For then-Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, the horrific day of Oct. 7, 2023, ended with a phone call to his U.S. counterpart, then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, to ask for the return of 50,000 shells that were taken from American storage facilities in Israel and sent to Ukraine. 

“And the secretary said, ‘Why do you need so many shells if you are fighting against Hamas in Gaza?’ I said to him, we are in the Middle East, I understand that everything can happen,” Gallant explained Thursday on Dan Senor’s “Call Me Back” podcast in the first episode of a new monthly series in which Gallant will reflect on his experience as defense minister during the Israel-Hamas war. 

“General Austin, Secretary Austin, did it and he sent back the 50,000. But this can teach you about some mistakes that were done before the war,” Gallant recalled. 

Gallant also told Senor about an early regret he had, describing Oct. 11 as a “dramatic day” that “could have changed the course of the war” and “eliminated all the chain of command of Hezbollah immediately.” Gallant asserted that Israel could have detonated 15,000 walkie-talkies that Israel had packed with explosives and distributed to Hezbollah operatives in an undercover operation. “In this walkie-talkie, there [were] three times more explosives than we had in the beepers later on,” Gallant said, referring to the operation Israel conducted on Sept. 17, 2024, when it detonated several thousand Hezbollah pagers and the following day, when it detonated hundreds of walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah operatives. The operations killed dozens and injured thousands of terror operatives.

The day after the pager operation, “we learned that they suspect the walkie-talkies,” Gallant explained. “So we initiated the walkie-talkies and what [happened] is that 200 of them were working efficiently and all the rest were in storages and in isolated places and it [blew up] and nothing happened. So this is a big miss of this war.” 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has contradicted Gallant’s assertions about the operation, saying it had been necessary to wait because on Oct. 11 “we had only 100-150 beepers [in Lebanon], as opposed to thousands accumulated over that time.”

After Iran shot more than 200 ballistic missiles and drones at Israel in April, Gallant said Israel assessed how it would respond, and then he picked up the phone to Austin once more. 

“So Secretary Austin asked me, what do you need? And I said, Mr. Secretary, we need five things. One, we need to fly over Iraq with your permission. Second, we need some intel that we don’t have, and this is intel from satellites. Third, we need you to help us to rescue deserted pilots if needed. Otherwise, if pilots are down, we can rescue them, but it’s a long operation with helicopters. Four, we need to get more missiles from America in order to empower the Arrow 3 and the Arrow 2. … And the fifth issue was to get refuel[ing] of Israeli jets from American tankers.” 

Gallant said that the Biden administration approved the first four within hours, but did not agree to have American assets refueling Israeli jets mid-operation on their way to and from Iran, presumably because the U.S. did not want to be seen as directly involved in the strike.

“Eventually we went with the four components,” Gallant said. “I went to the prime minister and I said to him, this is it.” Israel launched retaliatory missile strikes on Iranian military sites a few days later.

Gallant also shed light on his communication with Austin as Israel considered assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas in Tehran, and Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah in Lebanon. 

As Israel was considering how to carry out the strike on Haniyeh in July 2024, Gallant told Senor: “I got a call from my friend, Lloyd Austin … He said, and what about Haniyeh? I said to him, this is once in a lifetime. Either you take it or you don’t take it. This is the Osama bin Laden of Hamas. He knew about what was going on before October 7th. He is responsible. This is a symbol. He is the leader of Hamas. This is our goal. The conversation wasn’t easy, but I’m sure we did the right thing.”

Two months later, Gallant said: “Fifteen minutes before we hit Nasrallah, I called Secretary Austin and I said the plans are on the air. We are going to kill this bastard. And he said it’s going to create a major event in the Middle East. I said, Mr. Secretary, this guy is a bad guy. He’s responsible for the death of thousands of Israelis and hundreds of Americans. So I think you need to evaluate this issue very seriously. And within a few hours, the president came with a very positive announcement saying that this has to be done and this was justice. And I praise him for doing that because some other countries didn’t do it.”