Why didn’t Netanyahu’s cabinet preempt October 7 (if it knew about it in advance)? Part 2

Continued from Part 1

Intelligence was purposely ignore

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 in proximity to Gaza

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

This article was originally published on INFORMED COMMENT 28 September, 2026.

Dr Dan Steinbock is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/  He is also the author of The Fall of Israel (2024), and The Obliteration Doctrine (2025)