JAKE WALLIS SIMONS: A war hero whose son was killed in Gaza, Gadi Eisenkot as president would be a victory for democracy - but he's as hawkish as Bibi on Iran

Two months to the day after October 7, 2023, a 25-year-old computer science undergraduate and reservist paratrooper called Gal Eisenkot was on a mission to retrieve the bodies of two Israeli hostages from the rubble of a building in northern Gaza.

As he explored the site, a Hamas booby-trap exploded in a tunnel shaft and, critically injured, he was evacuated by helicopter to hospital, where he died.

Just a few miles away, his father, General Gadi Eisenkot, a heavyset career soldier who had risen to the top of the Israel Defence Forces, was in the operations room at the command base of the IDF’s 162nd Division. As a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet, he was one of the most senior decision-makers in Israel.

A shaken officer asked Eisenkot to step outside. ‘I understood immediately,’ the father-of-five recalled later. Going into ‘autopilot’, he went home and found his wife, Hannah, putting their granddaughter to sleep. He gathered his family around him and told them that his youngest son had died.

And there was more tragic news to come. The following day, he was informed that his nephew, Sergeant Maor Cohen Eisenkot, had also lost his life in an explosion in Gaza.

Yet five days later, while still observing the traditional seven-day ‘shiva’ period of Jewish mourning, Eisenkot was to be found at a meeting of the war cabinet at the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv. ‘Don’t make allowances for me,’ he told his dumbfounded colleagues. ‘Because I don’t intend to make allowances for myself. Or for you.’

Almost unbelievably, there was yet more heartache in store for him. Eleven months later, another nephew, Captain Yogev Pazy, was shot by a jihadi while protecting a wounded colleague, yards from where Gal had been killed.

Few men in public life have paid such a price for their country and, when Eisenkot resigned from the government in 2024 and went on to set up a new political party called Yashar, or ‘Straight’, he attracted a groundswell of support.

Gadi Eisenkot with son, 25-year-old computer science undergraduate and reservist paratrooper, Gal Meir Eisenkot, who was killed in battle in the north of the Gaza Strip

Jake Wallis Simons says like other opposition figures, Eisenkot criticises Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in Iran only because it was not decisive enough

But outside Israel, few have heard of Eisenkot. That is about to change. For the 66-year-old, whose coalition of four Jewish opposition parties won 48 seats in Israel’s 120-seat parliament in last month’s election, was invited by President Isaac Herzog on Saturday to attempt to form a government.

So what do we know about the politician who now has a real chance of calling time on nearly 20 years of the Netanyahu era?

Eisenkot’s story begins a long way from the corridors of power. He was born of Jewish Moroccan immigrants on the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel in 1960. When a baby, the family moved to Eilat, a working-class town in Israel’s arid southernmost tip, and his father worked in the copper mines of the Timna Valley.

Eisenkot met his wife, Hannah, at high school at a sailing club and went on to pursue maritime and mechanical studies.

It was hardly the gilded upbringing of a member of the Tel Aviv elite. If Eisenkot wins, he will be Israel’s first prime minister from the ‘Mizrahi’ community, the Jews whose families were expelled from Arab lands, and who are often patronised by the European-dominated Israeli establishment.

But Eisenkot was a born fighter. At 18, he was drafted into the Golani Brigade, Israel’s legendary working man’s infantry unit, the start of a military career that would last 41 years. By the time the 1982 Lebanon War broke out he was a company commander and spent years locked in combat with Hezbollah guerrillas.

He went on to serve as military secretary to two prime ministers and commanded troops in the West Bank at the height of the Second Intifada. In 2006, he was put in charge of the northern front. It was there that he devised the ‘Dahiya doctrine’, named after the Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut that was flattened during the war. Any village from which Israel was attacked, he warned, would be hit with massive force. ‘From our standpoint,’ he said, ‘these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.’

Clearly, Eisenkot is no dove. In 2015, Netanyahu appointed him chief of staff of the IDF.

Like other opposition figures, Eisenkot criticises Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in Iran only because it was not decisive enough.

An Eisenkot government would likely introduce four key changes. Firstly, the far-Right ideologues in Netanyahu’s government, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, would probably be out, which would mean a clampdown on settler violence in the West Bank and less discrimination against Arab Israelis.

Secondly, the ultra-Orthodox, who have been exempted from military service since the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 to allow them to devote themselves to studying the Jewish holy book the Torah, would likely be forced to serve in the army.

Thirdly, there would be an inquiry into October 7, which Netanyahu – who continues to duck responsibility for intelligence failures – resists. And lastly, it would mean an end to a corrosive fight between the far-Right government and the country’s judiciary.

Ultimately, a government under Eisenkot that excluded Netanyahu would represent a victory for secularism and democracy and a defeat for the cheerleaders of theocracy. But Britain’s Labour Government would find itself dealing with a highly decorated general who is just as hawkish on defence as his predecessor.

For now, the arithmetic is fiendish. All the main options for coalition have been ruled out by key members of the Eisenkot bloc, meaning any government led by him would have to appeal to either Israel’s two Arab parties for support or the two ultra-Orthodox parties.

The alternative would be a unity government with Netanyahu, at which both sides baulk.

But if Eisenkot does prevail, Britain had better get to know him. The boy from an old copper-mining town on the Red Sea, who has lost a son and two nephews to the war in Gaza, may be about to become one of the most important men in the Middle East.