Ehud Barak: "We need to respond, but the order needs to be given wisely and calmly. "We are at the heart of a ring of fire between Gaza, the North, Judea, and Samaria," he says.
"There is no choice but to put the abductees first. "If we return to the matter of abductees in six months, they will return to the closets," he adds. "In my opinion, already today half of them are not among the living," Barak says of the Tel Aviv abductees, 133 of whom are believed to have been taken in October. "The results of October 7 dictate that there will be a high price for the kidnappers. "They have turned from stretcher bearers to scapegoats. Soon they will become scapegoats," says Barak of the Gantz and Eisenkot coalition. "We need to examine the response from a broad perspective, at a time and in a way that Israel chooses," he concludes. "What is happening in Gaza is no longer a war, we need to understand that, return the kidnapped and start to cool down the situation," says Barak. Opening a front with Iran will also ignite all the other arenas and prevent us from finishing. "Here is a case of the sin of arrogance. This is what has already led us into errors twice, once on October 7th and a second time on April 1st. A curse has been placed on Netanyahu. He returned to power promising to us that he is the only person capable of collapsing Hamas," he says. "He has been promising us for 20 years that he will stop the Iranian nuclear program. This is his life's mission," Barak says of Netanyahu's 20 years of Iranian heritage. "No country with a leadership that does not suffer from strategic paralysis enters the wet dream of its enemies," says the former prime minister. "I admit that I also share in the disappointment of their presence in the government. They came in with a sense of emergency to prevent promiscuous, irresponsible, or ill-considered behavior," he adds of his cabinet partners.