Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington, D.C. Eric Lee for The New York Times
By Jodi Rudoren
I covered two prior Gaza wars and was Jerusalem bureau chief from 2012 to 2015.
Why has the Gaza war lasted so long? In a blockbuster investigative profile published this morning, the Times Magazine explains how Benjamin Netanyahu prolonged it partly for personal political reasons. Our Jerusalem bureau chief, Patrick Kingsley, and his colleagues Ronen Bergman and Natan Odenheimer spent six months interviewing more than 110 people and reviewing scores of military and government documents.
I spoke to Patrick — who is leaving his role this summer after four and a half years in what many have called the hardest job in journalism — about Netanyahu, the war and how they got people to share so many secrets.
Today is the 643rd day since the Oct. 7 attacks. Nobody imagined the war would go on this long. Why is it still going?
The strategic argument was that it gave Israel a better chance of defeating not only Hamas but also Hamas’s regional allies, Hezbollah and Iran. Whether you buy that argument or not, our reporting shows that Netanyahu was clearly often motivated by his personal interest instead of only by these national priorities.
There were key turning points when Netanyahu chose to continue the war to prevent the collapse of his coalition government. Fearing a domestic backlash, Netanyahu also refused to finalize a clear postwar plan for Gaza, leading to an aimless battlefield strategy that killed tens of thousands, stained Israel’s reputation — and still allowed Hamas to survive.
North of Gaza City. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
The article opens on a remarkable scene at an April 2024 cabinet meeting. A truce was on the table — almost. What happened?
After months of stalling, Netanyahu had softened his negotiating position, raising the chances of a cease-fire and hostage release deal. His aides were preparing to present this new position to government ministers. Then a hard-right minister threatened to bring down the government if the deal went ahead. Netanyahu chose to continue the war rather than see his government collapse.
You, Ronen and Natan uncovered so many things that have never been reported before. People should read the whole story, but can you tease them here with a few of the most telling tidbits?
There’s a moment in a hospital when Netanyahu was in pajamas after being fitted with a pacemaker, and a security chief called to warn him of a looming attack. There’s the phone call, minutes into the Oct. 7 attack, when he first learns about the scale of the raid. There’s the attempt by his team to alter the official record of that phone call. There’s a surprise appearance by the Saudi crown prince, fraught conversations between Netanyahu and President Joe Biden, and a decisive meeting where he tells the military leadership to bomb Gaza with even more intensity.
When I covered Netanyahu a decade ago, he was universally assessed as risk-averse, letting conflicts simmer rather than embark on all-out wars like the ones we’ve seen the last two years. What changed?
In some senses, he is still the same Netanyahu that you knew — he still keeps lots of options open, avoiding key decisions until the last moment. We see that in his monthslong deferral of all-out confrontation with Hezbollah and Iran last year. But he has gradually taken more risks. Ultimately, he did choose to invade Lebanon, assassinate Hezbollah’s leadership, invade Syria and brazenly bombard Iran.
These choices are partly about a shift in the Israeli psyche. To Israel’s critics, the Hamas attack was an inevitable reaction to Israel’s blockade of Gaza and occupation of the West Bank. But to many Israelis, the attack was the result of Israel’s timidity, its failure to deal pre-emptively with the threat that Hamas posed.
Our colleague wrote recently that Israel has managed over the last two years to vanquish its enemies but also alienate its friends. What does that portend for its future?
In diplomatic terms, Israel has a foot in two parallel realities. In the first, Israel’s global standing has rarely been lower. In the second, Israel is edging closer to breakthroughs with longtime foes, defying the logic that the war in Gaza has left it irrevocably isolated. Even as Israel’s reputation worsens within American and Arab societies, Israeli envoys are simultaneously engaged in back-channel talks with officials in Syria that could firm up Israel’s standing in the Middle East. It’s a bizarre and confusing situation.
Netanyahu is 75 and Israel’s longest-tenured prime minister, serving nearly 18 years in three stints. Yet there is no hint of him being ready to retire.
A few longtime Netanyahu watchers think he might bow out if he establishes formal ties with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states. Coupled with the Iran campaign, he might then have secured enough military and diplomatic triumphs to restore his domestic legacy, even as his global reputation is in tatters.
But for years, Netanyahu has refused to resign despite being prosecuted for corruption (a charge he denies). He has not given the impression of ever wanting to call it a day.
Read the full story here.
Takeaways From the Times Investigation Into Benjamin Netanyahu
By Patrick Kingsley, Ronen Bergman and Natan Odenheimer
Prolonging the Gaza war helped the Israeli prime minister forestall a political reckoning.
For this article, the reporters spoke with more than 110 officials in Israel, the United States and the Arab world and reviewed scores of documents, including meeting minutes, war plans and court records. Read the full investigation.July 11, 2025
When Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, setting off the war in the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career seemed doomed. Nearly two years later, the war is still going, and Netanyahu has assumed a position of rare domestic strength.
Our six-month investigation, containing many details that have never been previously reported, tells the behind-the-scenes story of how Netanyahu survived and then prospered as the war dragged on. The article brings readers to Netanyahu’s hospital ward in July 2023, to his home in the minutes after the Oct. 7 attack began, to the Israeli military headquarters in the days that followed and inside several cease-fire negotiations and Israeli cabinet discussions throughout 2024 and 2025.
Through interviews with more than 110 officials in Israel, the United States and across the Arab world, as well as a review of dozens of government records and other documents, we reveal how Netanyahu’s actions first made Israel more vulnerable to the October disaster and then helped to prolong and expand the ensuing war. Unexpectedly, the war’s expansion allowed Israel to defeat Hezbollah and bruise Iran. But its extension in Gaza brought relentless misery for Palestinians, led to the deaths of Israeli hostages and allowed Netanyahu to defer a political reckoning.
Here are five takeaways from the investigation.
Before Oct. 7, Netanyahu ignored repeated warnings about a potential attack.
As Netanyahu convalesced in his pajamas in the hospital in July 2023, a senior general brought him a troubling intelligence assessment. The report warned that Israel’s enemies, including Hamas, had taken note of the country’s domestic turmoil, set off by Netanyahu’s divisive plan to weaken the judiciary, and were preparing an attack.
Netanyahu ignored this and other warnings, and his government went ahead with the overhaul, passing a law hours later that limited the judiciary’s power, setting off more unrest. Two days later, Hamas’s leaders once again noted the turmoil in Israel — and decided the time was right to proceed with a long-planned attack.
Netanyahu deflected responsibility and tried to blame defense officials.
Minutes after the attack began in October 2023, at the nadir of his political career, Netanyahu was already planting the seeds for his personal survival act. “I don’t see anything in the intelligence,” Netanyahu said in one of his first phone calls that day. It was his first deflection of blame and an early hint of how Netanyahu would try to prolong his political life by blaming the security and intelligence chiefs for failing to prevent the attack.
As fighting still flared in southern Israel, Netanyahu’s team then briefed sympathetic influencers, telling them that it was the generals who were at fault for Israel’s worst-ever defense failure. At the same time, they moved to prevent the leak of conversations that might prove problematic to Netanyahu, stopped the military from creating official recordings of their meetings with Netanyahu and arranged for the searching of generals — including Herzi Halevi, the army chief — for hidden microphones.
Later in the war, Netanyahu’s team ordered archivists to alter the official records of his earliest phone calls on Oct. 7. Then they leaked a sensitive document to a foreign newspaper — circumventing Israel’s military censorship system — in order to discredit Netanyahu’s critics, including distraught families of hostages still in Gaza.
To avoid alienating far-right allies, Netanyahu dragged out truce negotiations.
In the opening hours of the war, Netanyahu turned down an offer from Israel’s opposition leader to form a unity government, preferring to remain in a coalition with far-right extremists who were more likely to let him remain in power after the war. That decision made him beholden throughout the war to the far right’s demands — in particular on the question of whether and when to reach a truce with Hamas.
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When momentum toward a cease-fire seemed to grow, Netanyahu ascribed sudden significance to military objectives that he previously seemed less interested in pursuing and that top military officials told him were not worth the cost, such as the capture of the southern city Rafah and later the occupation of the Gaza-Egypt border.
Saudi Arabia and the United States were willing to make a landmark Israeli-Saudi peace deal. Netanyahu demurred.
During intense talks with American counterparts in May 2024, the Saudi leadership took the risky step of signaling it was ready to form formal ties with Israel — as long as the Gaza war ended, the United States made concessions to Saudi Arabia and Israel began the process of recognizing Palestinian statehood. “Let’s finish this,” Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, said in one late-night meeting about the U.S.-Saudi parts of the deal.
Netanyahu’s resistance to taking that path was among the many issues that strained U.S.-Israeli relations under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. As the death toll in Gaza rose in December 2023, Biden grew so frustrated during one call with Netanyahu that he abruptly ended the conversation. As cease-fire talks stalled months later, American officials cited polls showing that more than 50 percent of Israelis now supported a hostage deal rather than continued war.
“Not 50 percent of my voters,” Netanyahu replied.
Conflict in Lebanon, Syria and Iran helped restore Netanyahu’s lost prestige.
At the start of the war, Netanyahu avoided steps that might expand the conflict into an all-out war with Hezbollah and Iran, key allies of Hamas. He called off a major attack on Hezbollah in the war’s opening days and avoided uncontrollable escalations with Iran.
But nearly a year into the war, a sequence of unforeseen intelligence successes led Israel to kill several senior Hezbollah commanders. Now emboldened, Netanyahu ordered the assassination of Hezbollah’s leader and the invasion of its heartland in southern Lebanon, destroying much of its arsenal.
Then, Israel managed to wipe out much of the Iranian air-defense system — significantly undermining the Iranian threat. Now neither Iran nor Hezbollah could protect President Bashar al-Assad of Syria against a rebel advance, prompting the ouster of another longtime nemesis of Israel.
With Tehran unusually vulnerable, Netanyahu then proceeded with an attack on Iran that became the greatest episode of his political career. Celebrated in Israel as a victory, the military campaign left Netanyahu’s party in a stronger polling position than at any point since October 2023.
How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power
Secret meetings, altered records, ignored intelligence: the inside story of the prime minister’s political calculations since Oct. 7.
July 11, 2025
Patrick Kingsley is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.
Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv.
Natan Odenheimer is a Times reporter in Jerusalem, covering Israeli and Palestinian affairs.