'They Need a Nakba': Former Israeli intelligence chief calls Gaza death toll 'necessary'

The former head of Israel's military intelligence, who resigned last year for failing to prevent the 7 October attacks, has said Palestinians need to face a Nakba "every now and then" and that the spiralling death toll in Gaza is "necessary" and will serve as "a message for future generations."

According to audio recordings broadcast on Ulpan Shishi, a TV programme which airs on Israel's Channel 12 on Friday, Retired General Aharon Haliva said that "50 Palestinians should die" for every victim of the 7 October attack on southern Israel.

"There's no choice, they need a Nakba every now and then to feel the consequences," Haliva said, referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist militias to make way for the creation of Israel in 1948.

"I'm not saying this out of revenge, but as a message for future generations," he added.

It's unclear how many Israelis were killed by Hamas-led fighter on 7 October but according to the Israeli military at least 1,195 people died on that day.

According to Haaretz, Israel's newspaper of record, the Israeli military widely employed the Hannibal directive on 7 October which mandates that Israeli forces use any means necessary to prevent the capture of Israeli soldiers, even if it involves killing them.

In the wide-raging recording, Haliva also said that Israel was intent on creating a politically hostile environment in the occupied West Bank so that groups like Hamas could assume power and the international community would refuse to engage with them, thereby killing off the idea of a two-state solution.

Haliva said that a plan was devised after the 2014 Gaza war to dismantle Hamas, but Israeli officials had no intention of "implementing it."

"Listen, you don't understand that there are much deeper things here. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the heart of the matter, because Hamas is good for Israel - that's [Finance Minster Bezalel] Smotrich’s argument," Haliva said, saying that the minister wants to dismantle the Palestinian Authority and let Hamas take control in the West Bank, as it did in Gaza.

"Why? Because if the entire Palestinian arena is destabilised and crazy, it is impossible to negotiate with," he said. "Then there will be no agreement [on a Palestinian state]."

"Who made the decision to differentiate between Gaza and the West Bank? The prime minister!" Haliva said, placing blame on the rise of Hamas in Gaza on Netanyahu.

"Why does he want Hamas, a terrorist organisation, to take over from the PA?" Haliva asked. "He wants Hamas, which is much worse than the PA. Why does he want Hamas? Because the PA has international status."

"Hamas is an organisation that you can fight freely, it has no international justification, it has no legitimacy, you can fight it with a sword," he said.

Hamas and Israel reached a brief three-stage ceasefire in January, but the deal collapsed in March after Israel took back several of its captives and resumed bombing Gaza, walking away from the deal before talks with Hamas on a permanent end to the war could start. 

Since then, the Trump administration has given Israel full backing to wage war on the enclave.

Israel has relentlessly bombed the besieged Gaza Strip since the 7 October 2023 attacks on southern Israel, displacing the entire 2.3 million population multiple times, and has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.