Gadi Eisenkot
What was Gadi Eisenkot known for in his military career?
What was Gadi Eisenkotâs role in the Israel-Hamas War?
How did Gadi Eisenkotâs military strategies differ from others during his tenure as the IDF chief of staff?
What political party did Gadi Eisenkot join in 2022, and what were his views?
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Gadi Eisenkot (born May 19, 1960, Tiberias, Israel) is an Israeli general and politician who after the 2026 Israeli elections was given the first chance to form a government and become prime minister. Eisenkot previously served under Benjamin Netanyahu as chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), serving from 2015 to 2019 as the first person of Mizrahi background to hold the post. After retiring from the military in 2019 and launching his political career in 2022, he became an opponent of Netanyahu.
Also spelled: Gadi Eizenkot
Born: May 19, 1960, Tiberias, Israel
Highest office: Chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF; 2015â19)
Political leaning: Yashar!; center
Associated figures: Benny Gantz; Yoav Gallant; Benjamin Netanyahu
Upon Eisenkotâs election to the Knesset in 2022, he joined the opposition against Netanyahuâs right-wing government. Nonetheless, he joined Netanyahuâs war cabinet during the Israel-Hamas War as a nonvoting observer. While Netanyahu drew increasing public criticism for his handling of the war, Eisenkotâwhose son Gal was killed in the early months of the warâwas viewed as a policymaker committed to ensuring the safety of the Israelis who had been taken hostage during the October 7 attack and those in combat. After months of criticizing Netanyahuâs war aims as unrealistic and calling for a deal to release hostages, Eisenkot resigned from the war cabinet in June 2024.
During his military career, Eisenkot played a uniquely influential role in Israelâs military strategy against nonstate actors, particularly Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. He oversaw operations in the West Bank in the final two years of the second intifada (2000â05) and is credited as one of the leading architects of Israelâs âmowing the grassâ strategy, an approach to protracted conflict in which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) undertake short, large-scale operations to temporarily destroy enemy capabilities and create long periods of quiet. After the 2006 Lebanon War, he articulated the Dahieh Doctrine (or Dahiya Doctrine; named for a neighborhood just south of Beirut), which calls for the use of rapid and disproportionate force in order to establish deterrence, place pressure on decision-makers, andâlike âmowing the grassââminimize the period of combat.
Early life and rise in the military
Eisenkot is the second of four children born to Esther and Meir Eisenkot, who had earlier immigrated to Israel from Morocco. The surname Eisenkot, despite its Ashkenazic appearance, is a variant spelling of Azencot, a name of Amazigh (Berber) origin and common among Sephardi Jews. After joining the IDF in 1978, Eisenkot made his career in the Golani Brigade, of which he became commander in 1997. In 1999 he became military secretary to Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
Military career
After Barakâs tenure ended in 2001, Eisenkot was given positions as a commander of armed divisions. In 2003 he was appointed commander of the Judea and Samaria Division, which oversees operations in the West Bank, after the completion of a large-scale offensive intended to suppress the second intifada. He implemented a strategy, later dubbed âmowing the grass,â that used short spurts of intense military activity to create periods of quiet in protracted conflicts. The intifada subsided in 2005, and Eisenkot was moved to operational planning for the IDF. He later replaced Udi Adam as the head of the Northern Command following the 2006 Lebanon War, a costly 34-day conflict against Hezbollah that failed to subdue the militant group or recover the soldiers that it had abducted. Among the notable outcomes of the conflict was the IDFâs bombing of the Dahieh neighborhood just south of Beirut, which caused damage to Hezbollahâs infrastructure and also to a densely populated urban area. As Israelâs security establishment grappled with its failures and successes during the conflict, Eisenkot articulated the Dahieh Doctrine in an October 2008 interview with Yedioth Ahronoth, one of Israelâs leading news periodicals:
What happened in the Dahieh quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on.âŠWe will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.
The doctrine calls for the use of rapid and disproportionate force in order to establish deterrence, place pressure on decision-makers, and minimize the period of combat. The strategy appeared to be carried out later in the Gaza Strip, including in the 2008â09 conflict, the 2014 conflict, and the Israel-Hamas War that began in 2023. It was also used in the Israel-Hezbollah war, concurrent with the Israel-Hamas War, that saw heavy destruction in the Dahieh district as well as villages throughout southern Lebanon.
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In 2015 Eisenkot was appointed IDF chief of staff after serving as deputy chief of staff (2012â15) to Benny Gantz. Observers regarded his tenure (2015â19) as a uniquely calm period in Israelâs history. Similarly to his policies in the West Bank and Lebanon, he pursued military strategies designed to minimize combat. A wave of stabbings in 2015 and 2016 by Palestinians against Israelis, sometimes called the âknife intifada,â was met with restraint: Eisenkot refused to allow a shoot-to-kill policy or impose curfews on West Bank towns and disciplined a soldier who killed an attacker after he was already disarmed. The policies, which treated the attackers as lone wolves, were thought to have successfully avoided escalation. As tensions boiled in the Gaza Strip in 2018, Eisenkot resisted pressure for a full-scale war, ultimately prevailing in Netanyahuâs cabinet against the minister of defense Avigdor Liberman (who resigned after the conflict ended). Eisenkot was also credited with bolstering war readiness and carrying out small operationsâor âcampaigns between warsââthat prevented and deterred potential attacks. He retired from the military in 2019.
Political career
Member of the opposition
Eisenkot entered politics in 2022 as a member of the National Unity party, an electoral list led by the centrist Benny Gantz and the center-right Gideon SaÊżar. Eisenkotâs political views were at first cryptic; days before the Knesset election he refused to take a position on major issues such as the two-state solution, public transportation on Shabbat, and same-sex marriage. He joined Gantzâs list after being courted by other parties, stating that he was interested in a party that could form âa broad and stable government,â although his long professional relationship with Gantz was widely understood to play a part in his decision too. In December 2022, after the election had taken place, he warned that policies proposed by Netanyahu and his allies could politicize the IDF and lead to its breakup. Attempts to enact controversial reforms to Israeli governance in early 2023 led to unprecedented strikes and protests by Israelis, including thousands of army reservists. The country became so polarized that in August senior IDF officials warned lawmakers that the readiness of the military had begun to weaken.
Participation in the war cabinet during the Israel-Hamas War
On October 7, 2023, the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people, making it the deadliest day for Israel since its independence, and took more than 240 others hostage. Netanyahu called for an emergency unity cabinet that would stabilize the government during the Israel-Hamas War and allow him to maneuver in decision-making without relying on his coalition allies on the far right. On October 11 Gantz agreed to bring his party into a unity government with Netanyahu, on the condition that Netanyahu create a small war cabinet. Netanyahu, Gantz, and Yoav Gallant (the minister of defense) served as the war cabinetâs primary decision-making members. Eisenkot joined as a nonvoting observer, along with Ron Dermer, an American-born Israeli diplomat-turned-minister from Netanyahuâs party.
Gantz and Eisenkot were the first members of the war cabinet to hold meetings with the families of hostages, who reported feeling that the release of the hostages was the top priority for Gantz and Eisenkot. When Netanyahu later met with the families, they were left with a different impression. Public sympathy for Eisenkot increased on December 7 when his son Gal was inside a tunnel in the Gaza Strip and a bomb exploded. He died in a hospital shortly afterward.
Meanwhile, Eisenkot became highly critical of Netanyahuâs handling of the war. In late November an agreement had successfully led to the release of about 110 of the hostages. When fighting resumed, the ongoing number of civilian casualties and wide destruction in the Gaza Strip remained high. More than half of the Gaza Stripâs total population had also crammed into a single city. International support for Israelâs offensive began to wane, and Hamas refused to agree to another deal to release hostages without guarantees of a permanent ceasefire. In January 2024 Eisenkot told Channel 12 that âabsolute defeatâ of Hamas would be impossible and began criticizing Netanyahu for lacking an exit strategy. He also called on Israeli leaders to prioritize reaching a deal for a hostage release. He and Gantz continued to call for change in direction in the following months, but to little avail. They resigned from the war cabinet in June.
Campaign for prime minister
Public support for Gantz, who had become the most favorable political figure among Israelis in the wake of October 7, declined rapidly for his failure to either sway Netanyahuâs decision-making or force early elections to replace him. As the decline persisted, Eisenkot left the National Unity party in July 2025 and two months later announced the formation of his own party, Yashar! (Straight Ahead!) with Eisenkot. He continued to poll above Gantz, who struggled to reach the minimum threshold for reelection to the Knesset. In June 2026 Eisenkot emerged as the main challenger to Netanyahu. Later that month he formally launched his election campaign, emphasizing national unity while taking aim at Netanyahu and calling for ultra-Orthodox Jews to be drafted into the IDF, one of the countryâs most divisive issues. In August he unequivocally rejected a two-state solution, but he rejected settlement construction in the E1 area that would prevent a Palestinian state, saying the controversial move would harm Israelâs international standing.
When the elections took place in October 2026, Yashar! won 21 seats in the Knesset and Eisenkot, with the support of the majority of the Knesset, was tasked with the first chance to form a governing coalition. Although he received the broadest support of any candidate for prime minister since the 2015 electionsâtotaling 67 members of Knesset out of 61 needed to form a majority governmentâthat support included the right-wing party Yisrael Beiteinu, led by Avigdor Liberman, and the Arab parties, Joint List and United Arab List (RaÊżam). Liberman, whose party had won 7 seats, refused to join a government that relied on Arab parties, which had won 19 seats, creating a challenge for Eisenkot to form a majority coalition.