Dan Steinbock Informed Comment
In his fiery speech to the UN General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed back against accusations of genocide levelled against Israel, as many delegates walked out and hundreds of protesters rallied against him across Manhattan.
After Netanyahu had downplayed Israeli settler violence, rejected Gaza genocide and presented a number of misrepresentations, his speech reached its hallucinatory crescendo: “Israel didn’t commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide.”
Netanyahu’s speech was an effort to shift attention away from a political storm brewing in Israel that won’t go away. It failed.
October 7, 2023 was no surprise
A day after October 7, 2023 Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer said that the “massive attacks by Hamas leadership into Israel … is no less than Israel’s 9/11.” I fully disagreed. In the same interview for CNBC, I said the attack did not come out of the blue: “The Israeli-Hamas War is a logical result of 50 years of failed military policies.”
Half a decade before. I had written of the ticking time bomb in Gaza. And a day or two before October 7, I warned of the coming explosion. It was not a prophetic insight. That date was the 50-year anniversary of the Yom Kippur War and a high-profile escalation was a no-brainer.
But why wasn’t Hamas’s operation disrupted when Netanyahu cabinet knew about it in advance?
In early 2025, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) investigations into the October 7 attack disclosed severe, deep-rooted intelligence miscalculations and fundamental misconceptions on the nature of Hamas and its intentions by both the Israeli government and military.
Probing the same attack, Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, pointed fingers at Prime Minister Netanyahu. The key mistakes featured the political idea of Hamas as an Israeli asset, the intelligence misjudgment that it couldn’t launch a large-scale attack, and weak defensive deployment.
As we are approaching the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War (October 5, 1973), the Hamas-led attack (October 7, 2023) and the late October election in Israel, new disclosures have been many recently.
Intriguingly, many of these warnings were initially reported a long while ago. Now they have been weaponized in the bitter Israeli election struggle. That’s why most focus on Netanyahu and his cabinet rather than his rivals, several of whom effectively supported the genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
UAE president’s pre-October 7 warning of a major operation
A week and a half before October 7, 2023 UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, known as MBZ, called Netanyahu from the Presidential Palace in Abu Dhabi and spoke with him for 45 minutes.
In that conversation, bin Zayed warned that Hamas’ then-leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was planning a major operation against Israel. He expressed concern that the event in question would not only lead to bloodshed but also destabilize the entire region and undermine the Abraham Accords.
MBZ told Netanyahu that Israel should be ready. He recommended trying to find an economic solution for the Strip and calming the West Bank to prevent escalation.
To bin Zayed’s surprise, the Israeli PM felt there was little reason for concern. Netanyahu reassured him that Israel was prepared for any scenario.
The story was disclosed in early September by Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval in their new book, Hostages: 843 Days of Abandonment (in Hebrew).
If the story is valid, the inaction of Netanyahu’s cabinet on October 7 was a colossal political failure at the highest level of the Israeli government.
Hamas leader’s pre-October 7 warnings
Just days ago, former senior Fatah official Sufian Abu Zaida, who mediated between Israel and Hamas before the attacks on October 7, 2023, said that the sides had been close to signing an agreement before the massacre.
In an interview with Egypt’s Alghad TV, Abu Zaida said that Hamas’ Yahya Sinwar warned twice in September 2023 he was preparing a major operation.
The disclosures make the pre-October 7 diplomatic environment even more consequential. Abu Zaida says Israel and Hamas were nearing a proposed arrangement, which involved Palestinian prisoners, easing restrictions on Gaza and measures concerning electricity, water and workers.
Reportedly, Sinwar explicitly dictated an ominous message to Abu Zaida, ordering him to deliver it to Israeli officials word-for-word. Sinwar warned that Hamas would put cards on the table and cause an “earthquake” in negotiations, demanding that Israel prepare to “empty its prisons.”
Subsequently, then-Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar briefed Netanyahu on the meeting with Abu Zaida in mid-September 2023. Two days later, senior Israeli defense figures held an urgent discussion on Sinwar’s threat.
At the end of September, Egypt’s then-intelligence chief, Abbas Kamel, came to Israel, reportedly to deliver a warning that Hamas was preparing for something big.
Why were these high-level warnings ignored on October 7?
Oddly enough, many of these disclosures have been known since late fall 2023, when I, too, incorporated them in my The Fall of Israel (2024).
Repeated warnings, repeated inaction
After October 7, the Egyptian intelligence chief Kamel acknowledged that Israel had ignored repeated warnings that “an explosion of the situation is coming, and very soon, and it would be big.”
While Netanyahu denied receiving any such advance warning, the Egyptian said that the Israeli PM had received direct notice from Cairo’s intelligence minister. Similarly, Michael McCaul, Chairman of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, told reporters of the alleged warning.
The inconvenient fact was that Israeli intelligence authorities had been aware of the threat for months yet ignored it.
Right after October 7, several Israeli media released several reports indicating that intelligence analysts’ warnings were ignored. In November 2023, even the New York Times reported “Israel knew Hamas’s attack plan more than a year ago.”
What was new in the Times piece was the document verifying the story. Code-named Jericho Wall, the 40-page blueprint outlined a lethal invasion.
But it was known to have been circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders. Yet, experts determined an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities.
In effect, based on over 1 year of evidence, Hamas militants had trained for the blitz attacks in at least six sites across Gaza in plain sight and less than 1.5 km from Israel’s heavily fortified and monitored border, as even the mainstream CNN concluded barely a week after October 7.
Intelligence was purposely ignored
As I documented this pattern in investigatory essays in late 2023 and eventually in The Fall of Israel, warnings from the Israeli lookouts were dismissed as routine training in Gaza. Just days after October 7, testimonies from members of the mainly female lookout units bolstered accusations that Netanyahu’s leadership fatally misread the dangers from Gaza.
In a subsequent Israeli TV segment, Maya Desiatnik, along with a few other survivors, recounted her experiences in the months before the attack. They saw many Palestinians dressed in civilian clothing near the border fence with maps, scrutinizing the ground around it and digging holes.
Yet they were told by their male superiors that what they had seen were just farmers, and there was nothing to worry about.
“It’s infuriating,” said Desiatnik, who served in the nearby Nahal Oz, where 20 other women border surveillance soldiers were murdered by Hamas. “We saw what was happening, we told them about it, and we were the ones who were murdered.”
As intelligence collection reportedly shifted away from Hamas’s tactical organization, confidence in the border barrier became excessive. That bubble burst on October 7, when Hamas breached the barrier at numerous points.
Abandoned hostages
The hostage issue adds another dimension because it concerns not merely prevention but alternatives. On October 7, 2023, as part of the overall Hamas-led offense, 251 people were abducted from Israel to the Gaza Strip, including children, women and elderly. Almost half of the hostages were foreign nationals or had multiple citizenships.
After the Hamas attack Prime Minister Netanyahu appointed ex-military commander Gal Hirsch to coordinate the cross-governmental response to abducted civilians and soldiers. Internationally, the appointment was portrayed as the PM’s move to ensure the timely release of the Israeli hostages.
Little did they know.
As I noted in late 2023, the appointment of Gal Hirsch as coordinator for the hostage response was widely debated and criticized in Israel; given his earlier record concerning a prior botched abduction affair and bribery case. Hirsch and his business partners were indicted for tax evasion of $1.9 million in a case concerning arms sales to Georgia.
Why did Netanyahu appoint as his hostage tsar a general who had already blundered one high-profile abduction affair, failed to protect his soldiers and had been indicted for corruption?
The IDF’s discarded warnings and “mass Hannibal”
Just days after October 7, early reports and interviews suggested that the IDF had detailed prior knowledge of the Hamas offensive three long weeks beforehand, based on information from military intelligence’s Unit 8200.
Highlighting the extent to which the IDF’s Gaza Division was aware of a potential attack on Israel’s southern border communities, the document, which was ignored by senior officials, detailed a series of exercises conducted by Hamas’ elite Nukhba units in the weeks prior to its publication.
One of the most shocking sections of the pre-October-7 IDF report featured instructions relating to the taking of hostages, the number of which was estimated to be between 200–250. The actual tally was 251 captives.
There was also a potentially explosive issue behind many Israeli deaths. Not about “friendly fire,” which is not uncommon amid fierce battles, but about the consequences of the Hannibal Directive, which was now the rule, according to many Israelis.
This directive demands Israelis to kill their fellow soldiers and family members so that their kidnapping and the consequent prisoner exchanges can be avoided. The Hamas-led offensive was compounded by what some Israeli soldiers subsequently called a “mass Hannibal.”
Testimonies by Israeli witnesses to the Hamas attack indicate that the Israeli military killed its own citizens struggling to neutralize Palestinian gunmen, in accordance with the Hannibal Directive. As one witness said to Israel Radio: “[Israeli special forces] eliminated everyone, including the hostages.”
Neglected Israeli communities
When Israel was established, its founding fathers considered its border areas strategic. Adjacent to the Gaza Strip, these are the populated areas in Israel’s Southern District located within 7 km of the border and thus within the range of mortar shells and Qassam rockets.
But if these areas were strategic to national security, why were they so vulnerable on October 7?
As I showed in The Fall of Israel, there had been significant budget reductions after the expiration of earlier confrontation-line measures in the so-called Gaza Envelope areas. Furthermore, the per-capita budgets for 2023–24 were substantially below 2022 levels.
The security architecture itself encouraged complacency. Israel invested heavily in fences, sensors, underground barriers and remote surveillance. But the barrier’s own builder had warned that it required military presence and was never intended to prevent a mass assault by itself.
And there is a still harder question. If communities formally designated as strategically vital could remain so exposed despite years of rocket attacks, tunnels, infiltrations and warnings, what did the state actually mean by “national security”?
The residents of the Gaza Envelope discovered the answer on October 7: the state could possess extraordinary military capabilities while being unable to protect its own citizens at the moment they needed it most.
File photo. Netanyahu with JD Vance, 2025. Public Domain. Via Picryl
Return of the repressed
A few weeks ago, the pro-Netanyahu Israeli TV Channel 14 aired an interview with the prime minister’s wife Sara Netanyahu who invoked the “betrayal from within” conspiracy theory. Popular among the right-wing Netanyahu supporters, it alleges that the Israeli Democrats Party Chair Yair Golan and other senior opposition figures knew in advance of the impending Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.
There is absolutely no evidence for such pre-knowledge. Like so many times before, Netanyahu is exploiting proxies to distract, divert and discard inconvenient facts. Moreover, Golan is the prime culprit of the Netanyahu loyalists for a reason.
As Deputy Chief of Staff, Golan made a speech on Holocaust Day in 2016. In that speech, he noted with moral disgust the “horrific processes which developed in Europe – particularly in Germany – 70, 80, and 90 years ago, and finding remnants of that here (in Israel) among us in the year 2016.”
Before the speech he was widely expected to become the next Chief of Staff of the IDF. After the speech, that was no longer in the cards.
Golan plans to sue Sara Netanyahu, accusing her of fueling “ongoing and crazy incitement.” He has compared the current rhetoric to Netanyahu’s conduct in 1995, adding, “We all remember how that ended.”
Golan alludes to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing extremist and the poignant accusations that Netanyahu contributed to the climate of incitement that preceded the murder.
Just weeks before election, Israel is drifting at the edge of a comparable nightmare of political extremism.
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As long as the far-right Netanyahu government and its successors shun an independent and comprehensive investigation on the real causes of October 7, the incendiary political environment, which Netanyahu has fostered from Rabin’s assassination that killed the peace process in the 1990s to the Gaza genocide, will escalate.
The issue is no longer whether Israeli intelligence possessed some warning. It had many warnings. The question is whether the warnings were sufficiently clear that the catastrophe could have been prevented or mitigated.
Unless the idea was to weaponize October 7 in an ultimate effort to legitimize something far more lethal – ethnic cleansing and genocidal atrocities.
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