Eisenkot Vows to End Hamas Rule as Election Nears

Gadi Eisenkot stood at the Gaza border on Thursday and made a promise with a deadline: within 18 months of becoming prime minister, Hamas would no longer rule the Gaza Strip. The Yashar party leader spoke ahead of the October 27 elections and left no room for ambiguity. “We will destroy Hamas’ military wing,” he said.

He laid out two paths. One would follow action based on President Trump’s framework, which Netanyahu’s government accepted. The other would rely on Israel’s own military and operational capabilities. The base reporting doesn’t say what either path would mean for the civilians living in the territory he addressed.

The Plan, and Its Gaps

Eisenkot said he would draw up a plan with the heads of the defense establishment, “restore the National Security Council,” and present it to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. He said he was confident he could dismantle Hamas, citing his past in the IDF, Mossad and security establishments.

His résumé is substantial. He rose through the Golani infantry brigade, served as OC Northern Command, and led the IDF as chief of staff from 2015 to 2019. That tenure put him at the center of Israel’s confrontation with Iranian forces and their allies in Syria.

Eisenkot said intelligence reports and senior security officials indicated Hamas was “restoring its military capabilities, reestablishing itself in the Gaza Strip, and attempting to carry out terrorist acts against us.” For Israelis living near the border, that’s no abstraction. Hamas remains an armed organization that carried out the October 7 massacre.

He also attacked Netanyahu directly. “Let it be clear: as long as Benjamin Netanyahu is in power, Hamas will remain in power,” Eisenkot said, accusing the prime minister of lacking strategic military objectives. “There is a way to prevent the next disaster, if we make courageous decisions and formulate a national strategy.”

Accountability for October 7

Eisenkot renewed his promise to establish a State Commission of Inquiry into government failures on October 7 within 150 days of a new government’s establishment. The source said no probe had taken place more than three years after the massacre because the political echelon had repeatedly blocked the commission. Netanyahu had repeatedly spoken against including judicial appointments in the investigation.

He also vowed that his government would pass a conscription law to draft haredim, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, into the IDF.

A Campaign Fight Over Arab Parties

Likud responded with a jab at Eisenkot’s coalition arithmetic: “How would you destroy Hamas without getting permission from your partners, Mansour [Abbas] and [Ahmed] Tibi?” The statement suggested that a government with Arab parties would block an operation in Gaza.

The record cited in the base article points the other way. Abbas’s Ra’am joined a coalition that carried out strikes against Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Those actions included an IDF operation targeting Hamas tunnels days after the coalition formed in June 2021, as well as the 2022 Operation Breaking Dawn.

Eisenkot hit back: “For 17 years, Netanyahu and Likud have misled Israel’s citizens and strengthened Hamas.” He added: “If you had focused a little more on doing your job and a little less on drafting talking points, perhaps October 7 could have been prevented. In 12 days, you’re going home.”

The source said Eisenkot has repeatedly ruled out Abbas or Tibi’s Joint List joining his coalition, and told The Jerusalem Post he didn’t consider them viable partners. “In the basic guidelines of the next government, it will be written that whoever does not accept that Hamas is a terrorist organization, that it needs to be dismantled and destroyed, will not be a partner in the next government,” he said. “And therefore I do not see an Arab party that accepts my principles.”

Attacks From the Right

Parties aligned with Netanyahu’s bloc joined the attack. People of Israel leader Ofer Winter said Eisenkot, as chief of staff, “embodied the ‘conzeptzia (military mentality of containment),’ pushed for containment and negotiated arrangements, and called for the war to stop before we entered Rafah.” Winter said Eisenkot couldn’t lead Israel to victory. He also accused him of having “appointed Yair Golan, Aharon Haliva, and Herzi Halevi, and promoted disastrous doctrines that led Israel to October 7.”

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of Otzma Yehudit, said: “There is no limit to the lies of the Arab and left-wing camp led by Eisenkot.” He claimed that Eisenkot, while in the cabinet, demanded a complete halt to the war, capitulation to all of Hamas’s demands, a full withdrawal from Gaza and the release of all terrorists from Israeli prisons. Ben-Gvir said Eisenkot opposed taking Rafah and entering the Philadelphi Corridor, and opposed taking the security zone in Lebanon.

The story is developing.

Why This Matters: Eisenkot’s two pledges—to end Hamas rule within 18 months and open the October 7 inquiry—are promises about accountability. Israelis hear them 12 days before voting. Yet the base reporting says nothing about what a campaign to destroy Hamas’s military wing would mean for Gaza’s civilians, or about any political horizon for Palestinians beyond the military question. Debate over containment versus decisive victory dominates the campaign, while diplomacy gets little airtime. That gap matters: on this record, a security strategy without a political track hasn’t prevented the next disaster. Whoever wins on October 27 will inherit that unresolved choice.