Smotrich says he considered resigning after Oct. 7, but decided there was nothing he ‘did that wasn’t right’

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich reveals that he considered resigning after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught but decided to hold off after giving it more thought and concluding that he didn’t do anything wrong.

“I thought about resigning — not right after October 7, but a little while afterward, when I tried to think about what I did that wasn’t right and I couldn’t think of anything,” Smotrich says during an interview on the Geekonomy podcast.

Smotrich explains that he protested against the Oslo Accords as a child, suggesting that that peace process with the Palestinians in the 1990s was connected to the Hamas attack three decades later.

He adds that he also demonstrated against Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and was jailed for three weeks after authorities pulled him over with 700 liters of gasoline. While the Shin Bet suspected that he was trying to use the gasoline in an attack, he was never convicted.

Smotrich argues that Israeli policies from decades earlier played more of a role in leading to Hamas’s attack than his conduct as minister over the last four years.

השר סמוטריץ׳: ״חשבתי להתפטר אחרי 7.10 – אבל לא מצאתי במה הייתי לא בסדר״. (בשיחה עם הפודקאסט ״גיקונומי״) pic.twitter.com/btpK8iLfQl

— סודות News (@News_Secrets_of) July 28, 2026