Amos Harel

Amos Harel is one of Israel’s leading media experts on military and defense issues. He has been the military correspondent and defense analyst for Haaretz for the last 25 years. In this role, he has written extensively about Israel’s ongoing fight against terrorist organizations, its battle with the Palestinian intifadah (uprising) and the conflicts with Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Harel writes in Hebrew, but his work is also available in English, through the Haaretz English edition (published in Israel with the New York Times) and its English website (haaretz.com).

Prior to his current role, he worked as general night editor for Haaretz for four years. Harel has also been an anchorman for a weekly radio program about defense issues broadcasted on IDF Radio from 1999 to 2005. He is frequently interviewed on Israeli TV and radio stations and also on American and British stations and newspapers.

Amos Harel is a co-author, along with Avi Issacharoff, of “The Seventh War: How we won and why we lost the war with the Palestinians”, a book about the second intifadah, published in Hebrew in 2004 (a revised edition was published in 2005). The book has been a best-seller in Israel and was also translated to French and Arabic. It is the winner of the prestigious Chechic Award (handed out by the Institute for Strategic Studies at Tel-Aviv University) for the most outstanding security research in 2005.

Harel and Issacharoff’s second book, “34 Days: Israel, Hezbollah and the War in Lebanon”, about the war in summer 2006 was published in Hebrew in January 2008 and also became a best-seller. It was published in English by Palgrave-Macmillan Books in April 2008. “34 Days” also won the Chechic Award in September 2009. Harel’s last book, “The New Face of the IDF” was published in Hebrew in 2013. It has also been a best-seller.

In 2015, Harel won the Sokolov Award, Israel’s most prestigious prize for excellence in journalism.

In recent years, much of Harel’s work has focused on Israel’s strategic posture in the Middle East, and its relationships with its neighbors and the United States. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he also covered the government’s response to the crisis, as his newspaper’s senior analyst on that matter.

Harel has a bachelor’s degree in law studies from Tel-Aviv University (1995) and is fluent in English and in Hebrew.

Affiliations:

• Center for Media and Democracy in Israel, advisory committee, member