Former defense minister Yoav Gallant said Sunday that Israel received a broad warning from Hamas before the terror group’s October 7, 2023, onslaught, but that security officials interpreted the message as relating to a possible prisoner exchange rather than preparations for an attack.

Speaking to Army Radio, Gallant said sources in Hamas passed a message to the Shin Bet in September 2023 that then-Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar “will cause the prisons to quake.” Gallant said it was the only such message to reach the domestic security agency in the lead-up to October 7.

According to Gallant, the security establishment assessed at the time that the message concerned a possible prisoner exchange involving Elizabeth Tsurkov, an Israeli-Russian researcher who had been kidnapped by a Shiite militia in Iraq earlier that year.

Gallant told Army Radio that he was unaware at the time of the a reported Emirati warning to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a subsequent warning from Egypt, and said the recent coverage was the first he had heard of them.

“I heard about these warnings for the first time from the media,” he said, adding that if the reports were accurate and the information was not shared with the security establishment, it would amount to “a very serious flaw in the overall assessment.”

“If the prime minister receives a warning from the leader of a country, it is not his political asset; it is a security asset of the security establishment,” Gallant said. He argued that the information could have changed the way senior defense officials evaluated the situation........

© The Times of Israel