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

By Dr Dan Steinbock 

Following October 7, 2023, the Hamas-led offensive has been portrayed as “Israel’s 9/11,” which came out of the blue. That’s not supported by facts. The Netanyahu cabinet knew about the attack, in advance.

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.

Continued tomorrow: Intelligence was purposely ignored

This article was originally published on INFORMED COMMENT on September 28, 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)