Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is under growing pressure over what he knew before Hamas’s October 7th, 2023 attack, with new reports casting fresh light on warnings received by Israeli authorities in the months leading up to the assault.
For the last three years Netanyahu has argued that his military and security chiefs were taken by surprise and failed to warn him. He said if they had only woken him earlier before the dawn attack, he could have ordered an appropriate military intervention.
The entire military and security echelon has since resigned, with most of the key figures accepting their own failures that led to the biggest disaster in Israel’s history.
About 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed on October 7th, with 250 taken hostage into Gaza. The ensuing Israeli war in Gaza has to date resulted in the deaths of more than 77,000 residents, according to local authorities.
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Despite the magnitude of the catastrophe, Netanyahu has refused to appoint a state commission of inquiry to investigate what went wrong and, critically, to make sure the same mistakes are not repeated in the future.
Last month the anti-government Haaretz newspaper published an excerpt from a book by two Israeli journalists which claimed that an encrypted call was made by the Emirati president Mohamed bin Zayed less than two weeks before October 7th, warning Netanyahu that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was planning a large-scale attack that could destabilise the Middle East.
Netanyahu did not pass on the warnings to his security aides, according to the authors, Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval.
Following the Haaretz exposé, both the Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal published reports that then-Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel also warned Netanyahu before October 7th that Hamas was planning to attack.
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Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister at the time, said Netanyahu never informed him or the army chief of staff of these warnings, and that they learned of them only recently from the media.
According to media reports, Netanyahu was reluctant to initiate action against Hamas because he feared a conflict could derail efforts to normalise diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia.
Netanyahu denied all the reports, accusing the opposition, the “left-wing media” and former intelligence chiefs of generating fake news in an attempt to discredit him in advance of the October 27th election.
After he implied a conspiracy by intelligence chiefs to deliberately misinform him, Ronen Bar, the former director of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, sued Netanyahu for defamation, accusing him of “trying to deflect fire from himself by hurling accusations at the person who warned him in real time”.
A recent survey by the Institute for National Security Studies found that an overwhelming 75 per cent of Israelis – including a majority of coalition voters – support a state commission of inquiry into October 7th. All the main opposition parties have pledged to set up such an inquiry as a top priority for an incoming government.
Israel’s president Yitzhak Herzog and Eyal Zamir, the army’s chief of staff, called for accountability and a thorough investigation into the security failures that led to October 7th, in their addresses at memorial ceremonies this week.
“We must investigate with determination and courage, and without bias, and to understand: How did this happen to us?” said Herzog.
A bereaved father heckled Netanyahu during his speech, shouting: “You didn’t protect my son on October 7th. You didn’t protect 1,200 murdered on one day, on October 7th – disgrace!”
