Former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant said that Tel Aviv "would make a mistake if it returned to war on Gaza" before returning all its prisoners from the Strip.

The Hebrew newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted Galant on Tuesday during a conference he participated in in the United States, saying, "Israel will make a mistake if it returns to fighting to destroy Hamas before the hostages are returned."

Galant's statements coincided with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's procrastination regarding the full implementation of the terms of the ceasefire agreement with Hamas and moving to the second phase of it on the scheduled date to ensure the release of Israeli prisoners.

"I am the last person who would oppose the complete destruction of Hamas, but if we eliminate Hamas before we return the hostages, we simply will not have hostages to return," Galant added, referring to their deaths.

"Therefore, first and foremost, the hostages must be returned, and then we will proceed to completely destroy Hamas," he continued, noting that "even if Israel is not interested in fighting Hamas forever, we will have to do so for a long time."

At midnight last Saturday/Sunday, the first phase of the ceasefire agreement, which lasted 42 days, officially ended, without Israel agreeing to enter the second phase and end the war, and in light of Hamas’s announcement of its readiness to move forward according to the terms of the agreement in effect since January 19.

Netanyahu is obstructing this, as he wanted to extend the first phase of the exchange deal to release the largest possible number of Israeli prisoners in Gaza, without providing anything in return for that or completing the military and humanitarian entitlements imposed in the agreement during the past period.

Hamas rejects this, and demands that Israel be bound by what is stipulated in the ceasefire agreement, and calls on the mediators to immediately begin negotiations for the second phase, which includes an Israeli withdrawal from the Strip and a complete cessation of the war.

In a related context, Galant renewed the call to establish a government investigation committee into the events of October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched an attack on settlements adjacent to the Gaza Strip, which was described as the greatest security, military and intelligence failure in Israel's history.

"Eventually it will happen, the question is how long it will take? The most important thing is how to prevent a recurrence of an event similar to October 7, and to do that we need to learn lessons, and in order to draw conclusions, a comprehensive investigation must be conducted," he said.

Galant considered that the only way to learn from the lesson is to "conduct a national investigation through a government investigation committee," stressing that this committee is "necessary to understand the situation."

While the Israeli military continues its investigations into the security failures of October 7, Netanyahu refuses to form an official commission of inquiry to examine what happened.

Between October 7, 2023 and January 19, 2025, Israel, with American support, committed genocide in Gaza, leaving more than 160,000 Palestinian martyrs and wounded, most of them children and women, and more than 14,000 missing.