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Netanyahu Sought to Provoke, Not Attack, Iran in 2010

Sometime in 2010, Netanyahu and Barak had a secret meeting with their top ministers. The purpose of that meeting was to discuss ways to create tension with Iran, writes Yossi Melman.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) shares a laugh with his aide-de-camp Major-General Yohanan Locker during the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem November 4, 2012. Israel has stopped the unapproved influx of African migrants across its border with Egypt, Netanyahu said on Sunday after months of intensive counter-measures on the once porous desert frontier. REUTERS/Gali Tibbon/Pool (JERUSALEM - Tags: POLITICS SOCIETY IMMIGRATION)

TEL AVIV — Sometime in 2010, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak met with their top five cabinet ministers for a routine yet secret meeting to discuss pressing security and foreign-policy issues. The group, which has no legal status and does not have the authority to make decisions,​ is known as the "Secret Seven,” inspired by the “Secret Seven" series of adventure novels for children by the British author Enid Blyton.

Also present at that meeting (the date of which Israeli censors do not allow to be specified) were Israel's security chiefs, including then-Mossad director Meir Dagan, Chief of the General Staff Major-General Gabi Ashkenazi and a few others.

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