Likud senior officials are anxiously following the moves of former Mossad head Yossi Cohen who, according to them, is taking advantage of the war to jump into deep political waters aiming as high as possible to later become prime minister and succeed Benjamin Netanyahu.
According to Likud sources, among those concerned are Nir Barkat, Yuli Edelstein, Israel Katz and Ron Dermer.
Two of them had already started to heat up their engines with the outbreak of the war in the belief that the great failure would force Benjamin Netanyahu to resign at the end of the war or to bring forward the elections.
In their opinion, the Israeli public will not wait for the conclusions of the commission of inquiry that is supposed to be appointed to investigate the great failure, it will go out to the streets in a great wave of protest that Benjamin Netanyahu will not be able to withstand it.
It seems that the former head of the Mossad Yossi Cohen also shares this assessment, therefore he is already trying to position himself as someone whose concern is the state and he is running, despite being a private citizen, to help negotiate the release of the hostages held in the Gaza Strip while stepping on the current head of the Mossad David Barnea, who is officially authorized to conduct the negotiations with Qatar and Egypt on the release of the abductees.
Yossi Cohen has rich security experience and he successfully filled the position of head of the Mossad, but his name is associated with several scandals regarding women’s affairs and other issues for which silence is fine.
Sources in the know estimate that Mossad officials who worked with Yossi Cohen are aware of additional scandals related to him that have not yet been published and that they may soon be leaked to the media.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, as usual, allows Yossi Cohen and the head of the Mossad, David Barnea, to quarrel with each other while he stands aside as if this has nothing to do with it, his associates claim that he did not appoint Yossi Cohen to the position of “emissary for special tasks”, on the other hand, it is clear that Yossi Cohen would not have gone to Qatar in a private plane without the permission of the Prime Minister.
A security official estimates that the doubling of the Israeli envoys dealing with Qatar and Egypt regarding the abductees may harm the efforts to release them, “How do the Arabs look at the Israeli security establishment?” he asks.
Despite the green light Yossi Cohen received from the Prime Minister to deal with the issue, it is clear that the Prime Minister was very wary of him and stopped liking him.
The prime minister does not like, to say the least, political opponents who try to take advantage of the political, political and security predicament he is in to upgrade their status through the media that are hostile to Netanyahu.
Yossi Cohen runs to the TV studios to be interviewed, with great self-importance, his interviewers blow him hot air that inflates his balloon even more.
Yossi Cohen is not interested in collegiality either, he and David Barnea were once good friends when they worked together at the Mossad, it seems that Yossi Cohen’s lust for political power has completely turned him upside down, he also manages to mislead several journalists and uses them for his own purposes when he uses his manipulative experience in his role in the Mossad as a recruiter and operates agents.
At the request of the head of the Mossad, David Barnea, the Prime Minister’s Office issued a statement stating that “there is only one axis who manages the release of the abductees. Any other party who claims to have something to do with it is not authorized to do so.”
Security officials who know Yossi Cohen well estimate that this announcement will not stop him and that he will continue his activities, his flattery of the Prime Minister and spins in the media to try and cut a political coupon if the efforts to release some of the abductees are successful, if the negotiations fail he will shift the responsibility to the head of the Mossad David Barnea or towards the Prime Minister.
Yossi Cohen was the man who connected Qatar to Israel in everything related to the Gaza Strip, this was done with the approval of Prime Minister Netanyahu, this connection allowed Qatar to establish a foothold in the Gaza Strip and flow hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas who used the money to build the huge tunnel system and to manufacture the rockets and drones.
It is Cohen who is responsible for this concept, along with the political and military echelon, which estimated that calm can be bought through the flow of funds and humanitarian relief to the terrorist organization Hamas.
It is very strange that Prime Minister Netanyahu allows him to deal with the issue of the abductees in front of Qatar.
Political sources familiar with the issue estimate that Yossi Cohen will not last long in the position he attributes to himself, with the help of sources in the media, and that he will resign or be removed from it by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
