Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday claimed that senior IDF and defense officials deliberately chose not to wake him hours before Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught because “they knew that, as prime minister of Israel, I would have immediately given the order to put the entire military on alert” and would thereby have prevented the invasion.

The remarks made during an Instagram livestream and broadcast on Channel 12 were similar to comments he made on a podcast on Monday and on Channel 14 on Sunday night, and mark a shift from Netanyahu’s previous claim that events would have unfolded differently had he been woken up before the attack began. Now, the premier alleged that defense officials intentionally kept him uninformed.

In both the podcast clip Netanyahu posted on Monday and the Sunday Channel 14 interview, the prime minister said that the security chiefs saw multiple signs of an impending attack but were still convinced Hamas was deterred. He alleged that they knew that if they had woken him up, he would have mobilized the air force and the entire IDF and ensured that anyone who approached the fence from the Gaza side “would be killed immediately.” The security chiefs believed this would have prompted an actual Hamas attack or exchange of fire, Netanyahu claimed, without proof.

Israel’s security chiefs at the time have said that based on the information they had that night, they did not assess that Hamas was about to attack. Netanyahu’s office acknowledged last year that the premier’s intelligence officer received an IDF memo detailing suspicious Hamas activity three hours before the invasion and onslaught, but did not pass it on to Netanyahu because it was not framed as urgent.

Netanyahu’s allegations came as his wife, Sara Netanyahu, peddled a conspiracy theory targeting Democrats chief Yair Golan, insinuating without evidence in a Monday interview aired with the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 that the left-wing lawmaker, a former deputy IDF chief of staff, had advance notice of the onslaught. Golan said he will sue her for libel if she does not apologize. She has refused and has threatened to counter-sue.

Sara Netanyahu was reportedly accompanied to her Channel 14 interview by Topaz Luk, a senior adviser to the prime minister. Netanyahu’s Likud party reportedly demanded and received the full raw footage before the edited interview was aired.

Later Tuesday, Netanyahu posted a video on social media stating that neither he nor his wife was accusing top security officials of “betrayal” regarding the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre, just “failure.” He again denounced them for neither waking him nor preemptively attacking Hamas that night, when “all the signs were there.”

Netanyahu’s allegations

Netanyahu said in his Tuesday Instagram livestream that, had he been alerted by security chiefs in the hours before the Hamas onslaught, he would have “woken up all the communities, woken up all the security coordinators and told the air force to be ready to strike and kill anyone approaching the fence.”

“I am not telling you that some wouldn’t have breached [the fence],” he clarified, adding that he could have also canceled the Nova music festival where several hundred people were mowed down. “It is so obvious that all of this could have been done.”

Netanyahu made similar remarks in the Monday podcast clip, alleging that senior defense officials deliberately did not wake him before the........

© The Times of Israel