Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, head of the Israel Defense Forces’ intelligence department, resigned from his position and will retire, he said in a statement Monday, citing Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel as the driving force.
Haliva is the first general of the IDF staff to leave his position because of the failures that led to the attack and the war in Gaza, Israeli media reported. The surprise attack killed an estimated 1,200 people, the largest loss of life in a single day in the country’s history. Militants also took 253 hostages back to Gaza.
“The military intelligence directorate under my command did not live up to our mission,” Haliva said in a letter shared by the IDF. The document was titled “Responsibility and Termination of Position.”
Referring to the Hamas attack, Haliva wrote that he has “been carrying that black day ever since, day and night. I will live with the horrible pain of the war every day.”
For more than a year, Hamas strategically planned its assault on Israel, following battle plans built on open-source materials, Israeli intelligence officers said in December.
The attack stunned Israelis and immediately raised questions about the country’s intelligence and defense capabilities. The Washington Post reported last year that despite information coming to light in August that an attack was imminent, warnings were dismissed, and the communities on the Israeli side of the border were never notified about a threat.
Haliva, who has served in the military for 38 years, will officially leave the role once his successor is appointed, the IDF said.
Monday’s admission of guilt is not new for Haliva, who, just 10 days after the Hamas attack, took responsibility for the intelligence failures that led to the assault.
“In all my visits to Military Intelligence Directorate units in the last 11 days, I sat down and stressed that the beginning of the war was an intelligence failure,” Haliva said in October, adding that the military intelligence directorate, under his command, “failed to warn of the terrorist attack.”
In the months since the war, anger has flared at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has shied away from accepting any responsibility for the intelligence failures that led to the unprecedented cross-border attack by Hamas.
Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving leader, has largely refused to address a key question: What responsibility does he bear for the security lapses that allowed the militants to storm Israeli communities in October, destroying homes and killing civilians.
Lior Soroka contributed to this report.