Blood, Votes, and Bibi: How Gaza war allowed Benjamin Netanyahu to stage a comeback - and save his political career

Time of India

20 hours ago

FILE - President Donald Trump, left, stands with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the West Wing of the White House, April 7, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)
It's a known fact that
Benjamin Netanyahu
is a
huge fan of Winston Churchill
— the cigars, the wartime posture, the myth of the iron-willed statesman against a collapsing world. Netanyahu has long modelled himself on the British bulldog, seeing in Churchill a reflection of his own self-image: embattled, defiant, indispensable.
But Churchill fought Hitler. Netanyahu, as a devastating New York Times investigation reveals, fought something far more pedestrian — his own political extinction. The portrait that emerges from this investigation is not one of a wartime leader reluctantly thrust into conflict, but a political operator who prolonged war, sabotaged peace talks, derailed ceasefires, manipulated state records, and dismantled democratic checks — all to stay in power.
The War That Wouldn't End — and the Man Who Wouldn't Fall
There was a moment — brief, hushed, and deliberately unrecorded — in April 2024 when Benjamin Netanyahu almost stopped the war in Gaza.
Hostage negotiations had progressed. An Israeli envoy had been dispatched to Cairo. Egypt and Qatar had brokered terms for a six-week truce. Saudi Arabia had even cracked open the door to normalisation, with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly telling US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, 'Let's finish this,' if Israel ended the war and moved toward a two-state solution.
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Undo
But Netanyahu hesitated. At a cabinet meeting at the Kirya, Israel's Defence Ministry compound, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich got wind of the deal. 'Bring this,' he warned, 'and you no longer have a government.' Netanyahu folded. Publicly, he denied the ceasefire plan even existed. Privately, he whispered to aides: 'Don't present the plan.' It was the moment when a national trauma — the October 7 massacre, the largest single-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust — began to morph into something darker: a shield for political survival.
Read:
The biggest winners and losers of the Middle East War
Politics by Other Means
By mid-2024, Netanyahu was politically cornered. Polls showed Likud collapsing. His corruption trial loomed. The attorney general was investigating his aides. The Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, had opened a probe into irregularities around October 7. The unity government, temporarily propped up by Benny Gantz and his National Unity party, was fraying. The Gaza war — raw, brutal, and emotionally searing — offered a political lifeline.
Each time a ceasefire approached, Netanyahu moved the goalposts. A promising summit in Rome in July 2024 collapsed after he inserted six last-minute demands, including permanent Israeli control of the Gaza-Egypt Philadelphi Corridor — a known Hamas red line. Negotiators were stunned. A truce that could have ended the war fell apart.
In March 2025, a ceasefire lasted less than 24 hours. That same week, far-right firebrand Itamar Ben-Gvir offered to rejoin Netanyahu's coalition if the war resumed.
Netanyahu agreed. The budget passed. The bombs resumed.
Throughout this period, US officials claimed that Netanyahu had prohibited Israeli bureaucrats from discussing postwar planning — especially anything related to governance in Gaza. The reason? Even talking about a Palestinian administration risked alienating far-right allies like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.
The result: the IDF operated in a loop. Israeli troops cleared Khan Younis.
Then they pulled out. Then they returned. Then they left again. A senior Israeli officer was quoted saying it was 'the first war we've fought where we didn't know what winning looked like.'
The Birds That Saved Beirut
I
n October 2023, Israeli jets were 19 minutes away from launching a decapitation strike on Hezbollah's Beirut command structure. The strike, reportedly approved by the IDF and Mossad, could have reshaped the regional conflict.
But Netanyahu paused.
At the time, he was deep in negotiations with Benny Gantz over a national unity government. Gantz's support would give him a temporary reprieve from the far-right — and perhaps from prosecution. A risky strike on Hezbollah, however justified militarily, could have spooked Gantz. Eventually, radar imagery revealed that what Israeli forces thought were Iranian drone operators were, in fact, a flock of birds.
The strike was aborted.
Political calculus had once again overridden military momentum.
The Tehran Diversion: Operation Rising Lion
Israel launched 'Operation Rising Lion' on 13 June 2025 with a massive pre-emptive air and drone strike campaign. Around 200 fighter jets and drones struck 100 targets across Iran, including uranium enrichment sites at Natanz, missile factories in Tabriz, and nuclear command centres near Tehran. The operation was planned with intelligence support from Mossad and the IDF.
In June 2025, Netanyahu faced yet another internal crisis. Ultra-Orthodox leader Moshe Gafni was threatening to withdraw support over contentious conscription reforms, placing the fragile coalition on the verge of collapse.
Netanyahu's answer was escalation.
He authorised Israel's most ambitious military operation in decades: Operation Rising Lion, a sweeping, multi-pronged strike on Iran's nuclear infrastructure.
Over 100 targets were hit using stealth bombers, loitering drones, and cyberattacks. Israeli intelligence claimed the operation had pushed Iran's nuclear programme back by 'two to three years.'
But while the military objective was Tehran, the political target was much closer: Jerusalem.
Just days before the strike, Netanyahu briefed Gafni under the pretext of military secrecy. The implicit message was clear — now was not the time to topple the government.
Gafni shelved his rebellion. The coalition held. Netanyahu survived.
In the aftermath, in a gesture as theatrical as it was symbolic, Netanyahu nominated
Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize
, citing his 'unshakable support' for Israel during the Gaza war and the Iran strikes. Trump had privately supported the operation and publicly praised Netanyahu's leadership. It was a moment of mutual political validation — a wartime bond recast as peacemaking.
Read:
How Israel's masterclass in precision strikes destroyed Iran's nuclear program
The Narrative War
Israel PM Netanyahu launches 'Rising Lion' strike against Iran, his note at Western Wall reads "... A lion lifts himself up"
As the war dragged on and global pressure mounted over civilian deaths and hostage failures, Netanyahu turned his focus to information control.
His spokesman, Eli Feldstein, leaked a classified Hamas memo to the German tabloid Bild. The memo claimed that anti-war protests in Western capitals were part of a Hamas propaganda campaign. Netanyahu cited the article in a cabinet meeting: 'We are being manipulated.'
Simultaneously, efforts were made to manipulate Israel's own official record. According to court filings, Chief of Staff Tzachi Braverman ordered Netanyahu's October 7 phone logs to be doctored — changing his first recorded call from 6:40 a.m.
to 6:29 a.m. The goal was to make the prime minister appear more decisive. Meetings were moved to unrecorded rooms. Generals were frisked for hidden devices. Even IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi was not spared.
The Purge Begins
In March 2025, Netanyahu's cabinet voted to fire Shin Bet director Ronen Bar — even though Bar was actively investigating Netanyahu's inner circle.
Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara called the move illegal. Netanyahu responded by backing a no-confidence motion to remove her as well. Then, capitalising on wartime unity, he revived judicial reforms that had previously sparked mass protests.
Institutions that had once checked Netanyahu's power were now systematically defanged.
The Final Picture
By mid-2025, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza had reached apocalyptic proportions. Over 55,000 Palestinians had been killed, including more than 10,000 children, and nearly 90 percent of the population had been displaced, with famine spreading in the north and starvation deaths rising. Aid deliveries were routinely blocked or delayed, while disease surged through overcrowded shelters. Diplomatically, Israel faced growing isolation: the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders, the International Court of Justice continued deliberating over genocide charges, and the US and EU intensified calls for a permanent ceasefire.
Saudi Arabia suspended normalisation talks, and even the UAE fell silent. Yet, paradoxically, all of this helped Netanyahu.
What should have been his downfall — a catastrophic intelligence failure, international condemnation, and mounting civilian deaths — instead became his political resurrection. He outlasted rivals, weakened institutions, and reasserted control over the judiciary and security establishment, all while persuading his base that only he could protect Israel.
By July 2025, polls showed a recovery: Likud had stabilised, Gantz had exited the emergency government, the budget passed, and the coalition held.
Netanyahu enters 2026 not as a cornered defendant, but as the frontrunner for re-election. Yet history is an unforgiving judge. Churchill led Britain through its darkest hour, only to lose the 1945 election in a landslide. War makes men appear indispensable. Peace reminds people they have other choices. Netanyahu may have survived the war — but survival, as any Churchillian knows, is not the same as victory.