Trump: US won't hit Iran before midterms; IDF chief said to warn ...

Key updates NYTimes: US preparing options to renew Iran war, including plan for 3 days of intense strikes The New York Times reports that US President Donald Trump has ordered plans to be drawn up for options of returning to fighting against Iran, even as he said today that strikes would not restart before the midterm elections on November 3. According to the newspaper, the president has asked the Pentagon to develop plans that would target Iran’s drone and missile arsenal, energy facilities and other military sites. The report says that security officials have proposed on five occasions in recent months for the US to conduct major operations against either Iran or their proxy the Houthis in Yemen, but the plan has been vetoed by Trump every time. Nevertheless, the NYTimes reports, Trump is again considering a new attack plan that was discussed last Friday at Camp David, and centers on “a short, intense campaign lasting about three days,” citing people briefed on the plan. Trump says comments about Iran wiping out Los Angeles were misinterpreted US President Donald Trump says comments he made that Iran could “take out” California cities had been misinterpreted and that he was instead referring to the need for people to tolerate higher gas prices. Trump made the remarks at a political rally in Nebraska on Monday as he spoke about Americans’ wartime economic sacrifices. “Remember, with the war, it’s just artificial, it’s a little bit high, it’s a small price to pay,” he said then. “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, for keeping our country safe. They could take out a city. Let ’em take out Los Angeles, let ’em take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon.” California’s Democratic leaders and some fellow Republicans quickly rebuked the remarks. “What I was talking about was that a temporary increase in the price of Gasoline is a small price to pay for Iran not having a Nuclear Weapon,” Trump writes in a Truth Social post. “If you want to see a big price, can you imagine what it would be like if they bombed San Diego and/or Los Angeles?” he continues, saying he loves both cities. Pentagon says execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan will be livestreamed The Pentagon says the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan will be livestreamed after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the execution would be “public.” Hegseth, speaking to the conservative TV outlet Real America’s Voice News yesterday, said the execution of Hasan will take place at Fort Hood on Dec. 3. Hasan was convicted of killing 13 people and injuring 32 others in a shooting at the military base in 2009. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth said. Officials in the Pentagon clarify today that the execution will be livestreamed and that more details will follow. Hasan, an Army psychiatrist who held the rank of major, walked into a medical building where soldiers were were waiting in long lines to receive immunizations and medical clearance for deployment. He shouted “Allahu akbar” — Arabic for “God is great!” — and opened fire with a laser-sighted handgun. Hegseth said the military hasn’t executed a servicemember by firing squad since World War II. The last military execution took place on April 13, 1961, when Army Pvt. John Bennett was executed by hanging. Eisenkot calls for criminal probe against Netanyahu after ex-military aide’s account of PM’s Oct. 7 actions; Liberman alleges treason Former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party says it has appealed to Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara to probe whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lied to the state comptroller about the lead-up to the Hamas-led onslaught of October 7, 2023, after the premier’s former military secretary Avi Gil said in an interview with Channel 12 that the 55-page account that Netanyahu gave the comptroller earlier this year was misleading. Eisenkot also takes Netanyahu to task over Gil’s allegation that the premier’s chief of staff tried to falsify a key protocol from the early minutes of the Hamas attack in the Gaza border region. “While other brothers and sisters in the border region were slaughtered by Hamas, Netanyahu worked on changing protocols instead of saving them,” Eisenkot says on X. “Nothing will save him from the state commission of inquiry we’ll establish after the election.” MK Avigdor Liberman, head of the hawkish anti-Netanyahu Yisrael Beytenu party, says in a video statement that Baharav-Miara should “order the immediate opening of an investigation against the prime minister and his people on charges of treason and conspiracy.” Liberman also called on IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir to “prevent any attempt to use the IDF for political purposes solely to change the public agenda a moment before the election” on October 27. Netanyahu could have saved lives of some hostages, but prioritized his political survival, his ex-military secretary charges In his bombshell interview with Channel 12, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s former military secretary is asked about claims that some of the hostages who died in captivity in Gaza could have been brought back alive, and that some of those who survived could have been returned earlier. “We could have [done so],” he replies simply. Gil indicates that Netanyahu caved to pressure from far-right ministers in his coalition who wanted intensified war against Hamas in Gaza and opposed hostage deals and ceasefires. He is asked whether there were times when Netanyahu had taken a decision, but then far-right ministers said “there is no deal,” and Netanyahu changed course. “Yes,” he says. “Over time, gaps developed between the recommendations of the defense authorities and maybe even the prime minister’s own wishes,” on the one hand, “and the decisions or recommendations of his ministers,” says Gil. He is asked whether, simply put, hostages were murdered or died in captivity, when it was possible to bring them home alive, for political reasons. “That is accurate,” he says. “They could have come back before.” Pressed further as to whether he was present at a meeting where the prime minister decided in favor of “the government and politics, in other words for his own personal political survival,” over the lives of hostages in Gaza, Gil initially does not directly address the question, saying he does not want to give a superficial answer. “Factually,” he says, however, “that is exactly what happened.” He adds that leadership requires looking at the full picture, and “political considerations are also part of the matter… [But ] did I think at the time that it was a mistake? Did I think it was right to prioritize the return of hostages? The answer is yes,” he says. Gil is asked whether he was prevented from bringing a certain document into a cabinet meeting, and that a hostage deal consequently did not go ahead, and he says nothing. When he meets with the families of hostages who died in Gaza, or with former hostages who spent longer in captivity than might have been avoided, Gil is asked, what does he says to them. “That they are right,” he says. He says he sits with “people who came back from that hell, and yes, you know that some of them could have come back earlier.” Gil is asked why the prime minister refrained from visiting Kibbutz Nir Oz and other Gaza-envelope communities for a long time, and says his interviewers should ask the Prime Minister’s Office. He says he, among others, did recommend that Netanyahu visit. Asked, in retrospect, what he could have done differently, Gil notes that he was a uniformed soldier in the State of Israel for 35 years, “all my adult life,” and served in a senior role as the prime minister’s military secretary. “That cannot be taken away. I carry that with me. I see the holes. I meet the people who returned from Hamas captivity. And that is with me. It is inside of me.” Asked whether the prime minister is “responsible” for the failures surrounding October 7, Gil says “yes,” and adds: “I don’t understand in what world you can disconnect the concept of leadership from the concept of responsibility.” As commander of the elite IDF Duvdevan undercover unit, he says, “I was responsible” whether an operation he ordered succeeded or failed. “There is no leadership without responsibility.” Gil is asked whether he sometimes asks himself “how it happened to us, to the great IDF?” “Sometimes?” he retorts, bitterly. “Every day.” He lists multiple reasons for what went wrong, including the lack of questioning of false assessments, the primacy of intelligence material “that caused us to forget common sense” as regards what Hamas was preparing to do, and an exaggerated sense of Israel’s strength “that sometimes makes you feel that nothing [bad] will happen to you.” Asked how history will judge Netanyahu, Gil, as often in the interview, says nothing. And how history will judge his military secretary, Avi Gil, he says, “I don’t know. I hope that I base myself on true facts, and on that they will judge me.” Netanyahu says his military secretary ‘chose not to wake PM up in time’ on Oct. 7, in response to damning interview Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says his former military secretary Avi Gil knew “like others” about the impending Hamas-led onslaught of October 7, 2023, “and chose not to wake the prime minister up in time,” after Gil said in an interview with Channel 12 that Netanyahu had been warned about a coming military confrontation, gave a misleading account of the lead-up to the attack and tampered with the protocols of the early hours of the attack. Gil’s remarks to the media were “an attempt to obscure the simple and painful truth about his failure,” Netanyahu says in response to the interview. The premier later shares on X a two-minute segment from the pro-government Channel 14 tonight that purported to counter the lengthy Channel 12 interview. The Channel 14 segment recycles earlier reports about the information Gil received in the hours before he woke Netanyahu up at the start of the attack, including that scores of Hamas fighters had activated Israeli SIM cards to communicate during the attack and that leaders of the terror group had gone underground into its tunnel networks. Netanyahu didn’t ask to speak with security chiefs the morning of Oct. 7 – ex-military secretary Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military secretary on October 7, 2023 says the premier did not hold conversations with senior security officials in the first two hours of the Hamas attacks. Netanyahu arrived at the Kirya in Tel Aviv between 8:30 – 8:45 a.m. on October 7, says Maj. Gen. (res) Avi Gil in an interview with Channel 12, two hours after Gil woke him. In the two hours after the Hamas attack began, Gil says, Netanyahu did not ask him to get any security officials on the line. Gil says he does not know whether Netanyahu was dysfunctional at the time. “I’m not a psychologist.” Netanyahu met with Jonathan Urich and Eli Feldstein — two senior aides who are accused of taking money from Qatar — in the Kirya military HQ in the first days of the war, Gil says, even though they didn’t have security clearances. Gil says he made sure they didn’t gain access to classified meetings. He also says that he remembers an unexplained interest in alleged Egyptian violations of the peace treaty by introducing unauthorized forces into the Sinai Peninsula, though he doesn’t know whether that was part of a Qatari influence campaign, as some have claimed. Police Central District chief resigns, reportedly seeks to run for top job in 2027 without being linked to Ben Gvir The Israel Police says that Central District chief Assistant Commissioner Amir Cohen submitted his resignation to Chief Commissioner Daniel Levy today. Cohen reportedly wants to run for head of police from outside the organization when Levy’s term is up in August next year. Levy accepted Cohen’s resignation, thanked him for 38 years of service, wished him well and saluted him for “valiantly leading” officers in the fight against Hamas-led invaders on October 7, 2023, when Cohen was Southern District chief, the police say in a statement. Cohen, who was wounded in the fighting, thanked Levy “for the trust and joint path” and said he is ending his service “with a feeling of pride and great appreciation for Israel Police,” the statement adds. Haaretz, citing senior police sources, reports that Cohen quit over tensions with Levy and is expected to try and succeed the police chief, but wants to do so from outside the organization to avoid being linked to National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. Throughout his term, Cohen attended private events hosted by Ben Gvir and the minister’s associates, but is trying to “purge himself of Ben Gvir by resigning,” according to a source quoted by Haaretz. The newspaper also reports Cohen had tensions with other senior officers who had criticized him over the Southern District’s conduct before and during the Hamas onslaught, including the approval the district had given to hold the Nova music festival, where Hamas killed hundreds of people. PM’s ex-military secretary: Netanyahu’s chief of staff tampered with Oct. 7 phone records Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Chief of Staff Tzachi Braverman tried to tamper with phone records from the morning of October 7, 2023, alleges Netanyahu’s military secretary at the time. The gathering of meeting minutes from the morning of October 7, 2023 began two or three weeks into the war, says Avi Gil in an interview with Channel 12. At the end of October 2023, he says, several individuals approached him to inform him that there was an “unusual” minutes-gathering effort. “This gathering of minutes was done against the regulations,” he says. He says he turned to the Attorney General and asked her to officially make clear the rules in order to stop the irregular gathering of the minutes, which she did. Then a stenographer at the Prime Minister’s Office told Gil in person in January 2024 that she was asked to retrieve the record of the phone call he had with Netanyahu on the secure line at 6:40 a.m. on October 7, and that Braverman told her to falsely change the documented time of that first secure call between Gil and Netanyahu to 6:29 a.m. “She came into my office, closed the door and told me everything,” he says. “She understood it was a departure from accepted practice… A document had been sent out two months earlier explaining what is and is not permitted… She told me, it is forbidden for me to change it.” She noted that the call had been recorded, and was marked 06:40 to 06:44. “If I remember correctly, the change was carried out by the chief of staff,” he says. “Those are the facts. They cannot be disputed.” “The first