A stunning message emanated from a Tuesday morning interview on the right-leaning FM94 radio station with the former deputy head of the research division at Military Intelligence, who told the host, Erez Tadmor, “I lost faith in the army, the General Staff is in a kind of rebellion.”
Colonel (res.) Ronen Cohen, told Erez Tadmor: “The failure on October 7 was not in intelligence. An intelligence failure is when you don’t provide intelligence. But when you provide intelligence in large quantities but everyone is silenced and don’t unpack the material for many days – that’s a failure of values and operational capacity.”
“And it’s not only the intelligence corps but the entire army, which was deep in such a culture that they lost the basic values of operational action,” Col. Cohen continued. “What has been published is not all of it; little by little more materials will come out that arrived in the days and weeks before the massacre. The material that was in Unit 8200 during the week of being silenced was not the kind of material that anyone could come and say, ‘Nothing will happen.’ It comprised hundreds of pieces of information about Hamas’s preparation for an attack at the most tactical level, and it could not have been ignored.”
Erez responded, “I’ve been worried for the past few weeks that we won’t even know what really happened here.”
Col. Cohen agreed: “Unfortunately, I also lost faith in the army at a very deep level, as one who has been in this system for 30 years. I rely on the reservists, many of whom are still serving, and when they leave, when the war business is over, they will speak up, and at least part of the truth will come out.”
He continued: “Today, the General Staff is in a kind of rebellion. The role of the army is to give operational alternatives to the political echelon and not to talk about today and say, ‘I’ll finish the fighting after Rafah.’ You can’t transfer territory when you don’t own it, it’s a basic thing that every citizen understands, but they still insist on lousy solutions with Hamas actually staying in the territory.”
“The obvious alternative is to divide the strip among several divisions, which is the only way to control the area and cleanse it,” he concluded.
Last Sunday, Col. Cohen appeared on a Mida podcast and said, regarding that critical night on Shabbat Simchat Torah, between the sixth and the seventh of October: “What’s strange about this event is the fact that no one from Intelligence took part in this conversation among the Chief of Staff, the head of Operations, and the commander of the Southern Command… The military intelligence chief (Aharon Haliva, now resigned) didn’t bother to hold a discussion with the research division chief.”
Col. Cohen places the biggest blame on IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi: “His performance on October 7 was extremely faulty. His unreadiness, hesitance, cowardice to enter Gaza… his handling of appointments and statements – there is a huge gap between him and the IDF’s morality, values, command, and leadership.”
