Israel’s Security at the Turn of 2026 – An Assessment
Yossi Alpher — December 15, 2025
Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
Q. Was 2025 a good year for Israeli security? Will 2026 be?
A. The year coming to an end did witness strong military achievements against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. Progress was registered toward stabilizing Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria along Israel’s borders. The hostages held by Hamas were returned. The nuclear threat posed by Iran was radically reduced.
If we set aside the internal damage being inflicted constantly to Israel’s health as a Jewish and democratic society (see 2026, below), it sounds like 2025 was, on balance, a good year for Israel’s overall security.
Q. Indeed, what are Israel’s security prospects looking toward 2026, particularly regarding societal resilience?
A. They are dim. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has, in the course of 2025, replaced every single security official who shared responsibility for the debacle of October 7, 2023–except himself. There is still no national commission of inquiry to examine the roots of that disaster. This raises the prospect of a repeat performance in 2026, in the West Bank, for example.
Two months after the reputed ‘end’ of the war in Gaza and a year after a reputed ceasefire in Lebanon, nowhere is there a decisive victory as the prime minister promised. Iran is restocking its arsenal, as well as that of Lebanese Hezbollah. Hamas has survived the war and is reestablishing its rule in the half of the Gaza Strip that President Trump’s map left it. There is no alternative to Hamas on the horizon, largely because Netanyahu has blocked the evolution of alternative Palestinian rule.
Inside Israel, politicization of security is rampant. Netanyahu’s appointments to head the Mossad and Shin Bet–pillars of national security–are mediocre yes-men, one a security novice, the other a messianist.
The IDF is losing career officers at an alarming rate as two years of combat fatigue take their toll. No progress has been made toward conscripting Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) youth to compulsory service. National Religious settler militias are running rampant in the West Bank. The settlers there have just been granted an appropriation of nearly NIS three billion for their ‘infrastructure’ needs.
The fissures that have opened within Israeli Jewish society are widening by the day. More and more secular-liberal Israelis are leaving or considering leaving the country. Our neighbors are noticing. Here is a uniquely triumphant, one-sided Gazan observation, that of researcher Ahed Parawna: “While Gazans live steadfastly amid the ruins, the Israelis are afraid and are looking for ways to leave the country.”
Correction: not “the Israelis” but rather the minority of Israelis who do not ascribe to the increasingly right-messianic-racist mainstream. Gazans, take note.
Q. Can you go into detail? What is emerging in Gaza in 2026?
A. The Trump plan’s phase 2 calls for more IDF withdrawal, the deployment of an international stabilization force, massive international investment in an optimistic reconstruction program, and the implantation of a nebulous Palestinian interim governing body. None of these schemes has the enthusiastic support of either Israel or Hamas–the two principal local actors in the Strip, each with its own extremist agenda for the future.
Regarding Israel, Gaza, and the international community, Yediot Aharonot columnist Nachum Barnea wrote on Monday that Netanyahu is notorious for sabotaging phase 2 of any agreement he enters into: [The international community] should begin with phase 2–otherwise they’ll never get to phase 2.” President Trump, take note.
Accordingly, prospects for Gaza in 2026 are chaotic. Trump’s Gaza peace plan is liable to go the tragic way of his much-ballyhooed Ukraine and Cambodia peace plans. Major General Nitzan Alon, who just retired as IDF point man for the Gaza hostages, warns that, “It doesn’t matter how much money is dumped there and how much political pressure, I am not aware of a meat-grinder that knows how to take in Gazans at one end and generate Danes at the other.” (Recall that in the popular Israeli perception, Scandinavians represent the opposite of Palestinian terrorists.)
Q. So your forecast for Gaza in 2026 is more chaos. What about the West Bank?
A. The more frustrated Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich and his fellow messianists are when confronted with Trump’s schemes for removing Israel from Gaza, the more they will step up their project of ‘Judaizing’ the West Bank: outposts, settlements, and violence against disenfranchised Palestinians. That means more Palestinian attacks in response and more friction with neighboring Jordan. If Israeli misjudgment of the Palestinians is going to lead to another October 7, it will take place in the West Bank and parts of Israel bordering on the West Bank.
Q. And looking north to Lebanon and Syria?
A. Here, and here alone in my view, the outlook for 2026 is better. The Trump administration is on more solid ground than in Gaza. The past year witnessed the opening of direct Israel-Syria and Israel-Lebanon talks, with active American participation.
True, there remain lots of bumps on the road ahead: the Lebanese government and army have to vanquish Hezbollah and the new Syrian regime has to come to terms with the country’s many large minorities. Israeli intelligence is understandably suspicious of the Sunni Islamists now ruling Syria. But gradual, incremental progress toward tranquil borders looks possible in 2026.
Q. And beyond the Middle East?
A. The coming year appears to herald more of the same international antagonism, condemnation, and antisemitism toward Israel that we have seen–and that our behavior in Gaza has helped stoke–over the past two-plus years since October 2023. Chaos in Gaza and the West Bank will feed the anger cultivated by the stunning ineptitude of the Netanyahu government and its fanatic ministers. Trump will remain an ally, but one with heavy demands on Israeli policy. Israel’s fortunes will fare less well in Europe. But there will remain ‘friends’ in the authoritarian world, from Moscow and New Delhi to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.
Q. Recent days have witnessed Israeli assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah military chieftains in Gaza and Lebanon, and an Islamist terrorist attack in Sydney, Australia that murdered 15 Hanukkah celebrants. Is this too a taste of what awaits us in 2026?
A. Yes, Israel will continue to pursue the (largely mistaken) assumption that eliminating terrorist leaders eliminates terrorism. And Islamist terrorists will continue to believe that killing innocent Jews achieves their extremist aims.
Q. Bottom line?
A. The critical variants to be monitored in 2026 are President Trump’s shooting-from-the-hip policy whims and vagaries, and the outcome of Israel’s elections. These could help determine how good or bad 2026 is for Israel’s overall security.
Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer.
Photo by Amit Agronov, CC BY-SA 3.0
