IDF, comptroller reach compromise to probe October 7 massacre in 2025

The IDF and State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman on Thursday reached a compromise deal to begin the probe into the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion disaster – this February.

The sides will solidify the process and mechanism for the probe in February, but the comptroller still agreed to take into account any special ongoing war circumstances for select delays on certain issues – such as if information was needed from a given commander who is still in the field.

While this compromise may have resolved the differences between the sides – especially if the main fighting in Lebanon and Gaza concludes by February – it leaves open the option for further disputes if the war intensifies.

What can be probed now are secondary issues that only incidentally relate to October 7, such as how properly the home front is defended from rockets.

A year of back-and-forth

The deal came after a nearly year-long fight, starting in January, in which the IDF tried to keep the comptroller at arms-length, while Englman persistently pressed on for compliance with his probe, and used threats from the High Court of Justice to break the logjam.

On Sunday, the High Court set Thursday as the deadline to resolve the year-long battle between Englman, the IDF, and Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara.

What emerges from between the lines of the claims made by the lawyers from both sides at Sunday’s hearing, it seemed that the IDF was playing for time, hoping to reach a ceasefire in Lebanon before it has to cooperate with the comptroller, while Englman has lost patience on giving the military extensions.

Looming behind all this may be the military’s belief that once there is a ceasefire in Lebanon, various parties will finally succeed at getting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to a state commission of inquiry, which will sideline the comptroller probe or make it less important.

The IDF has suspected Englman of being more aligned with Netanyahu, and so might place more of the blame on the military, whereas the military views the prime minister as equally responsible, as he is the architect of the Hamas security strategy in Gaza, which included containment, deterrence, and payment (in the form of Qatari funding).

Further, the IDF has said Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul campaign last year – and continuing into this one alongside the war – weakened the military in the eyes of Hamas.

From January until July, the High Court essentially sided with the IDF and held the comptroller at an arm’s distance. It said that the war was too current and intense to expect military commanders to divide their time between fighting and being probed.

The court’s stance shifted after July however, and it began to apply mild pressure on the IDF to reach a compromise with the comptroller. On October 14, it further pressured the military.

The court’s position was that even if a state inquiry was preferable, given its absence, a comptroller probe – with certain parameters – was preferable to no external probe at all.

During that hearing on October 14, Justices Noam Sohlberg, David Mintz, and Yael Wilner gave the military three weeks to offer some more compromises toward Englman. After this, if there was no deal between the sides, the justices threatened to issue a binding decision.

Negotiations made enough progress after three weeks, so the court gave the sides another week and then some to reach an elusive deal.

At the hearing on Sunday, lawyers for the attorney-general and the military said that the sides solved most of the disagreements about what issues the comptroller could probe with the war ongoing, as well as to what the mechanism would be used for sharing classified IDF information, and what limitations would or would not be allowed for interviewing commanders.

However, the comptroller’s lawyers only gave the IDF partial credit. They said that the military, for some weeks, seemed to show flexibility, but that in recent days had withdrawn back to a more rigid, less cooperative stance.

The comptroller also argued that publicizing security gaps related to the Nova music festival on October 7, security issues relating to east Jerusalem, and the drone threat, as well as other home front defense issues, could help save lives in the future, and so it was prudent to execute these investigations.

Since August, it has been relatively clear that the latest version of the fight between IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi and Englman are not just about how preoccupied the military is, but about who will determine the narrative of who is at fault for October 7.

Earlier this year, the IDF said it might make sense for Englman to carry out a probe, but not before the IDF carried out its own October 7 probes. From March until August, the IDF kept changing the publication dates for these probes.

In August, the military decided to indefinitely delay publishing the probes, even though it committed to publishing them in June and August. Currently, there are no near-term plans to publish the probes.