Israel is no longer facing any existential threats, Tamir Pardo, the outgoing head of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, said in an interview published Saturday. But he warned that the nature of the challenges that the Jewish state must meet has shifted dramatically in recent years.

"The greatest challenge faced by every head of the organization is to adapt to reality," he said. "This is a profoundly different reality to the one that existed when I was drafted into the IDF in 1971. Then we dealt with entirely different issues, as the threats were different. Hezbollah was an entirely different entity, Iran has completely changed, and even Turkey and Saudi Arabia are not what they once were."