Netanyahu claims security chiefs feared waking him before the October 7 attack, while denying he received an early warning from Egypt’s spy chief
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that intelligence and military chiefs feared waking him on the night of October 7, 2023, believing he could inadvertently trigger a Hamas attack, as he again blamed the security establishment for failing to anticipate the assault. However, he said in the Channel 14 interview that, “they were locked in a conception that it was a drill, or a small thing.
“If we wake up the prime minister, he’ll cause Hamas to attack us without meaning to,” Netanyahu asserted the security chiefs believed, as quoted by The Times of Israel. Netanyahu said security officials had mistaken Hamas’s preparations for a military drill or a minor attack, despite signs that the Palestinian militant group was preparing for an assault. Officials had seen Hamas operatives putting Israeli SIM cards into their phones and senior Hamas commanders heading underground, according to Netanyahu. “If they had woken me up, they knew I’d have woken everybody and canceled Nova and put the air force on alert,” he said, referring to the Nova music festival, where hundreds of people were killed during the Hamas-led October 7 assault. Netanyahu, however, denied meeting or speaking with Kamel during the visit and said he did not know whom the Egyptian intelligence chief had met. When reports of the warning emerged, Netanyahu had issued a statement saying, “No early message came from Egypt and the prime minister did not speak or meet with the intelligence chief since the establishment of the government, not indirectly or directly.”
The prime minister has repeatedly blamed Israel’s security establishment for the failures surrounding the attack, while denying that he received and ignored advance warnings of a major assault from Gaza.