"The IDF on Tuesday announced that it is reestablishing Tank Division 38 as a sign of the ongoing rise of IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir's new post-October 7 army.

One of the main lessons that Zamir and some other top military officials drew from Hamas's invasion and the war in general was the need for more tanks and a more offensive mindset against adversaries on the border.

In March 2025, Zamir announced that the Northern Corps, which included large forces of reservists who could be called up to support the mandatory service of Northern Command in an emergency, would be closed. In place of the Northern Corps, IDF forces would be transferred and absorbed into other alignments.

One of the major shifts is reestablishing Tank Division 38, which was a large part of Israel's victories in the 1956 and 1967 wars, but was eventually absorbed into other wars as the IDF shrank its investment in tank warfare in favor of a greater focus on the air force and various forms of hi-tech warfare..."
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-886212

"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will present US President Donald Trump with "principles" for the United States' nuclear negotiations when the two meet in the White House on Wednesday, he said as he departed Israel on Tuesday afternoon.

"I will present Trump with principles for negotiations with Iran that are important not only to Israel but to everyone who wants peace and security," Netanyahu said while boarding Wing of Zion, Israel's state aircraft. "In my opinion, these are important principles for everyone who wants peace and security in the Middle East." There are no significant gaps between Israel and the United States on negotiations with Iran, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday at Ben-Gurion Airport. "I think there's an extraordinary alignment between Israel and the United States. Everyone would love to see something that would resolve without a war, but it will be up to Iran. If they insist on holding nuclear weaponry and enriched uranium, then I think the president made very clear that this is not acceptable," Huckabee said.

When asked by The Post if the US and Israel's stance on red lines for negotiations are the same, Huckabee said that he had not hear anything to the contrary. Huckabee's comments came as Netanyahu set off for Washington to discuss a course of action on Iran with the US president. The prime minister is slated to meet with Trump and senior members of his administration at 11 a.m. local time (6 p.m. Israel time) on Wednesday, and is expected to stay in Washington for around 42 hours..."
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-886205

"Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan warned that Turkey could be pulled into a nuclear arms race if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, arguing that such a development would reshape regional security and create pressure on neighboring countries, in an interview with CNN Turk on Tuesday.

"If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, it will not be possible for others to remain indifferent," Fidan said in the interview. He added that the outcome would not be limited to Iran, warning of a chain reaction across the Middle East driven by deterrence logic and heightened threat perceptions.

Fidan said Turkey remains opposed to nuclear proliferation and supports a diplomatic solution, but stressed that regional realities could force states into reassessing their options..."
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-886203

"
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday night shared a post on social media accusing former Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar of falsifying the intelligence agency’s probe into the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led assault and positioning himself as “de facto prime minister” after the attack.

The post was first published on X by former Likud spokesman Erez Tadmor on Friday. Netanyahu, who has been pushing to distance himself from responsibility for the deadliest attack in Israel’s history, reposted it almost verbatim on his X account three days later, with attribution to Tadmor.

In the post, Tadmor claimed that Bar decided Netanyahu was “an illegitimate prime minister who has already dragged Israel into an unnecessary war [the 2014 Gaza war], and therefore — in order to prevent him from making another miscalculation — decided to appoint himself de facto prime minister on the night of the [October 7] massacre.”He further claimed that “after the decisions he made led to the greatest disaster in the country’s history, Bar realized that the only thing worse than the reckless decisions themselves was that they were made as part of a rebellion against the prime minister — and decided to falsify the Shin Bet investigation.”

“The top brass of the Shin Bet in particular and the top brass of the security establishment in general were infected with an anti-democratic virus,” Tadmor charged in the post shared by Netanyahu, adding that they had acted as though they were required to “protect the state of Israel from the prime minister.”“After the rebellion they led ended in the most terrible disaster in the history of the state, they added sin to crime and embarked on a campaign of covering up, falsifying, and rewriting history,” Tadmor concluded.

Netanyahu’s reposting of Tadmor’s claims of an insurrection by Bar came some eight months after the cabinet voted to to dismiss Bar on the prime minister’s recommendation, prompting a legal battle in the High Court of Justice. Bar resigned a month later, citing personal responsibility for the agency’s failure to prevent the October 7 attack, though he has said that Netanyahu was seeking to oust him for personal and political reasons.

As Israel readies for elections later this year, the premier has ramped up his efforts to distance himself from responsibility for October 7, shifting blame to the security establishment.

On Thursday, he published a 55-page document with select quotations from cabinet meetings in the years leading up to October 7 that painted a picture in which he ostensibly pushed for aggressive policies against Hamas, while his current political rivals and security chiefs urged long-term deals with the terror group and blocked the assassinations of its leaders. The document contained Netanyahu’s answers to State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman’s since-frozen investigation into the attack.The release of the document drew sharp condemnation from Netanyahu’s defense minister on October 7, Likud colleague Yoav Gallant, who flatly called the prime minister a liar.

It also drew fierce denunciations from opposition figures, including former prime minister Naftali Bennett, who called the premier “the Israeli Forrest Gump” and “a weak, pitiful, helpless nebbish who just happened to stumble into events.”

“He is not a leader, but someone who is led. He is not a commander, but a subordinate,” Bennett said. The word “nebbish” is a Yiddish pejorative roughly translating to “loser.”

Blue and White leader Benny Gantz called the document a “rewriting of history.”

Netanyahu has served as prime minister since 2009, with the exception of 18 months in 2021-2022. He presided over a policy of encouraging Qatar to send hundreds of millions of dollars into Hamas-run Gaza, which he publicly defended as essential to keep the peace and prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in the coastal enclave.

Amid Netanyahu’s efforts to shift blame, the Haaretz newspaper reported Monday that the Prime Minister’s Office recruited reserve soldiers from the IDF’s intelligence unit last year to obtain the minutes of various security meetings held in the run-up to and the aftermath of October 7.

According to the report, the soldiers were recruited in May and June 2024 by Netanyahu’s military secretary, Roman Gofman, without the knowledge of then-IDF chief Herzi Halevi..."
https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-shares-post-accusing-ex-shin-bet-chief-of-appointing-himself-de-facto-pm/

"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was presented with IDF intelligence reports detailing Hamas’s battle plans as early as April 2018, the Ynet news site says, citing intelligence documents and testimony from senior officials.

The report says that between 2018 and 2022, Hamas developed a comprehensive operational blueprint for a coordinated, multifront attack against Israeli military bases and civilian communities in southern Israel.

The attack plan, which was later put together in a document known as “Jericho’s Walls,” envisioned breaching the Gaza border at dozens of points and deploying thousands of fighters. The report says the earliest known transfer of the plan to Israeli leadership occurred in April 2018, when the Military Intelligence Directorate’s Research Division distributed a special intelligence document to senior officials, including the military secretaries of the prime minister and defense minister, the National Security Council, the heads of the Shin Bet and Mossad, and the IDF chief of staff’s office.

According to the documents cited by Ynet, the 2018 report asked the following question in its subheading: “Is Hamas’s military wing building its force for a broad attack deep into our territory?”

The 2018 report made sure to convey the seriousness of the threat, emphasizing that “the scope of the plan and its complexity are exceptional.”

While some analysts who contributed to the report expressed doubt that Hamas could actually carry out the plan in full, they cautioned that “the plan illustrates a new and broader threat scenario than before.”

Netanyahu has denied receiving any intelligence that Hamas was planning a major attack during the years leading up to October 7, and when questioned by State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman about it during a probe into the failures that enabled the attack, the Prime Minster’s Office said that “the prime minister never received and was never briefed on the ‘Jericho’s Walls’ document” until after the war broke out, and that he was “never presented with any Hamas plan for a mass raid into Israeli territory.”

However, Netanyahu’s own published materials appear to contradict those claims. In the 55-page document he sent to the State Comptroller’s Office last week, he acknowledged receiving the April 2018 intelligence report, but selectively quoted only the most restrained assessment, which stated that Hamas had “a basic capability to carry out several simultaneous raids,” but that due to various factors, “it is not likely at this time.”

The document omitted the paragraph’s concluding sentence, which warned that the plan signals the terror group’s future ambitions and that it intended to significantly build up its forces.

The Prime Minister’s Office did not respond to requests for comment, Ynet says."
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/report-netanyahu-received-intel-of-hamas-plan-to-invade-southern-israel-as-early-as-2018/