Graeme Wood
Oct 2, 2026 – 1.51pm
On October 13 of last year, Hamas released its last living Israeli hostages – 20 Jews in various states of disrepair. And Israel, along with a remarkably small fraction of the rest of the world, allowed itself a brief moment to celebrate.
Among the Israelis paid to contain his relief was Zohar Palti, who served as Mossad’s head of intelligence from 2011 to 2016. He joined me for dinner in a northern suburb of Tel Aviv two days later. Looking on the bright side, he told me, was “a waste of time” for someone whose job was to think about all that could go catastrophically wrong.
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