Nobody in Israel — literally nobody — has seriously claimed that Israel’s security chiefs were not profoundly to blame for the failure to prevent the Hamas-led  invasion, massacre and abductions of October 7, 2023.

Benjamin Netanyahu, however — the prime minister today, on that blackest of all days in modern Israeli history, and for almost 16 of the past 17 and a half years — is now seeking to assert that they were solely to blame.

They failed to read the signs ahead of the invasion, notably in the final hours before Hamas burst through the fence, and in their hubris and “miscalculation” deliberately chose not to wake him, he claimed this week. If they had alerted him, he would have ordered a mobilization and prevented the attack. “If they had woken me, everything would have been different. That’s the story of October 7,” he declared.

IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi, Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, IDF intel chief Aharon Haliva et al indeed failed to read the blood-red writing on the wall in the days, months, even years before the catastrophe. But so, too, of course, did Netanyahu — and he set the policy through those days, months and years.

He backed — indeed passionately championed — years of Qatari funding of Hamas-controlled Gaza, to the tune of hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars, right up until the invasion, proclaiming that it was essential to keep Gaza from humanitarian disaster, when it was manifestly easing Hamas’s rule in Gaza and helping finance the Hamas war machine.

Hindsight is a wonderful and terrible thing. Simply looking back at the photographs of Mohammed Al-Emadi — Qatar’s envoy to Gaza and chairman of Doha’s National Committee for the Reconstruction of Gaza — the man with the suitcases of cash, holding press conferences at Hamas-run Gaza hospitals, meeting in Gaza with the Hamas-appeasing UNRWA’s Gaza head, guarded by Hamas gunmen — it is impossible not to internalize that this money was enabling the Hamas war machine.

And yet, despite being reportedly warned at least twice that this was the case, Netanyahu kept the money flowing. According to a December 2023 New York Times report, in talks in Doha just weeks before the Hamas invasion, then-Mossad chief David Barnea urged Qatar to maintain the funding, since “Netanyahu’s government had recently decided to continue the policy.” In September 2023, Israel asked Qatar to increase the financial assistance it was giving to Gaza, the Yedioth Ahronoth daily reported in January 2026. Netanyahu denies that he was warned against the continued funding, and denied the Yedioth report, too.

Post-October 7, moreover, he allowed Qatar a central role in negotiations on ceasefires and hostage deals, despite the assessment from within Israel’s own negotiating team that Qatar continued to represent Hamas’s interests rather than mediate. To this day, he employs one of several of his prime ministerial aides alleged to have been working from the PMO to promote Qatar’s interests and image. To this day, he refuses to bar that kind of employment by classifying Qatar as an enemy state.

Likewise, he now derides those security chiefs for holding to the false conception that Hamas was deterred from attacking Israel, and maintained this week that “There........

© The Times of Israel