A former commander of the Israeli Air Force warned Monday that Israel will face threats in the coming years that are more severe than what it experienced during and since the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

Speaking at a defense summit at Tel Aviv University, Amir Eshel — who also served as the director general of the Defense Ministry from May 2020 to February 2023 and is now a senior partner at venture capital firm Aurelius Capital — called for urgent national preparation and large-scale investment in defense innovation.

“October 7 was experienced in Israel as a modern war and a successful one, which is true,” Eshel said at the DefenseTech Summit, held by the Defense Ministry’s R&D directorate, of Hamas’s attack on southern Israel, which employed ground forces, rockets, drones and hang gliders. “I want to argue that we went through, in some aspect, a tasting menu. The next wars – ours and everyone else’s – will be orders of magnitude more challenging. We must prepare now.”

Eshel outlined a future battlefield flooded with “magnitudes [more threats] than the Iranian attack on October 1, 2024,” including stealth and AI-powered autonomous drones, along with electronic warfare, directed-energy weapons, cyber operations, and attacks on critical civilian and military infrastructure.

During that attack,

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