore public trust in government, rebuild Israel’s security, and heal the divisions that have fractured the country. “This election is about the identity of Israel,” Eisenkot told TIME in an interview on Oct. 20. “What will be Israel two weeks from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now? This is the main question.”

Three years after Netanyahu’s political obituary was being written, pre-election polls show him running in a dead heat. On the eve of the vote, the nation is suffused with a sense of uncertainty; political analysts say almost anything can happen. Netanyahu and Eisenkot could form a unity government. Netanyahu could cobble together another right-wing coalition, dragging Israel further right. Eisenkot could join forces with Bennett, Lapid, and the Arab parties (20% of Israeli citizens are Palestinian) to oust Netanyahu, producing the closest thing Israel could muster to a center-left government. Or perhaps no bloc will manage to pull together the 61 Knesset seats needed for a majority, plunging Israel into another round of elections and a reprise of the paralysis that produced five contests between 2019 and 2022.

“The most probable scenarios currently are either there will be some sort of unity government, which again is very complicated politically because all of the opposition parties swear they don’t want it under Netanyahu, and I don’t see how Netanyahu is going to sit under them,” says Nimrod Nor, an expert on Israeli politics at Hebrew University. “The other is we’re going to have another election after this one.”

According to two sources familiar with Netanyahu’s thinking, he would prefer to form a unity government with Eisenkot. One reason is legacy. He believes such an alliance offers his best chance to transcend the worst security failure in the nation’s history, and to be remembered not only as the leader who emerged from the slaughter of Oct. 7 to decimate Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon and persuade an American president to wage war against Iran, but also as the statesman who helped to reconcile a divided nation.

The other reason, the sources say, is personal. Netanyahu has little desire to form another right-wing coalition that would leave him beholden to the radical and uncompromising parties led by Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, both of which he brought into government four years ago to reclaim power. “He thought that he could control Ben-Gvir,” one Netanyahu aide says. “Now he knows that he can’t.”

That is precisely what the Israeli right fears he’s thinking, and what brought me to Neve Daniel. The settlement of capacious red-tiled homes is just across the Green Line that defined Israel’s borders before the Six-Day War of 1967. It was built on land that was a Jewish farm even before Israel was founded in the crucible of the 1948 war. Settler violence against Palestinians has risen sharply during Netanyahu’s tenure, but the militant settlers who make headlines by terrorizing their Palestinian neighbors tend to live on hilltops deeper into the West Bank than this.

But few, if any, of the 700,000 Israelis who live in settlements are leftist. Many regard Netanyahu as a cynical opportunist—a political chameleon who parrots their convictions but will do whatever it takes to survive. Among his many heresies, they say, is a long history of accommodating American presidents: signing the Wye River Memorandum under Bill Clinton to advance the Oslo peace process that aimed to create a Palestinian state; voting for the disengagement from Gaza under Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush; endorsing, at least rhetorically, a two-state solution and imposing a moratorium on settlement construction under Barack Obama; and, under Donald Trump, accepting a ceasefire and hostage-exchange agreement to end the war in Gaza.

Three people in Neve Daniel offer a revealing glimpse of the forces pulling Netanyahu rightward. Each plans to vote for a different party, but they all share an overriding objective: a right-wing government with Netanyahu at its center, constrained by allies who will keep him from drifting toward the middle. 

Barak Moore is supporting Zehut, a libertarian nationalist party founded in 2015, whose eclectic platform combines tax cuts, the dismantling of monopolies, and cannabis legalization with an uncompromising vision of Israeli sovereignty and the removal of Palestinians from Gaza. It is something of a right-wing hipster party, blending free-market economics with religious nationalism.  

Avi Abelow, 52, an activist who runs the website Pulse of Israel, is voting for Netanyahu’s Likud Party. His complaint is not that the prime minister has gone too far in Gaza, but rather that he has not gone far enough, hamstrung by a security establishment and governing coalition insufficiently committed to the nationalist cause. “We should have conquered all of Gaza and made sure it’s Jewish again,” he says.

The youngest of the three, Hershey Kellner, is a 19-year-old Orthodox Jew who moved to Israel from New Jersey just months before Oct. 7. He is supporting Otzma Yehudit, the far-right party led by Ben-Gvir, whose confrontational politics and open contempt for established norms have made him a hero to some of Israel’s most fervent ideologues. Helner admires Ben-Gvir’s push to expand civilian gun ownership, permit Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, and introduce the death penalty for terrorists. 

To explain his thinking, Kellner invokes one of the most consequential decisions in recent Israeli history: the 2011 deal that freed the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Among them was Yahya Sinwar, who would go on to mastermind the Oct. 7 massacre. Helner believes that sparing Sinwar’s life was a catastrophic mistake. “If you hanged him or put a bullet in the back of his head, not sure how the world would be now,” he says, “but it would definitely be better.”

For three years, Israel has been a nation at war, not only with its enemies but with itself. The extraordinary solidarity that followed Oct. 7 has given way to recriminations and ideological divisions, intensified by the trauma of war, the anguish of the hostage crisis, the pain of deepening antisemitism worldwide, and the unresolved question of who bears responsibility for such a stunning security lapse. Though Israel rejects the charge, critics accuse the country of committing a genocide in Gaza, where the dead include both uncounted Hamas fighters and 20,000 children—and of countenancing a thuggish brand of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. On Oct. 16, masked settlers were filmed attacking Palestinians and European diplomats in the West Bank, and injuring a Washington Post photojournalist.

The fault lines run through nearly every aspect of Israeli life. Secular and religious. Liberals and nationalists. Those obliged to serve in the military and the ultra-Orthodox who are not. Those who believe Israel must reach an accommodation with the Palestinians and those who want permanent Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza. And, not least, those who regard Netanyahu as the indispensable guarantor of Jewish security and those who see him as the principal threat to the country’s democratic character and reputation abroad.

The fear increasingly voiced across Israel’s political and cultural establishment is that another Netanyahu victory could push those divisions toward a societal rupture. After Netanyahu’s coalition moved in early 2023 to restrict the power of the Supreme Court, the prospect of another government dependent on religious and ultra-nationalist parties has raised the specter of an exodus of young Israelis, who see the country’s liberal and democratic traditions slipping away. In a recent survey by the Agam Institute, an Israeli research firm, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 59% of Israelis said they believe internal threats are greater than external ones, while 64% said they were considering leaving Israel, citing insecurity, living costs, and political instability. In a nation of roughly 10 million, even the departure of tens of thousands of highly educated citizens could have consequences far beyond their numbers, draining the country of the talent and investment on which its economic and military strength depends.

There is a deeper irony. Israel was founded as a refuge, a place where a people long subjected to persecution and exile could finally determine their own destiny. Some Israelis now contemplate leaving, not because they have lost faith in the necessity of a Jewish state, but because they fear the political direction of the state created to provide one.

For those contemplating a future abroad, there is an unsettling question: Where, exactly, would they go? Antisemitism has surged across much of the world, with 2025 marking the deadliest year for Jews in the diaspora in more than three decades, according to Tel Aviv University.  Israel has become increasingly isolated, condemned in international forums, denounced in the streets of European capitals, and regarded by many critics as a pariah state. The result is a profound paradox: Israelis who fear for their country’s future wonder whether they would be any safer, or more welcome, anywhere else. 

It is this siege mentality, the sense of a small nation standing alone against a hostile world, that Netanyahu is counting on to sustain his political survival. He has spent much of his career presenting himself as a leader hardened by history, experienced in diplomacy, and ruthless in the exercise of power. His message: Whatever Israelis think of him personally, whatever blame they assign him for Oct. 7, the world is too dangerous to entrust their security to anyone else.

The chasm between how Israelis see themselves and how much of the outside world sees them has rarely seemed wider. In the new documentary NAZA, Israeli filmmakers draw on the anonymous testimony of 24 soldiers and intelligence officers to expose what they describe as the military’s systematic use of artificial intelligence to identify Hamas targets in Gaza, even when commanders knew that bombing them would kill women and children. Inside Israel, meanwhile, the fifth season of Fauda, the country’s enormously popular television thriller, recreates the atrocities of Oct. 7 in harrowing detail, immersing viewers once again in the terror, grief, and vulnerability of that day.

One production focuses on the suffering Israel inflicted, the other on the suffering Israelis endured. Together, they illuminate the competing narratives of a war that has left Israel increasingly estranged from the world, and many Israelis feeling more besieged than ever. Indications from polls and analysts are that even after voters have their say, no one bloc will have mustered a legislative majority. At that point the leading vote-getter will have weeks to try to gather a coalition, a test of the kind of political leadership at which Netanyahu has long excelled.

For nearly three decades, Netanyahu has been the dominant figure in Israeli public life, his political fortunes rising and falling with the country’s anxieties and ambitions. He has survived scandals, indictments, electoral defeats, and repeated attempts to engineer his ouster. The question is whether a political system he has spent so long mastering can produce a future that no longer revolves around him.

In a country not yet 80 years old, many are ready to chart a new era. “I think that Eisenkot is the one,” says Livna Savir, 72, at a rally for the challenger on a basketball court in Kibbutz Netzer Sereni, outside of Tel Aviv. “It’s a change of direction.” With her children living in the U.S., she laments the impacts of the last three years on a once unified group: “What happened now in our country—it’s not good for the family.”

Gadi Eisenkot’s office is small and sparsely furnished. There are no medals on display, no photographs with foreign dignitaries or political luminaries, none of the trappings of a decorated general who rose to become chief of staff of Israel’s military. The space, tucked inside a commercial building in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat HaSharon, is conspicuously devoid of ostentation.

Beside his desk sit three photographs. One is of his son Gal, who was killed fighting in Gaza in Dec. 2023, two months after the war began. Another is a family portrait taken during a visit to Washington, D.C., years earlier, a picture of a family still whole, before the war shattered it. The third shows Gal next to one of his closest friends from their military unit, who was also killed in combat. “He was a settler,” Eisenkot says of his son’s friend. The image conveys a snapshot of contemporary Israel: the son of a centrist military commander and a young man from a West Bank settlement, products of different worlds, serving and dying alongside one another. 

As we speak, Eisenkot, dressed in his trademark black polo and black pants, pauses to pick up the photographs. He recalls the days after his son’s death. After three nights of sitting shiva, the Jewish mourning ritual, he left his grieving family to attend a meeting of Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet. “I decided to go forward,” he says.

Now Eisenkot hopes to move not only himself forward but his country. The former general has emerged as a leading challenger to Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. Polls suggest a close contest, with Eisenkot seeking to assemble a coalition capable of ending Netanyahu’s rule three years after he presided over the worst security failure in Israel’s history, launched the war in Gaza, and led the country into deepening international isolation.

Eisenkot has cultivated a reputation for integrity, competence, and personal rectitude, forging relationships across Israel’s fractured political spectrum. But perhaps his most powerful political asset is his devastating personal loss. In a country scarred by the trauma of Oct. 7 and the war that followed, Eisenkot’s grief is familiar to countless Israelis. His effort to persevere mirrors a nation’s struggle.

The Oct. 27 election will be more than a referendum on Netanyahu. It will test whether Israelis are prepared to chart a different course after three years of bloodshed, recriminations, and cultural fracture. The country is deeply polarized, increasingly castigated by the rest of the world, and confronting a resurgence of antisemitism. Voters will determine not only who governs Israel but what kind of nation Israel will become—and whether its next leader can begin to heal the divisions that have left the world’s only Jewish state facing one of the gravest crises in its history.

Netanyahu, of course, can never be counted out. The consummate political survivor, he has weathered scandals, electoral defeats, and corruption charges. His credibility has suffered, but many Israelis still regard him as the only leader who can protect them in a dangerous region. Eisenkot could assemble a coalition with other opposition figures, including former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, Avigdor Lieberman, and Yair Golan. Netanyahu would depend on the far-right parties led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, whose ultra-nationalist politics have found a receptive audience among younger right-wing Israelis.

Israel’s fragmented parliamentary system offers no guarantee of a decisive outcome. Negotiations could drag on for weeks, or fail altogether, sending Israelis back to the polls. Eisenkot tells me he will not serve in a unity government with Netanyahu under any circumstances. He has framed his ambitions around nothing less than the sustenance of the Zionist enterprise: the ability of Jews to live safely in a state of their own in their ancestral homeland. In his telling, that means confronting the threat from Iran; restoring Israel’s standing in the world; preserving the country’s character as a Jewish democracy; and finding an accommodation with the Palestinians, who lay claim to the same land and have their own aspirations to self-determination. 

“What holds the country together is the Jewish and democratic ethos of the majority of Israelis,” says Yossi Klein Halevi, a bestselling Israeli author and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. “That's what we're going to have to try to repair. That is really what Eisenkot is offering the country.”

For Eisenkot, the challenge is not merely to replace Netanyahu but to lead Israel beyond the trauma that has consumed it since Oct. 7. He sees a country caught between the imperative to protect itself and the need to recover the democratic values, national solidarity, and international legitimacy that are essential to its survival. “I feel like it’s a historic mission—to save the state of Israel,” he says, invoking his son and the many others who died defending the nation.  “We owe it to them to be worthy of the sacrifice they made.”

On Oct. 7, 2023, Eisenkot awoke shortly after 6 a.m., stirred by nothing more than his circadian rhythm. When he turned on the television, he saw the first images of a catastrophe unfolding a short drive south of his home. Thousands of Hamas-led militants were pouring into southern Israel by land, air, and sea. They rampaged through kibbutzim and the streets of Sderot, descended on the Nova music festival, where they murdered civilians, raped women, desecrated the bodies of the dead,  and dragged hundreds of hostages back into Gaza. Many filmed themselves carrying out the atrocities, celebrating the carnage as it unfolded. Desperate Israelis called the authorities, pleading for help that would not arrive for hours. By the time security forces regained control, entire communities had been devastated by the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

Eisenkot’s son Gal, 25, was staying at the family home in Herzliya, outside of Tel Aviv, rather than his apartment near Tel Aviv University, where he was studying bioinformatics. He had come home for the holiday of Simchat Torah. Eisenkot woke him. “Gal, come to see the TV,” he said. “There are trucks of Hamas inside Sderot. This means war. Where is your military equipment?”

Gal had completed his compulsory service and was now a reservist, trained as a combat medic. Eisenkot drove him to his unit’s base, where lines of cars were already forming as reservists converged. “I knew right away that Israel, that the world, would never be the same,” Eisenkot says. 

Four days later, with a ground invasion of Gaza looming, Netanyahu asked Eisenkot to join a small war cabinet. Eisenkot had served under Netanyahu as chief of the general staff from Feb. 2015 to Jan. 2019, but the two men were now political adversaries. Netanyahu had hoped to project unity to a divided public, much of which had come to distrust or despise him. After months of mass demonstrations against his efforts to curtail the power of the judiciary, he sought to rally the country behind the coming war.

One of Eisenkot’s first priorities in the war cabinet was to prevent the opening of a second front against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite militant group in Lebanon. Some of Netanyahu’s senior ministers, particularly Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, favored launching a preemptive offensive against Hezbollah, despite objections from the Biden Administration. Eisenkot argued that Israel needed to concentrate its military resources on defeating Hamas in the south before embarking on another major conflict. On that question, he prevailed.

On another matter, one he considered even more urgent, Netanyahu was less receptive. Hamas had abducted 251 people on Oct. 7, and Eisenkot believed securing their release should take precedence over a full-scale military campaign. It was, in his view, a fundamental obligation of the state, part of the covenant between a country and its citizens. Once Israel plunged into a prolonged ground war, he feared, the prospects of recovering the hostages alive would diminish. “My idea was to do the hostage deal, and after that, defeat Hamas,” Eisenkot tells me.

Netanyahu chose a different course. Israel launched a ground invasion following an extensive aerial bombardment of Hamas’s military infrastructure, including its vast network of subterranean tunnels. Hamas had embedded military facilities and weapons in densely populated areas, deliberately exposing civilians to grave danger. The military campaign that ensued has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. 

Two months into the war, Eisenkot suffered a catastrophe of his own. He was at a military headquarters, studying a satellite map showing the positions of Israeli battalions near some of the fiercest fighting in Gaza. Fifteen minutes later, a major general who had once served under his command approached him.

“Gadi, come to me,” the officer said. “Gal is critically injured. Go home”

Eisenkot had spent more than four decades in the Israeli military. He knew what those words meant. If his son were still alive, he would have been told to go to the hospital, not home. “I understood he was dead,” he tells me. 

Gal died in combat alongside his friend Eyal Berkowitz, a young man from a West Bank settlement. It was Berkowitz whose photograph Eisenkot had shown me in his office, standing beside Gal. 

Thousands attended Gal’s funeral, which was broadcast on national television. Across the country, Israelis watched one of their most decorated commanders mourn the loss of his own son. Eisenkot delivered a eulogy, his voice trembling. “I promise you that we will continue to be a united and happy family, so that your sacrifice and that of the other fallen will not be in vain and that we will be worthy of it,” he said. “I salute you, beloved son.” 

Three days later, Eisenkot returned to Netanyahu’s war cabinet. He watched as Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war turned Israel into a pariah state. Images circulated daily on social media of children killed as collateral damage in strikes on Hamas targets. Netanyahu resisted allowing aid into the Strip. The world accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war and committing war crimes against a trapped population of 2 million.

He recalls his final meeting with Netanyahu, in late June 2024, when the prime minister appeared before a special intelligence committee in the Knesset. Eisenkot pressed him on how he intended to end the war. “What is your exit plan?” he asked. Netanyahu offered none, Eisenkot says, insisting instead that Israel would continue fighting until it achieved “total victory.”

Eisenkot reached into his briefcase and pulled out a book: Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy, Martin Indyk’s 2021 study of Kissinger’s statecraft. Indyk, who served in senior diplomatic roles under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, was a friend of Eisenkot’s and a longtime critic of Netanyahu. “Have you read this?” Eisenkot asked. Netanyahu said he had not. Eisenkot urged him to do so, arguing that military force without a diplomatic strategy could not deliver a lasting victory.

“Gadi,” Eisenkot recalls Netanyahu replying, “I have a different view about the meaning of the word strategy.” 

Eisenkot was enraged by Netanyahu’s refusal to prioritize the hostages. The suspicion among Netanyahu’s critics was that he feared a deal would fracture his coalition, potentially forcing elections that could remove him from power and trigger an inquiry into the failures of Oct. 7—much like the Agranat Commission, established after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, that led to the downfall of Golda Meir. In Eisenkot’s telling, Netanyahu put the preservation of his own power above the lives he was entrusted to protect. “He neglected them,” Eisenkot says. 

A spokesperson for the prime minister did not respond to multiple requests for comment.  

On June 9, 2024, Eisenkot resigned from the emergency government, ending his eight-month effort to influence the war from within. His departure, alongside that of Benny Gantz, effectively ended the national unity arrangement and precipitated the dissolution of the war cabinet. But the war was not finished exacting its toll on Eisenkot’s family. One nephew had already died fighting in Gaza on the same day of his son’s funeral. Another was killed 11 months later. 

Over the next two years, Netanyahu presided over a succession of extraordinary military operations. Israel killed Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who helped mastermind the Oct. 7 massacre, and Ismail Haniyeh, the group’s longtime political chief. It assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and dealt devastating blows to the Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon, including through an audacious operation that turned thousands of its members’ pagers into explosive devices. After Donald Trump returned to the White House, Netanyahu persuaded the president to join Israel’s 12-day war against Iran in June 2025, with U.S. forces striking three of Iran’s principal nuclear facilities.

But the military triumphs told only part of the story. For two years, the war in Gaza devastated the Palestinian enclave, killed tens of thousands of people, and left Israeli hostages languishing in captivity. In October 2025, under intense pressure, Netanyahu agreed to a ceasefire and hostage-exchange deal that halted the fighting and secured the release of the remaining living hostages. “Netanyahu dragged it” out, Eisenkot says. “President Trump pushed him to do it.”

Months later, the confrontation with Iran entered a more perilous phase. Netanyahu helped persuade Trump to join a broader war against the Islamic Republic, a conflict that grew difficult to end and intensified criticism of Israel in the United States, including among elements of the American right. Around 60% of U.S. adults now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, according to a 2026 Pew survey. 

Now, for the first time since Oct. 7, Netanyahu must face the electorate. Eisenkot thinks Netanyahu has done little to help Israel recover, instead perpetuating the trauma, cultivating a siege mentality and an atmosphere of never-ending conflict that allows him to cast himself as the indispensable wartime leader. “I don’t know how Netanyahu wants to close the story,” Eisenkot says.

He decided he would try to write the ending himself.

Eisenkot’s strategy has been to assemble a broad coalition. To his right, he envisions Bennett and the secular nationalist Liberman; to his left, Golan, leader of the Democrats, the successor to the historic Labor Party, and Lapid, the former television host who briefly served as prime minister. “I told them, let’s build a big party,” Eisenkot says.

He held a series of talks with Bennett about the prospect of running together, but ultimately declined, calculating that separate campaigns would give the opposition bloc a better chance of expanding their support. Instead, Eisenkot chose to lead his own party, Yashar. Bennett subsequently joined forces with Lapid. “I thought I had the ability to unite Israel, unite this divided country,” Eisenkot says, citing his military experience and relationships across the political spectrum. “It’s not from arrogance but from deep commitment to bring change and defeat Netanyahu.”

Eisenkot’s background also carries significance. Born in Tiberias to Moroccan Jewish immigrants and raised in the southern port city of Eilat, he belongs to Israel’s Mizrahi community, Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent who have long faced discrimination from the country’s predominantly Ashkenazi establishment. If elected, he would become Israel’s first Mizrahi prime minister.

Eisenkot has campaigned on restoring public trust in government, strengthening Israel’s security, and preserving its foundation as a Jewish democracy. He has pledged to dismantle illegal outposts in the West Bank and crack down on extremist Jewish settlers who terrorize Palestinians, expand military or civilian national service across Israeli society, confront the threat from Iran, pursue a political resolution to the Palestinian conflict, repair Israel’s frayed relationships abroad, and restore national unity.

Travel through the country and the psychological scars of Oct. 7 are difficult to miss. They surface in the impatience of drivers, the intensity of political arguments, the restless energy of a society still living in the shadow of a nightmare. The country seems suspended in its aftermath, unable to separate the horrors of the past from the anxieties of the present. In some ways, it is still Oct. 8, 2023.

During our interview, Eisenkot and I discuss Bessel van der Kolk, the Harvard psychiatrist whose bestselling book, The Body Keeps the Score, explores how overwhelming experiences can leave people psychologically trapped in the past. Trauma, van der Kolk argues, can persist long after the danger has passed, disrupting the ability to integrate painful memories and move forward.

Eisenkot believes Netanyahu has purposefully made that process harder. Nearly three years on, Israel has yet to establish a state commission of inquiry into the failures that allowed the attack to happen. Without an authoritative accounting, Eisenkot argues, the country cannot fully reckon with the catastrophe. He pledges to establish such a commission within his first 14 days in office, with a mandate to investigate not only Oct. 7 but the decade of decisions that preceded it, including his own tenure leading the military. 

He points to widespread suspicions that the attack involved some form of betrayal from within, a belief he attributes partly to Netanyahu’s efforts to shift responsibility onto military and intelligence officials. Netanyahu and members of his family have promoted disputed allegations that security officials deliberately withheld warnings before the Oct. 7 attack, including the claim that they failed to wake the prime minister as Hamas launched its assault—part of a broader effort by Netanyahu and his allies to shift responsibility for the security failures onto the military and intelligence establishment.

Recent polls show a close contest, with Yashar running ahead of Likud. But neither Netanyahu’s right-wing alliance nor the parties seeking to replace him appear assured of the 61 seats required for a majority in the 120-member Knesset. 

“I think the chances for a unity government are high because we will be more than happy to have Eisenkot joining our coalition,” says Ohad Tal, a Knesset Member running with Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party. “If the other side will have a majority with the Arabs, God save us.”

Forming an alternative majority could require support from Arab parties, a fraught prospect in Israeli politics. Eisenkot will not commit to bringing them into his government. Instead, he has set four conditions for any coalition partner: recognition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state; adherence to the principles of its Declaration of Independence; acceptance of a national-service obligation for all citizens, with civilian alternatives to military service; and agreement that Hamas is a terrorist organization that must be dismantled. None of the Arab parties has yet to accept the latter tenet.

“I understand that in the Israeli system we must have a big bloc,” Eisenkot says. “It’s a huge challenge. I’m doing my best from morning till night. I’m convinced we’ll defeat Netanyahu.”

If Eisenkot succeeds, he says, he will break with Netanyahu’s defining political method: cultivating a siege mentality that pits Israel against the world. “The main challenge is to break Netanyahu’s method with them and us,” Eisenkot tells me. “This is poison to our society.”

Nowhere is that more consequential than in the United States, where support for Israel has deteriorated, particularly among younger Americans. “Netanyahu knows the United States better than all of us, but today he can’t improve Israel’s relationship with the U.S.,” Eisenkot says. “He may have a good relationship with the administration today, but the situation in universities, with American Jewry, with the bipartisan relations, are at their lowest.”

One of Eisenkot’s proposals is to gradually wean Israel off American military assistance. He believes the dependence has become a source of friction in Washington, and runs counter to the Zionist ideal of a Jewish state capable of guaranteeing its own security. “Maybe it will take five to 10 years,” he says, “and it is our interest to do it.”

Eisenkot opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state, a goal long championed by much of the international community. But he also recognizes the profound danger of a one-state future: Israel would face a choice between granting millions of Palestinians citizenship and voting rights, which would end its Jewish majority, or denying them those rights, which would undermine its claim to be a democracy. He wants to prevent the vision of permanent Israeli control advanced by Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. “Smotrich’s vision for one state will be the end of our country,” Eisenkot says.

To avert that outcome, Eisenkot tells me he favors some form of separation in the West Bank, with a reformed Palestinian Authority assuming greater responsibility for Palestinian self-government while Israel retains military control over the territory. His approach to Gaza is different. He endorses the framework of Trump’s 20-point peace plan, which calls for a technocratic Palestinian administration to govern the enclave and envisions a conditional pathway to Palestinian statehood.

“We have two options: the 20 points of President Trump, or to use force,” Eisenkot says. “I prefer the diplomatic option—and I believe I can do it. But if not, I know how to dismantle Hamas with force.”

For all his confidence in working with Trump, Eisenkot and his advisers were surprised when the president endorsed Netanyahu. Trump had previously passed up opportunities to do so, including in an interview with TIME. Some of his closest Middle East advisers, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner, had grown frustrated with the Israeli leader. According to people familiar with the discussions, Fox News host Mark Levin and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee urged Trump to back Netanyahu in the closing days of the campaign. “Israeli society is independent and will make its own decision,” Eisenkot says. “I have no doubt Trump will accept every democratic choice in Israel.”

Netanyahu’s political operation has circulated a stream of AI-generated videos attacking Eisenkot, including one depicting him in a field approaching a young Israeli soldier who bears a striking resemblance to his dead son. Instead of embracing the soldier, the figure resembling Eisenkot pushes him aside and embraces Mansour Abbas. “I felt contempt,” Eisenkot says when we discuss the video. “That is the lowest he could go.” The invective has only continued. Yinon Magal, a Channel 14 host and pro-Likud commentator, called Eisenkot a “monkey” on air. Netanyahu waited days before describing it as “highly inappropriate.”

Eisenkot sees the election as a test of whether Israel can preserve the democratic and national ideals of the Zionist movement or drift further from them. “My goal is that the Israeli people will be united and proud of their country,” he says. “That global Jewry will be proud of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people.” Many fear an exodus of Israelis should Netanyahu hang on. A Channel 12 poll in July found that 23% said they or any of their relatives would leave if the Israeli premier is reelected. 

Eisenkot lacks Netanyahu’s rhetorical flair, polished English, and decades on the world stage. But he argues those advantages have grown less useful as Netanyahu grows increasingly polarizing, at home and abroad. For many critics of Israel, particularly younger ones, the distinction between the country and its longtime leader has become difficult to discern. “We need to return to speaking about sharing the same values,” Eisenkot says. “Nobody speaks about values right now. Everything is about interest, power, more power, and more power.”

As our interview draws to a close, Eisenkot returns once more to the subject of trauma, the force that has shaped his own life and, he believes, the fate of his country. “Netanyahu is unwilling to show the courage needed to end the war from a position of strength,” he says. “It will take years to close the trauma, but we must start now.”

- With Reporting by Liam Forberg

In a small office in the industrial district of Lod, a city outside Tel Aviv where Israeli forces expelled thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 war, sits the campaign headquarters of Otzma Yehudit, or “Jewish Power.” The ultra-nationalist party is led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right firebrand once deemed too extreme to serve in Israel’s military. He now sits in Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet as national security minister, overseeing the country’s police and prison services.

If Ben-Gvir has his way, the Oct. 27 election will give his party more seats in parliament and himself greater leverage over another right-wing government led by Netanyahu. His ambition is not to replace the prime minister but to make him even more dependent on the hardline parties pushing for Palestinians to leave Gaza and the West Bank—and for Israel to extend sovereignty over the territories.

“I want Netanyahu to be prime minister. He’s a leader. I prefer him a million times over Eisenkot,” Ben-Gvir tells me in a rare interview on Oct. 19, referring to Netanyahu’s chief rival, the former military chief Gadi Eisenkot. Pounding his chest, he adds: “What will really help Netanyahu be right wing is if I, Ben-Gvir, will be a senior minister and it’s a full right-wing government.”

The post he covets is defense minister, which would give him command over Israel’s armed forces and greater authority to pursue his vision for Gaza and the West Bank: fewer constraints on military operations, the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from both territories, and the expansion of Israeli control over lands he believes belong to the Jewish people. Netanyahu has resisted giving Ben-Gvir the portfolio. But Ben-Gvir and his allies hope to win enough seats to force Netanyahu to accommodate their demands or risk losing power. He may benefit from the rightward shift of Israeli politics, particularly among younger voters drawn to his confrontational style and uncompromising vision of Jewish sovereignty. In a Channel 12 survey of first-time Jewish voters, nearly three-quarters identified as right-wing or center-right.

Polls suggest a tight contest, with Eisenkot’s centrist Yashar party edging ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud in several recent surveys, but neither the prime minister’s right-wing bloc nor the opposition appears close to the 61 Knesset seats needed to govern. An average of four recent polls puts the two camps at roughly 50 and 53 seats, respectively, leaving Arab parties and smaller factions potentially pivotal. The result could be another fragile coalition; an unlikely unity government between Netanyahu and Eisenkot; or a prolonged deadlock that sends Israelis back to the polls. 

Ben-Gvir, dressed in a white shirt and white kippah, speaks halting English. Under his leadership, Israel’s prison service has drawn allegations of abuse for its treatment of Palestinian detainees. But he wants a more direct role in determining Israel’s future in Gaza and the West Bank.

“If Israel wants to continue to live and not be destroyed, we have to capture all of Gaza,” he says. “We have to promote voluntary emigration. Gaza could be a Riviera. It’s a beautiful place. But we can’t have one Hamas member there.” His proposal would have Palestinians leave Gaza for countries willing to receive them, and then allow Israelis to establish settlements in the coastal enclave. It would reverse a defining decision of an earlier right-wing prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who in 2005 withdrew Israeli forces and evacuated more than 8,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza. 

Ben-Gvir offers no clear explanation of which countries would accept large numbers of Palestinians, or how their departure could be considered voluntary under the conditions he proposes. “Gaza was always ours,” he says. “Israel is a tiny country. We have to be wider, broader. Hamas are terrorists who don’t just want to destroy Israel. They want to destroy the whole world.”

When I suggest that removing Palestinians from Gaza and resettling it would deepen Israel’s international isolation, he dismisses the concern. “I think that the stronger we are, we won’t be isolated,” he says. “Israel is isolated when it’s weak. If we help the population leave Gaza, we can be very strong.”

Ben-Gvir’s rhetoric and policy designs have drawn widespread condemnation at home and abroad, with critics across the political spectrum accusing him of inciting war crimes and eroding the foundations of Israeli democracy. “He’s a source of immense trouble,” Efraim Halevy, a former head of the Mossad, tells me.

His ambitions in the West Bank are no less sweeping. Ben-Gvir wants Israel to annex the territory, which he, like most Israelis, calls by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria. It is home to 3.3 million Palestinians and partially governed by the Palestinian Authority (PA), created by the 1993 Oslo Accords that envisioned a Palestinian state. Controlled by the Fatah party, the PA has a lightly armed security force that is trained by the U.S. military and historically works with Israel to suppress terror attacks. But Ben-Gvir wants Israeli security control over the area Palestinians envisage as the heartland of a future state. “We need to take away the weapons for the Palestinian Authority,” he says. “As of now, they are training in Jericho. They’re not training to direct traffic, are they? They want to do another Oct. 7.” A spokesperson for the PA did not respond to a request for comment. 

The vision goes beyond annexation. Ben-Gvir says he would encourage millions of Palestinians who have lived in the West Bank for generations to pack up and go. “We want sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, where we also want voluntary emigration,” he says. “Just so we understand, we want voluntary emigration—not kicking anyone out. People will choose the option to leave.”

Whether Ben-Gvir can translate those ambitions into official Israeli policy will depend in part on the leverage his party wins on Oct. 27. He is counting on voters to strengthen his hand. “I hope the nation sends its message,” he says.

Ben-Gvir, 50, was born into a relatively secular Jewish family of Iraqi and Kurdish descent in Mevaseret Zion, a suburb of Jerusalem. His mother had belonged to the Irgun, the Jewish underground that fought British rule before Israel’s founding, but his parents were, by all accounts, not ideological zealots. Ben-Gvir took a different path. He became religious at 12 and, amid the violence of the first Palestinian intifada, gravitated toward the teachings of Meir Kahane, the American-born rabbi who advocated expelling Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories. By his teens, he was an activist in Kahane’s movement, which Israel eventually outlawed as a terrorist organization. Ben-Gvir was considered so extreme that the Israeli military barred him from compulsory service. 

Today, Ben-Gvir continues to revere Kahane, even as he disavows some of his mentor’s most fanatical positions. “I went to his yeshiva. He did a lot of good things. He protected Jews. He was murdered sanctifying God’s name,” he tells me. “Not everything that he did do I fully agree with. In the past, I thought we should kick out all the Arabs from the land of Israel. Now I think there can be some. I accept that there are some Arabs who live here. And I have no problem with part of them. Those who recognize the State of Israel as the Jewish state. Those who are loyal to the Jewish State.”

As a young adult, Ben-Gvir moved to Kiryat Arba, a Jewish settlement overlooking the Palestinian city of Hebron, where Kahane’s legacy runs particularly deep. According to published accounts, he and his future wife, Ayala, visited the grave of Baruch Goldstein on their first date. Goldstein, an American-born physician and Kahane admirer, had massacred 29 Palestinian Muslims at prayer in Hebron in 1994 before being beaten to death by survivors. For years, Ben-Gvir displayed Goldstein’s portrait in his living room. He became an attorney for Jewish settlers and activists accused of extremist violence. He also acquired a criminal record, including convictions for incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization. 

For years, Ben-Gvir remained on the fringes of Israeli politics, a familiar presence at settler demonstrations but an unlikely candidate for national office. Over time, he softened some of his rhetoric, publicly distanced himself from Kahane’s demand to remove all Arabs, and cultivated a more approachable persona without abandoning his annexationist aspirations.

His political breakthrough came under Netanyahu. Ahead of the 2022 election, the prime minister helped broker an alliance between Ben-Gvir’s party and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism, giving Netanyahu enough seats to assemble a government. Netanyahu’s decision to bring two Jewish supremacists into government became emblematic of Israel’s rightward turn—and one of the factors in its growing international isolation.

As national security minister, Ben-Gvir has pursued a hardline agenda: expanding civilian gun ownership, imposing an increasingly draconian regime on Palestinian prisoners, and pressing for tougher policing of anti-government protests. He wore a noose-shaped pin as he championed legislation imposing the death penalty on Palestinians convicted of deadly terrorist attacks, and released an AI-generated video depicting Palestinian prisoners emerging from Israeli jails emaciated and weeping, a grotesque statement about the conditions of their confinement. 

Ben-Gvir also encouraged Jewish prayer at the Jerusalem holy site known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, challenging a decades-old arrangement governing the disputed religious site, which has traditionally permitted non-Muslims to visit but reserved the right to worship there for Muslims. Under Ben-Gvir, Israeli police have increasingly allowed Jews to pray at the site, a deliberate provocation to the Arab world, drawing condemnation from Palestinian and Jordanian authorities. “It used to be an apartheid up there and Jews could not pray,” he tells me. “That could not happen in any normal country. I returned justice to the Temple Mount.”

Ben-Gvir has also become one of the leading voices on the Israeli right seeking to shift responsibility for Oct. 7 away from Netanyahu and onto Israel’s military and intelligence establishment. Among the claims he repeats is that security officials failed to wake the prime minister as the attack unfolded—which is disputed by former security officials.

“Even if he’s not perfect, and even if he made mistakes, and he indeed made mistakes, what screwed him up on Oct. 7 was our intelligence,” Ben-Gvir says of Netanyahu. “The army, the intelligence, the Shin Bet. They are all to blame,” he adds. “Netanyahu is not clear of blame, but there are many people who are more at fault than him.” 

Ben-Gvir’s relationship with the prime minister is not exactly warm. “I’m not backing him; I’m not his crony on everything. I think he’s much better than Eisenkot,” Ben-Gvir says. “I want to be next to him. I want him to be very strong. I want to pull him to the right.”

He tells me he would not join a unity government between Netanyahu and Eisenkot, a possibility if neither can assemble a governing coalition. “Governments like that are never good,” he says. “It's dancing in two weddings.” Besides, he adds, “It won’t fulfill my dreams.”

What Ben-Gvir wants from another Netanyahu government would place him at odds with the diplomatic framework advanced by the Trump Administration and its partners in Europe and the Arab world. The American-led Board of Peace envisions Gaza’s reconstruction under Palestinian leadership, the withdrawal of Israeli forces, and a possible path toward Palestinian statehood. 

Ben-Gvir, on the other hand, wants Israeli sovereignty and the departure of much of Gaza’s Palestinian population. He cites polling that he says shows 52% of Gazans want to leave the territory, devastated by years of war and Hamas rule. If Israel helps that majority leave, he reasons, those who remain will eventually want to follow. “They will see it is successful for them, they’ll see there’s a future, there’s a life,” he says. “There’s good places in the world. Pretty places.” He offers no evidence that the remaining population would choose to relocate, or how such a migration could be arranged without coercion.

For Ben-Gvir and his allies, the coming election offers a chance to advance a far-reaching transformation of Israeli politics and society—to move the country toward a maximalist vision of a Jewish state, one with expanded territorial ambitions, fewer judicial constraints, and a government less inclined to heed international objections. Ben-Gvir dismisses concerns that such policies would cement Israel’s status as a pariah state. In his telling, the military campaigns against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran demonstrate the value of uncompromising power. “We made Israel stronger,” he says. “When Israel is stronger, the world respects that.”

– With reporting by Liam Forberg

As Israeli voters prepare for elections on Oct. 27, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to defend and distance himself from one of his government’s most controversial policies: allowing Qatar to funnel nearly $2 billion into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip for more than a decade. Previously undisclosed documents obtained by TIME, including letters from senior Israeli security officials to Qatari leaders, reveal that Israel encouraged and played a direct role in a payment program that was more extensive than Netanyahu has publicly acknowledged.

Beginning in 2012, Netanyahu’s government helped to facilitate Qatari payments to Gaza that had begun after Hamas seized control in 2007. By 2018, Qatar had sent roughly $1.1 billion into the Strip, according to an analysis provided to Israeli ministers, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported, with the funding designated for humanitarian assistance, fuel, and government salaries. That year, after Israeli officials castigated Qatar for allegedly financing Hamas, the Qataris began demanding formal documentation of an arrangement the two governments had agreed was meant to provide relief to citizens of the beleaguered enclave. 

The extent of Israel’s cooperation with the payments was reflected in a 2020 letter from Yossi Cohen, then director of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, to Qatar’s Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. “It is indeed a great opportunity to express our gratitude and appreciation for the humanitarian aid efforts that the State of Qatar has provided the last few years to the Gaza Strip,” Cohen wrote. “Undoubtedly, these humanitarian efforts have played a crucial role in improving the humanitarian situation within the Gaza Strip, and ensuring stability and safety in the region.”

The payment arrangement had the support of successive Israeli governments, the Palestinians, the Trump and Biden Administrations, the United Nations, and European powers, according to officials who served in both the Trump and Biden Administrations. The flow of money from Qatar into Gaza has taken on new significance since October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists stormed southern Israel, murdered some 1,200 people, and took 251 more hostage. The worst security failure in the country’s history raised troubling questions about whether the financial lifeline helped to sustain Hamas’s grip on power and, in turn, enabled it to carry out the assault.

Since then, Qatar has been frustrated by allegations leveled by Israeli political leaders that its payments to Gaza had helped finance the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. “All of Qatar’s financial assistance in Gaza has been directed to Palestinian citizens through mechanisms coordinated with the Israeli authorities and international partners. Under previous aid mechanisms, all financial assistance, as well as goods such as food, medicine and fuel, passed through Israel before entering Gaza,” a spokesperson for Qatar’s International Media Office tells TIME. “Nothing was delivered directly by Qatar; we provided the aid, while delivery was carried out by the United Nations’ organizations in coordination with the Israeli authorities. If any funding reached Hamas, as alleged by individuals and groups with political agendas against Qatar, the responsibility lies with Israel, which oversaw the delivery and created the mechanism.”

Critics have long argued that Netanyahu sought to sustain Hamas rule in Gaza to keep the Palestinians divided between the Islamist terror group and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, foreclosing the prospect of a unified Palestinian leadership capable of negotiating a two-state solution. Netanyahu’s wager, according to these critics, was that the aid would give Hamas something to lose and would therefore help contain the group while Israel pursued normalization with the Arab world without resolving the Palestinian question. Instead, as Israel moved closer to a historic agreement with Saudi Arabia, Hamas launched an assault that upended the region, plunging it into war. 

The Prime Minister’s office declined to comment for this story. 

The documents now give Israelis a fuller accounting of a policy that preceded the catastrophe, as they prepare to render a verdict on the man who presided over both. “It was a policy failure on our part born of good intentions that multiple prime ministers kept going,” says one former Israeli defense official. “But Netanyahu was unquestionably at the center of it. He was the one who championed and accelerated the program, his government was in charge of the way it was run, and now we know as a society that we can never afford to make a mistake like that again.”

Ehud Olmert was still prime minister when Qatar began sending money to Gaza in 2007, after Hamas won control of the coastal enclave. At the outset, the Israeli government was not directly involved in the transfers. That changed under Netanyahu. By 2012, his government had approved a system that gave Israel a direct role in facilitating Qatari assistance: delivering food and medical supplies, determining which Palestinian families qualified for financial aid and disbursing the funds, and enabling Qatari financing to expand Gaza’s electricity supply, according to Israeli and Arab officials, as well as official documents obtained by TIME.

At first, the arrangement was informal. Qatar supplied the money with Israel’s approval, even as Israeli officials publicly criticized Doha for financing Hamas, according to sources familiar with the negotiations. The contradiction aggravated the Qataris, a senior official in the first Trump Administration tells TIME: Israeli officials would denounce the payments in public, then privately ask Doha to renew them.

Qatar, a gas-rich monarchy in the Persian Gulf, is accustomed to walking a fine line. It plays host to both the U.S. Central Command and to senior Hamas officials. The country set up a Hamas political office in Doha at the request of the U.S. in 2011. In contrast to other Gulf monarchies, especially Saudi Arabia, Qatar sees no threat in the Muslim Brotherhood, the political movement that spawned Hamas. After Oct. 7, Qatar's government emerged as the go-between in negotiations among Israel, Hamas and Washington, where Biden Administration officials privately praised the Qataris as honest brokers. 

By 2018, Qatar sought written documentation of the Israeli government’s role in the aid agreement. It was subsequently formalized through a trilateral mechanism involving Qatar, Israel, and the United Nations, designed to administer the aid with international and Israeli oversight. On October 2, 2018, Israel and Qatar, together with the United Nations, signed an agreement to finance fuel deliveries into Gaza.

A spokesperson for the United Nations declined to comment for this story but referred TIME to statements the body’s special coordinator for Middle East peace, Tor Wennesland, made in 2021 acknowledging the arrangement. “These efforts are vital to improving the dire socioeconomic and humanitarian situation in Gaza,” he said at a UN Security Council briefing. 

In August 2021, Qatar signed another agreement committing $40 million to a cash assistance program that would give nearly 100,000 Palestinian households $100 per month for four months. The arrangements were subsequently extended. American officials were brought into the discussions as well. According to a diplomat briefed on the process, who asked for anonymity to divulge details because they were not authorized to comment publicly, Qatar wanted Washington to understand precisely how the system worked, fearing that Israeli officials might later accuse Doha of financing Hamas without acknowledging Israel’s own role. “The Israelis kept insisting on doing it this way, so that they can control what goes in and out,” the official told TIME, rather than establish “something more regular and something which goes directly to the people.”

Under the system, according to U.S. and Israeli officials, Qatar paid for fuel and electricity purchased from Israel to increase the number of hours Gaza received power, a structure coordinated with Israeli security services. It transferred money through the United Nations for projects in the Strip. And it provided monthly $100 payments to some of Gaza’s poorest families. According to diplomats familiar with the system, Israel vetted the recipients and oversaw the distribution mechanism, with funds transferred through the World Food Programme and eligible families notified by text message before collecting their assistance at designated locations. “If the money ever got in the wrong hands, it was because of the Israelis,” the diplomat said, “because they were the ones overseeing the whole thing.” 

Netanyahu’s government was so committed to the policy that when Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas cut payments to government workers in Gaza in 2018, Israeli security officials shuttled Qatari cash into the Strip in suitcases, U.S. and Israeli media reported at the time. Naftali Bennett, then Netanyahu’s education minister, publicly opposed the transfers, denouncing them as “protection money.” Netanyahu briefly suspended the payments in January 2019 amid renewed violence along the Gaza border, using the prospect of their resumption as leverage to pressure Hamas to stop firing rockets. 

But while critics on the Israeli right railed against the deal, Netanyahu’s deputies worked behind the scenes to preserve it, according to correspondence obtained by TIME. In July 2019, according to one letter, Qatar notified the Netanyahu government that it was transferring $6 million to 20,000 beneficiaries in Gaza, with each receiving $300. It is unknown how many of those beneficiaries, chosen by Israel, were connected to Hamas or had family members who belonged to the group. Over the last two decades, Hamas has been deeply embedded in Gaza, operating not only as an armed militant organization but also as a political movement and governing authority, employing civil servants responsible for the territory’s public services and infrastructure.

In 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic swept through Gaza, R. L. Maoz, a member of Netanyahu’s National Security Council, urged Qatari officials to maintain the payments despite the Israeli government’s public criticism. “We reiterate the importance of continuing to transfer the Qatari humanitarian financial assistance through the existing mechanism,” Maoz wrote. “We ask that Qatar’s financial assistance not be transferred through mediators or countries other than the ambassador, Mohammed Al-Emadi,” he added, referring to the chairman of the Qatari Committee for the Reconstruction of Gaza. “We greatly appreciate your cooperation and open discourse to safeguard stability and security in the region and to bring our countries and peoples closer together.”

The program survived Netanyahu’s departure from power. His successor, Bennett, had been among its fiercest critics, raising the prospect that the arrangement might finally end. At that point, Qatar prepared to halt the program, a former Biden official tells TIME. Instead, after taking office in 2021, Bennett ended only the delivery of cash-filled suitcases, not the broader flow of Qatari assistance to Gaza, the Associated Press reported. According to people familiar with discussions about the policy, Bennett’s prior objections were a message intended for his domestic political constituency. “There’s no issue,” an Israeli representative told a Biden envoy, according to an official present. “We want to continue with it as is.”

To some of the officials involved, the compact contained a fundamental flaw: both the Israeli government and Hamas retained control over aid intended for ordinary Gazans. “Bibi and Hamas hold the tap, essentially,” one of the officials told me. Hamas could restrict the system to exert pressure internally, the official said, while Netanyahu could restrict it to pressure Hamas. “We knew this was not something that was beneficial for the long term. We need to have something that’s sustainable, that empowers the civilians.”

By 2023, with tensions mounting between Israel and Hamas, Qatari officials pressed for a different model, one that would deliver assistance to Gazans without making civilians dependent on either Hamas or the Israeli government. But Netanyahu’s government wanted the existing framework kept intact, according to multiple sources who spoke to TIME, including an Israeli official and an international diplomat. 

Two weeks before October 7, Mossad director David Barnea traveled to Doha and asked Qatar to renew the funding, the New York Times reported in 2023. The Qatari officials agreed but warned Barnea that it would be the last renewal. With tensions rising between Israel’s far-right ministers and Hamas, the arrangement had run its course, Qatar believed. Barnea asked for two more months. The rationale, according to the officials familiar with the conversation, was that continuing assistance to Gaza’s civilians gave Hamas something to lose and therefore gave Israel a measure of leverage over the group. After two months, the parties could reassess Hamas’s behavior and devise a more durable mechanism for delivering aid. 

They never got the chance. With the brutal Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, the Qatari aid arrangement that successive Israeli governments had spent years helping to build, modify, and preserve was over.

Ever since, Netanyahu has faced accusations that he deliberately strengthened Hamas to keep the Palestinians divided—between Hamas in Gaza, and the secular Fatah party that under Abbas governs the West Bank—and forestall a peace agreement. Critics point to remarks Netanyahu allegedly made at a 2019 Likud Party meeting. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he said, according to a report in the Jerusalem Post. “This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza.”

In a 2024 interview with TIME, Netanyahu denied making the statement, insisting that the payments were meant to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. “The reason that successive governments agreed to that is that we wanted to make sure that Gaza has a functioning civilian administration to avoid humanitarian collapse,” he said. Without the money to maintain sewage systems, water supplies, and schools, he argued, the territory could have descended into chaos and disease. Netanyahu claims that Iran supplied Hamas with weapons through separate channels, including suspected smuggling routes across Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

Netanyahu’s dealings with Qatar have also become a source of controversy in Israel.  Netanyahu has been under intense scrutiny in recent weeks over the so-called Qatargate scandal, in which former and current aides to the Israeli premier allegedly received payments to conduct a public relations campaign to cast Qatar in a favorable light for more than a year after the Oct. 7 onslaught. 

Now, as international diplomats contemplate Gaza’s reconstruction, they face a version of the same dilemma: how to provide essential assistance without strengthening Hamas or another militant organization. Trump Administration officials, led by envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, are working with Qatar and other Arab governments on a framework that would restore basic services while eliminating Gaza’s dependence on Islamist armed factions. “We want to ensure that the civilians are reliant on themselves and not on anyone else,” an international diplomat tells TIME. “So it’s providing actual opportunities for civilians to make money and be sustainable.” 

The question confronting Israel and its international partners is not simply whether money should flow into Gaza, but also who controls it—and whether the next arrangement will avoid the failures of the last.