Overview
The Strategic Failure: Hamas as an “Asset”
The Systemic and Tactical Failures
The Warnings of 2023
The Haaretz Investigation
The Egyptian Visit and Other Alarms
The Morning of October 7: Netanyahu’s Timeline
Netanyahu’s Claims and the Counterarguments
Conclusion
Overview
The debate over responsibility for the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023 narrowed, at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s urging, to a single question: whether he was woken up in time during the early hours of that morning. Netanyahu’s position was that the security chiefs had failed to alert him, that had they done so at 4 or 5 a.m., he would have ordered decisive action, and that they had deliberately kept him out of the loop because they feared he would force them to act. The material assembled here argued that this framing was a deliberate attempt to shrink the relevant time frame. It was drawn from Haaretz reporting and commentary, a Haaretz investigation by Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval based on their book “Hostages: 843 Days of Abandonment,” Netanyahu’s own published timeline, analysis by the co-author of the book “While Israel Slept,” and a report in The Atlantic based on interviews with officials from seven countries. According to these sources, the failure spanned years of strategic policy, months of ignored warnings, weeks in which specific foreign warnings allegedly arrived, and the morning itself, and it extended into the handling of the hostage crisis.
The Strategic Failure: Hamas as an “Asset”
The longest arc of the argument concerned Netanyahu’s policy toward Hamas over more than a decade. Critics contended that Netanyahu had deliberately cultivated Hamas rule in Gaza as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority, to deepen the division between Gaza and the West Bank and foreclose the two-state option. Bezalel Smotrich, later his coalition partner, said openly in 2015 that “Hamas is an asset and Abu Mazen is a burden.” Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen, himself a right-wing figure, said in 2019 that “Netanyahu’s strategy is to prevent the two-state option, and therefore he turned Hamas into his closest partner.”
The concrete instrument of this policy was money. In 2018, when the Palestinian Authority stopped paying salaries in Gaza and Hamas came under pressure, Israel turned to Qatar and allowed funds to flow into the Strip. The stated purpose was short-term stabilization; in practice, the sources argued, it sustained Hamas rule and financed its military buildup. Senior security officials objected in real time. In May 2019, Shin Bet chief Nadav Argaman demanded that Netanyahu halt the Qatari transfers, arguing that part of the money was going directly to Hamas’s military wing. Netanyahu refused. When Military Intelligence chief Tamir Hayman confirmed the same finding months later, Netanyahu again declined to stop the flow. As defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman pushed for action against Hamas and was overruled.
The pattern extended to military operations. A senior officer described a routine in which the army repeatedly sought approval for a broad operation in Gaza and was told to “calm down” and focus on the north and Iran, preserving “the ‘asset’ named Hamas.” IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi was quoted as criticizing the containment policy with an analogy: a nail sticking out of the wall that the family was told to walk around rather than pull out, saying that “instead of removing it from the wall, we would be impaled on it.”
Alongside this, Israel maintained a parallel track of indirect contacts with Yahya Sinwar. Beginning in 2017, Sinwar reached out through his old rival, Mohammed Dahlan, and by August 2018, he presented Netanyahu with a structured plan for a prisoner exchange and an arrangement to ease the blockade; Netanyahu committed to a decision, then let it lapse. Netanyahu’s former National Security Council head Meir Ben-Shabbat later revealed a note Sinwar had written in Hebrew in 2018: “Calculated risk.” The COVID pandemic and five election rounds then froze the contacts, while Sinwar continued investing in tunnels, training, and arms.
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The Systemic and Tactical Failures
A distinct strand of the analysis placed primary blame on the military rather than the political echelon, while rejecting any suggestion of betrayal. Offensive commando capabilities had developed for over a decade in both Gaza and Lebanon, designed to switch within hours from routine to assaults on Israeli communities. This contradicted basic Israeli security doctrine, yet the political leadership never directed the military to launch a preemptive war, and the senior command, though operating within that policy, did not challenge it sufficiently.
The systemic vulnerability was dependence on warning. Rather than building a defensive deployment along the southern and northern borders capable of holding even if intelligence was wrong, the system relied on limited forces and the assumption that intelligence would detect a change in enemy intentions in time. When the assessment of Hamas’s intentions collapsed, the defensive line was revealed to have never been built to withstand Hamas’s capabilities on its own.
At the tactical level, the Gaza Division was captive to the same conception. Its forces did not believe Hamas could or would attack on that scale. On the night itself, the Gaza Division intelligence officer, described as the IDF’s leading expert on the arena and the son of one of Netanyahu’s closest security advisers, shared the Southern Command assessment that the warning signs did not indicate an anomaly requiring war preparations. The author of this analysis stressed that had that officer thought otherwise, no one would have silenced him; the problem was not concealment but an entire system interpreting signs through a conception too deeply embedded at every level. In this view, October 7 was “first and foremost a military failure,” though not one of betrayal, and the residents of the border communities were owed a defense regardless of the political conception above.
Halevi himself acknowledged the depth of the misreading. In leaked recordings of briefings to bereaved families and residents obtained by Channel 12, he described the military establishment as having been “lulled to sleep.” In a separate recording, he told local council heads that before the attack, he had regarded Gaza “as the last border that needed attention.”
The Warnings of 2023
The formation of Netanyahu’s government at the end of 2022 and the launch of the judicial overhaul produced a wave of explicit warnings. Military Intelligence warned Netanyahu at least four times about the growing risk of war and the erosion of Israeli deterrence. Asked in April 2023 by right-wing media personality Yinon Magal whether these warnings were serious, Netanyahu replied: “I think there’s an exaggeration in this matter.”
Former Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot said repeatedly that Israel was in its most dangerous situation since the Yom Kippur War, and six weeks before the attack sent Netanyahu a letter warning against “the weakening of the IDF and public trust in it.” During the fight over the reasonableness standard law, Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar warned Netanyahu that a violent outbreak was imminent and urged Yair Lapid to seek a compromise to reduce the security risk. Halevi asked to meet Netanyahu before the law passed and was turned away. Two weeks before the massacre, Lapid released a video warning that Israel was “dangerously approaching a multi-front violent conflict,” citing unprecedented alert levels in the West Bank and events at the Gaza fence of the kind that had preceded past rounds of fighting. Notably, Lapid issued this warning after a meeting in which Netanyahu himself had presented the alarming data.
Internal documents cited by the investigation showed that within the Iran-Hamas-Hezbollah axis, Israel’s internal turmoil fed a perception that it had become vulnerable and that fronts could be united against it. Senior Hamas officials accelerated their appeals to Iran for funding for the attack during this period.
The Haaretz Investigation
The most explosive claims came from the Eldar-Yuval investigation, which asserted that Netanyahu received specific warnings in the weeks leading up to October 7 and did not pass them on to his security chiefs.
The context was a secret negotiating channel. In early 2023, with Netanyahu’s knowledge and approval, Israel opened talks with Hamas on a “hudna” aimed at a long-term arrangement. Sinwar appointed Ghazi Hamad, a Hebrew-speaking senior Fatah official, who used the pseudonym “Coal Eyes” to carry messages; a Shin Bet official handled the Israeli side. The channel was concealed from Egypt and became, in the words of a Shin Bet team member, “a personal channel cultivated by Netanyahu.” The talks covered easing the blockade, trade zones, safe passage to Sharm el-Sheikh and a “Gas for Gaza” proposal, and by summer 2023 had narrowed to the exchange of Avera Mengistu, Hisham al-Sayed and the bodies of Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul. Sinwar’s demand fell from 500 prisoners to 50, and by the end of August, Netanyahu had approved the release of 30, including 20 serving life sentences. All that remained was approval by the ministerial committee on hostages, which Netanyahu repeatedly declined to convene, citing fear of leaks. In early September, Sinwar cut off contact entirely.
In September, Sinwar summoned Coal Eyes and told him: “Tell the Israelis that if they don’t make progress, I’m preparing a huge surprise for them. Tell them to expect a ‘zilzal,’ an earthquake.” Coal Eyes, afraid both to report directly to the Shin Bet and to be accused of withholding, took the message to a close friend, a Gaza-born Palestinian who served as an adviser to UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed. Bin Zayed, worried that an uncertain warning might itself trigger a preemptive Israeli strike, ordered the matter verified. At a second meeting in mid-September, Sinwar said: “Convey a message that I am preparing the mother of all surprises. A terrifying operation. Something extraordinary. Please convey to the Israelis what I am saying word for word.”
On September 15, Coal Eyes and the adviser conveyed the warning to the Shin Bet. Bar requested an immediate call with Netanyahu, arranged by military secretary Avi Gil, and briefed him on the “earthquake” threat. A security meeting followed on September 17 with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Military Intelligence, then a working meeting at the prime minister’s bureau with the Mossad and National Security Council. The Shin Bet’s initial read, cross-referenced with fresh intelligence, was that Sinwar might be planning to acquire Elizabeth Tsurkov, the Israeli researcher then held in Iraq, to raise the price in an exchange. Bar qualified this as preliminary, said the warning showed a lack of deterrence and that “we are on a collision course,” and recommended a “fire-extinguishing bomb,” a sudden powerful strike, or at minimum strong defensive measures in Gaza and the West Bank ahead of the holidays. No decisions were made.
Seeing no Israeli response, bin Zayed called Netanyahu himself roughly a week and a half before October 7, speaking for 45 minutes on a secure Emirati device. According to three senior foreign sources and the adviser present on the call, bin Zayed warned that Sinwar was planning a major operation, urged Israel to prepare, and recommended economic relief for Gaza and calming the West Bank. Netanyahu reacted calmly, said he assessed that Hamas intended to act in the West Bank, and assured him Israel was ready for any scenario. Bin Zayed later recounted the exchange to CIA Director William Burns. A similar call came from Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel, warning of “something unusual, a terrifying operation”; according to journalist Smadar Perry, Netanyahu answered that “in Gaza, we are in the picture, we are in control. Our problem is with the West Bank.”
The investigation’s central claim was that Netanyahu briefed none of the heads of the defense establishment on the bin Zayed warning. On October 1, when Bar again recommended targeting senior Hamas figures, including Sinwar, who was “showing signs of arrogance,” Netanyahu replied as he had before: “Prepare plans for me, and I will consider them,” and summed up with “for now, calm the situation.” A senior defense official noted: “He never said ‘no.’ That was always his way of postponing dealing with the problem.” Throughout, Netanyahu did not mention the foreign warnings. A senior Shin Bet official said that had they known, it might have given weight to Sinwar’s first message and explained his withdrawal from the talks: “It’s possible we would have put two and two together and reached a completely different conclusion from the one we did, one that would have changed our entire assessment picture.”
The Prime Minister’s Office called the report an “absolute lie,” stating that Netanyahu “didn’t speak to the president of the UAE during the period in question and received no warning from him.” Netanyahu wrote on X that it was “a sinister libel with clear political timing, as part of the left’s election campaign,” said that any such call “would have left clear documentation,” and stated that the National Security Council and the military secretary had “meticulously reviewed the Prime Minister’s call log for those days” and found no trace of it. He announced a libel suit against Haaretz and Eldar and called for a criminal investigation of the journalists. Bar and Halevi confirmed they had never been informed of any UAE warning. Bin Zayed did not respond to a request for comment. Haaretz said it stood by its reporting, and the Times of Israel reported that an unnamed Emirati source had confirmed the account to it.
Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s former strategic affairs minister and the official responsible for the Abraham Accords file, issued a categorical denial in remarks at a conference in Washington that were circulated on X. “If there had been a call, I would have been on it, because one of the tasks assigned to me was expanding the Abraham Accords,” he said. “I was either involved in the details or was on the line during the conversation itself. That call did not take place.” He added: “It is not even a question of the content of the call. I do not think there was a call at all. I think the Emiratis were clear that it did not happen. We are clear that it did not happen. So it is essentially fiction. Just a made-up story.”
The UAE’s own response, issued by its Ministry of Foreign Affairs through the state news agency and posted on X, was more guarded than Dermer’s characterization of it. The ministry said that “the UAE government does not comment on media stories or speculation regarding conversations between government leaders.” It noted that “UAE and Israeli government entities have maintained open and direct lines of communication since the inception of the relationship more than five years ago,” that “when necessary, all relevant intelligence has been and continues to be communicated between the relevant entities,” and that since October 7, the UAE’s efforts have concentrated on de-escalation, regional stability and preventing further violence. The statement neither confirmed nor denied that the call took place.
The Atlantic subsequently reported that it had confirmed with multiple officials that the call took place. According to U.S. and Arab officials with knowledge of the conversation, bin Zayed had been briefed on intelligence findings from Egyptian and Palestinian sources and sought to convey his assessment that Sinwar was planning a major attack. Like Kamel, he urged Netanyahu to make economic concessions to Gaza. Two Arab officials familiar with the call said Netanyahu seemed unmoved. The UAE did not respond to The Atlantic’s request for comment.
The Egyptian Visit and Other Alarms
The Atlantic’s report added a further warning to the record, one not previously reported. On September 26, 2023, Israel’s leaders gathered in Jerusalem to mark the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Netanyahu described that surprise attack as a cautionary tale of missed intelligence warnings and self-delusion, declaring, “We do not underestimate any threat.” Roughly two hours before he spoke, a chartered Cessna jet linked to Egypt’s intelligence service landed at Ben Gurion Airport and taxied to an isolated section used for sensitive diplomatic and security missions. On board was Kamel. According to Israeli, Egyptian, Arab, U.S., and European officials briefed on the visit after October 7, Kamel said that Hamas appeared to be mobilizing for a major attack and that the window to prevent a disaster was closing. He recommended that Israel grant Hamas economic concessions to avert conflict. A former Israeli official briefed on the visit summarized the message: “If you don’t change course, Gaza is going to blow up in your faces.” This account of an in-person visit was distinct from the phone call between Kamel and Netanyahu reported by Perry.
Kamel provided no date or specific information about the attack, and it was not clear exactly whom he met. According to an Israeli airport authority flight log, the plane remained on the ground for 67 minutes before returning to Cairo; independent flight-tracking applications confirmed the journey. Kamel’s visits to Israel were rare. His last known trips had been in May and August 2021, after that year’s war. According to his public schedule, Netanyahu attended a classified briefing following the commemoration, and soon afterward he approved some economic concessions to Hamas. Officials stressed that the presence of Egypt’s intelligence chief alone should have signaled urgency. “The messenger was the message,” a former Israeli official said. “There is no world,” the official added, in which top Israeli officials met the head of Egyptian intelligence “and Bibi is not aware.”
Egypt continued to raise the alarm until two days before the attack, according to U.S., Egyptian, and Israeli officials with direct knowledge of the communications. On October 5, a message from Egypt reiterated that the situation was untenable and conveyed urgency about a possible attack, though it gave no date or method. Egypt also shared its assessments with several other countries in the region, including Saudi Arabia. Jordan’s intelligence chief separately told Israeli counterparts that the situation had grown potentially explosive, especially in the West Bank, and needed to be addressed swiftly. On October 11, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul told reporters after a classified briefing, “We know that Egypt had warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could happen,” adding, “I think the question was at what level.”
Netanyahu’s office denied any Egyptian warning from the outset. Two days after the attack, it stated on X: “The Prime Minister has neither spoken, nor met, with the head of Egyptian intelligence since the formation of the government, neither directly nor indirectly.” The Atlantic noted that the distinction between direct contact and intelligence passed through aides and other officials would become central to the debate over whether Israel could have anticipated the attack. Tzachi Hanegbi, then head of the National Security Council, denied to The Atlantic that Kamel had visited or that Egypt had issued any warning. Spokesmen for Netanyahu and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Other signals accumulated in the same weeks. On September 27, UN Middle East envoy Tor Wennesland left Gaza and wrote on X that “the situation inside the Strip is dire and we must avoid another conflict that will have grave consequences for all,” while privately working to defuse tensions. A day later, the new economic arrangement appeared to be taking hold, and European diplomats at the Erez crossing watched Gazan workers return to Israel. Negotiators later concluded that Hamas had used the talks to buy time while finalizing its plans. Documents recovered in Gaza showed that Hamas regarded the 2021 conflict as a triumph and began planning a far larger operation in its aftermath. A detailed memorandum from August 2022, apparently handwritten by Sinwar, laid out much of the operational plan carried out the following year. On September 28, the CIA issued an internal report on a possible Hamas escalation, reportedly based in part on foreign intelligence services, which described the possibility of rocket fire over several days. A second report followed on October 5. Neither detected rehearsals for a coordinated, multipronged assault.
Biden administration officials said that neither Egypt nor the UAE had shared their warnings with Washington before October 7. Explanations varied. Some officials said the warnings were too vague. Officials from the region said it was up to Netanyahu’s government to inform the United States, an explanation that U.S. officials dismissed. Several months after the attack, Burns was told, almost in passing, of both Kamel’s visit and bin Zayed’s call, without the specifics of either.
Current and former Israeli, Arab, and U.S. officials described a shared impression from 2023: an arrogance on Netanyahu’s part rooted in the belief that Israel had the upper hand against Hamas. “It seemed clear that, for whatever reason, the West Bank was their priority,” a former senior U.S. official involved in talks with the Israeli government said. “They were confident—even cocky—that they had the situation under control.” American and Israeli officials cautioned that it was unclear whether Kamel’s message could have been understood as foretelling an attack of that scale, and that most of the warnings Israel received in 2023 contained no date, target, or method. But they were frequent and persistent.
The Morning of October 7: Netanyahu’s Timeline
Netanyahu’s office published his timeline for the morning. Military secretary Avi Gil first informed him of the attack at 6:29 a.m. In a second call at 6:44, Netanyahu asked why nothing had appeared in the intelligence provided to him, asked whether a large reserve mobilization was needed, and asked whether Hamas’s leadership could be assassinated. A Channel 12 “Uvda” transcript of that call, published in December 2024, was consistent with this: Netanyahu asked whether the attack could be “aimed at taking hostages,” Gil answered, “That’s what we think.” Netanyahu said, “We have no indication whatsoever. I don’t see anything in the intelligence,” which Gil confirmed: “We have nothing.”
Netanyahu left for the Kirya at around 7:30 “after the prime minister’s entourage was prepared,” speaking with Gallant en route, and arrived around 8. At 8:40, Gallant convened Halevi and Bar for a situation assessment while Netanyahu received updates from his military secretariat. Only at 9:47 did Gil receive the situation-assessment document Bar had held since 5:15 a.m., an hour before the attack. At 9:55, more than three hours after the assault began, Netanyahu spoke with Halevi for the first time, in a forum that included Gallant, Bar, Mossad chief David Barnea, National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi, and Operations chief Oded Basiuk. At the end of that conversation, he issued his first operational orders: seal the border hermetically, reject the IDF’s partial call-up in favor of full mobilization, issue a wartime order, and prepare for a northern front. Haaretz reported that he had not spoken with Halevi from his home in Caesarea or during the drive, only after reaching the base.
The timeline did not address Netanyahu’s podcast claim that in his first calls he had warned about hostages and asked whether the Gaza border had been closed; the transcript showed him asking about hostages as a possibility rather than issuing an order. Commentators noted that Netanyahu was pale and frightened that day, and that the one thing that visibly galvanized him was Lapid’s proposal of an emergency government excluding Itamar Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, to which he replied, “I’m not excluding anyone.”
The security cabinet did not convene until 2:45 p.m., with no clear count of the abducted. Smotrich demanded that the captives be disregarded; Gallant declared “No negotiations whatsoever.”
Netanyahu’s Claims and the Counterarguments
Netanyahu’s argument had two layers: first, that the security chiefs did not wake him. Second, in a recorded conversation with his spokesperson Topaz Luk, that they did not wake him because “they were afraid that the prime minister, this ‘nut case,’ would deploy the air force and the entire IDF and wouldn’t let anyone near the fences — that we’d kill them immediately.” The implication was that a 4 or 5 a.m. call would have led to decisions that would have prevented the invasion.
The counterarguments ran along several lines.
The first was that the claim was implausible on its own terms. Had Netanyahu been woken, he would have heard from Halevi, Bar, and Military Intelligence chief Aharon Haliva, all of whom sincerely believed, based on the thin intelligence coming in that night, that Hamas was probably not preparing a major attack and that anything that happened would be limited. With every senior official offering the same assessment, the far likelier outcome was that Netanyahu would have told them to stay vigilant and reconvene in a few hours. This was precisely the catastrophic error described in “While Israel Slept”: the signs were present but were read through a framework that assumed Hamas did not want war. Nothing in Netanyahu’s record of consistently choosing restraint over escalation in Gaza supported the idea that he would have ordered the air force in at dawn on a holiday.
The second was that the “they didn’t wake me up” framing deliberately narrowed the issue. For three years, Netanyahu had tried to confine any inquiry to the pre-dawn hours, the only window in which he was literally asleep. The Haaretz editorial argued that his responsibility extended backward to the weeks before (the UAE and Egyptian warnings), the months before (the repeated warnings tied to the judicial overhaul), and the years before (financing Hamas, blocking diplomacy, preserving the “asset”), and forward to the war’s management. On this reading, the decisions at issue were those Netanyahu made while fully informed, and critics argued that focusing public attention solely on the pre-dawn hours, in the run-up to an election, kept those earlier decisions out of view.
The third was that his own timeline undercut the story of a hands-on leader thwarted by subordinates. Even after being informed at 6:29, he took an hour to depart, did not speak to the chief of staff for more than three hours, and issued no operational orders until nearly 10 a.m. He asked why the intelligence had shown nothing. That sat uneasily with the investigation’s claim that he had personally received explicit foreign warnings he had not shared, and with The Atlantic’s report that Egypt’s intelligence chief had flown to Israel 11 days earlier to deliver a warning in person.
The fourth, from the systemic-military analysis, partly cut the other way: it insisted that the military bore primary responsibility for failing to build a defense robust to intelligence error, and that the Gaza Division and Military Intelligence were obligated to defend the border communities regardless of political conception. But it equally rejected the implication in Netanyahu’s “nut case” remark and in his wife’s “internal betrayal” claims that security chiefs had concealed knowledge or acted in bad faith. The distinction it drew was between catastrophic professional failure and betrayal.
The fifth concerned the aftermath. The investigation described early hostage-release openings that went unanswered. On the evening of October 7, Qatar’s prime minister told Barnea that Hamas was ready to release all civilians immediately and offered to mediate; Barnea replied, “We are not prepared to speak with Hamas.” Sinwar’s deputy Rawhi Mushtaha conveyed through Dahlan’s associate Samir Mashharawi that Sinwar would release all civilians (meaning those under 18 and over 50) “without anything in return,” asking only for an agreed mediator. The response Dahlan received from Israel, according to Mashharawi, was that “Netanyahu doesn’t want to talk about anything. He only wants war.” Hostage release was not among the war objectives set on the night of October 7. After meeting Netanyahu on October 12, Blinken told Qatar that “Netanyahu is not there yet,” and Barnea reached Doha only on October 15, by which point Hamas’s price had risen. When Col. (res.) Doron Hadar, longtime head of the IDF’s negotiation unit, urged a rapid one-for-one deal for women and children, Netanyahu’s adviser, Ophir Falk, told him: “There will be no deal here. This is ISIS… Change your mindset, Doron.” Burns summarized the structural deadlock: Hamas sought a permanent end, while Netanyahu would only consider a first phase, reserving the right “to continue destroying Hamas later.” Two more years of war passed before the last hostages returned, with Hamas still standing. The attack had killed approximately 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and 251 hostages had been taken into Gaza. Israel’s campaign killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, along with much of Hamas’s leadership and thousands of its fighters. Barnea’s associates disputed Qatar’s account, saying Hamas had attached unacceptable conditions from the start; Qatar’s prime minister denied that. Blinken, for his part, flatly rejected the investigation’s account of his role. Responding on X to a post about the report, which had him telling al-Thani “Let’s wait” and “We will wait three days” on the night of October 7, the former secretary of state wrote: “For the record, this is false. Complete fiction.”
A Yedioth Ahronoth investigation reported that Israeli intelligence repeatedly warned Netanyahu before October 7 that Qatari money was reaching Hamas’s military wing, possibly covering as much as half its budget. The report said Egypt also warned him and that Israeli intelligence identified a separate covert funding route. Opposition leaders criticized Netanyahu over the findings.
Netanyahu’s office called the report recycled and false, saying security officials had supported the Qatari aid as humanitarian assistance intended to preserve calm. Qatar denied funding Hamas and said its aid reached civilians through mechanisms coordinated with Israel and international organizations.
Conclusion
The sources converged on a picture in which the failure of October 7 was layered. It began with a strategic conception that treated Hamas as a manageable asset, and a security architecture that depended on warning rather than robust defense. It continued through a year of explicit alarms about deterrence and internal division that were dismissed as exaggeration, and through specific warnings in the final weeks: from Sinwar himself, from the UAE, from Egypt (including, according to The Atlantic, an in-person visit by its intelligence chief), from Jordan, and from the UN envoy. According to the Haaretz investigation, at least some of those warnings were never shared with the security chiefs. It ended with a morning in which the prime minister took hours to engage operationally, and a first week in which possible hostage releases were not pursued. Netanyahu responded by denying the foreign warnings outright, suing for libel, and reframing the disaster as a tactical breakdown by security officials who chose not to wake him. On the most specific new claims, the reporting faced direct contradiction from the principals. Dermer said the bin Zayed call never happened, Hanegbi denied that Kamel had visited or that Egypt had warned Israel, and Blinken called the account of his October 7 exchange with Qatar “complete fiction.” The UAE declined to confirm or deny the call while affirming that intelligence was routinely shared with Israel. At the same time, The Atlantic reported that it had independently confirmed the bin Zayed call with U.S. and Arab officials and documented the Egyptian jet’s 67-minute stop at Ben Gurion through an airport authority flight log. Those disputes remained unresolved, and the underlying question of what Netanyahu knew in the final weeks rested on largely anonymous sourcing, now from two outlets, on one side and categorical denials on the other. Officials on all sides also acknowledged that most of the warnings lacked a date, target, or method. The security chiefs who erred resigned or were dismissed; Netanyahu said the voters would judge him. The Haaretz editorial concluded that the case for an independent state commission of inquiry covering the entire span, and not merely the hours before dawn, had become unanswerable.
Most Israelis believed that a national commission must be appointed to launch an official government investigation, resolve the contradictions, and present a clear, documented explanation for the failures before, during, and after October 7. Netanyahu opposed such a commission, fearing it would be biased against him. He proposed a more political commission with representatives from the coalition and the opposition, but the opposition rejected the idea. If Netanyahu is defeated in the October 2026 election, a new government will likely appoint a commission like the one that investigated the 1973 war.