Netanyahu Swaps His National Security Adviser Mid-Ceasefire

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed Gil Reich, the deputy head of Israel's National Security Council, to serve as acting head of the body.

Reich replaces Tzachi Hanegbi, a long-serving member of the Knesset and former cabinet minister from Netanyahu's Likud party, who announced on Tuesday night that he had resigned after the prime minister told him he intended to appoint someone new. Hanegbi was reported to have been pushed out over disagreements with Netanyahu and others about the re-occupation of Gaza and about his support for a ceasefire deal that his critics said had been struck before Hamas was destroyed.

What the National Security Council is meant to do

The council sits inside the Prime Minister's Office and its head doubles as the prime minister's national security adviser. It was given a statutory footing in 2008, with a duty to examine national security policy and put updated proposals to the security cabinet. In a report published in November 2025, State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman found that it had not fulfilled that role, repeatedly failing to bring updated policy proposals forward, and that Israel had gone decades without a formally approved, binding national security doctrine: successive drafting attempts in 1998, 2006, 2017, 2020 and 2021 were never adopted by government, the Times of Israel reported. The comptroller recommended strengthening the council's authority and reviewing the doctrine every five years.

The change came at an unusually loaded moment. The ceasefire brokered by the United States had taken effect earlier in October 2025, the 20 living hostages had come out on 13 October, and Israeli forces had pulled back to a line leaving them in control of roughly 53 per cent of the Gaza Strip, with further staged withdrawals still to be negotiated, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. The national security adviser's office is one of the bodies that would ordinarily staff those negotiations for the prime minister.

What the reporting said about the split

Israeli outlets described the change as a dismissal rather than a resignation. The Jerusalem Post reported on 21 October 2025 that Netanyahu had removed Hanegbi after disagreements including an Israeli strike on Qatari territory the previous month and the launch of the Gaza City offensive, and quoted Hanegbi as saying he was not willing to give up on saving the hostages and as opposing an all-or-nothing approach that put their lives at risk. In his own statement Hanegbi called for a thorough investigation of the failures of 7 October 2023 and acknowledged sharing responsibility for them. Opposition figures said the change was an evasion of accountability.

What is still unclear

The announcement did not say how long Reich would serve in an acting capacity, whether he was a candidate for the permanent post, or when a permanent appointment would be made. Netanyahu's office gave no official reason for the change, and the accounts of a rift over Gaza policy were attributed to reports rather than to any statement by the participants.