As Israel Reels From Mass Deaths and a Seeming Intel Failure, Evidence Mounts of Negligence By Netanyahu—Or Maybe Something More Sinister

Israel has the world’s very best intel services, yet allegedly failed to foresee a massive invasion months in the making. Now media outlets are beginning to point a finger at Netanyahu—as is the IDF.

ABOVE: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Update: Tuesday, October 10, 1:56 PM ET

A reader directed Proof to this Washington Post report from yesterday that confirms that key far-right Israeli politicians and figures in the media have inexplicably been downplaying the danger from Hamas for months in order to focus voters’ attention, for political reasons, on the plight of far-right settlers in the West Bank, instead:

Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants had been training for weeks near the Israeli border [in Gaza]—drilling in rocket launches, kidnapping soldiers and “storming settlements”, Gazan media reported. Yet the assessment from the Israeli military was that Hamas had no appetite for another conflict, a line repeated by trusted media figures. “The good news in the context of the Gaza Strip is that neither Israel nor Hamas want to see hostilities escalate, each for its own reasons”, columnist Yoav Limor wrote last month in the right-wing newspaper Israel Hayom.

As for those “assessment[s] from the Israeli military”, the Post makes clear that these were also heavily affected by Netanyahu’s nakedly political maneuvers:

Netanyahu, [analysts] contend, allowed military preparedness to erode alongside Palestinian militant escalation as he pursued a contentious plan to weaken Israel’s judiciary—setting off months of furious protests that delighted the country’s adversaries.

Indeed, it’s clear that Netanyahu’s autocratic domestic plot has so divided the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) that Netanyahu and supporters like Limor have begun to only listen to those “assessments from the Israeli military” that dovetail with their political aims. Per the Post (emphasis supplied),

The IDF issued rare public statements in recent months, warning that military deterrence was deteriorating. Netanyahu and radical members of his cabinet derided the officials as part of the protest movement, and the protesters as “anarchists”, asserting that the status quo with the Palestinians would hold.

All of the foregoing bolsters the claims by multiple Egyptian government officials (see below) that Netanyahu was warned about the Gaza attack and ignored the warnings for political reasons—in the same way he ignored warnings from his own IDF officers for political reasons.

IDF Reserve Major General Itzhak Brik has been even more bold in decrying this dynamic, telling Reshet Bet Radio yesterday that (as paraphrased by the Post),

“He has met with Netanyahu and other top leaders for years, and more frequently in recent months, urging them to formulate a long-term strategy for dealing with Palestinian terrorism. ‘The [political] chaos that has been going on in the past year [under Netanyahu] has created a situation that we’re in now, of putting out fires. A terror attack here, a terror attack there. They’re not dealing with building the army.’”

The result was, according to one former Israeli intelligence officer, fully foreseeable:

The Gaza border, it soon became clear [as Hamas invaded Israel on Saturday], was minimally manned. It took hours to redirect units stationed in the West Bank, which has been the main area of focus for the military this year….Some in Netanyahu’s far-right government had called to annex the West Bank. Gaza, by contrast, appeared stable.

“There was a need for more soldiers [in the West Bank], so where did they take them from? From the Gaza border, where they thought it was calm”, said Aharon Zeevi Farkash, the former IDF military intelligence chief. “Not surprising that Hamas and Islamic Jihad noticed the low staffing at the border.”

Netanyahu’s West Bank adventurism, aimed at bolstering growing far-right communities of settlers on contested land there, pulled forces from Gaza during the very months Israeli intelligence should have been picking up on increased terrorist activity there. When Netanyahu was warned generally of a deterioration in military deterrence by the IDF and specifically of a coming attack from the woefully undermanned Gaza border by Israel’s Egyptian allies, he balked at pulling back from his politically radical designs in eastern Israel and—now—has publicly called some of his nation’s closest foreign allies liars, possibly damaging a critical intelligence partnership in western Israel. And as noted in the update just below this one, throughout all of this Netanyahu had convinced himself that Hamas was unsophisticated, ignorant, and fully under his thumb—a folly likely attributable to his infamous bigotry toward Muslims (see more on this below).

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Update: Monday, October 9, 11:36 PM ET

A reader directed Proof to this Haaretz article from earlier today (Haaretz is a leading Israeli outlet, discussed more below, that follows the Twitter feed linked to Proof):

Per the article, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking of both Hamas and Hezbollah in a closed 2019 Likud Party meeting, said that he “send[s] them messages all the time” with the belief that his interactions can “mislead them [and] destabilize them” and in this way “control the height of the flames [of violence].”

This was in addition to saying his “strategy” has long been to “bolster” Hamas and so ensure the impossibility of a “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian Crisis.

Given that Israel is in a state of open armed conflict with Hamas—and given that Netanyahu and his government have now formally declared war on the terrorist organization—the political strategy Netanyahu here describes would, in the context of American jurisprudence and criminal law, flirt with Treason. It may be seen differently in Israel, however.

Still, it raises a new question: whether Netanyahu’s bizarre, bigotry-tinged arrogance regarding the intelligence of Muslim militants caused him to ignore the warnings of a Gaza attack discussed below because his contacts in Hamas had outmaneuvered him—convincing him that no attack was forthcoming, and he could thus continue to focus his political and military plans on enabling the recklessness of far-right Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

This is undoubtedly a possibility that Mossad and Shin Bet will consider as the two agencies investigate any role Netanyahu may have had in negligently—or deliberately—allowing the Gaza attack to occur.

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Original Story: Introduction

For those who don’t already know, close Trump Family friend Benjamin Netanyahu is confirmed by many years of reliable major-media reports as a career white-collar criminal, war criminal, and unrepentant racist who also appears to have illegally aided Donald Trump’s efforts to steal the 2016 presidential election—a criminal conspiracy exhaustively detailed and sourced in 2019 New York Times bestseller Proof of Conspiracy.

No one versed in American or Israeli politics doubts that the Israeli prime minister would do almost anything to remain in power—including what he was doing in the months leading up to Hamas’s historic invasion of Israel, namely trying to end Israel’s democracy and institute a brutal autocracy with him at its head (a conspiracy Israeli media outlets have referred to as an attempted “constitutional coup”). His actions, which call to mind those of his friend Trump, led to the largest domestic protests in Israeli history. Indeed, like Trump, Netanyahu seeks to end his nation’s democracy in part to evade a sprawling network of significant criminal investigations into his use of government power to enrich himself and advance his personal political ambitions.

So perhaps it should be no surprise that Haaretz—along with The Times of Israel, the New York Times-and-Washington Post combo of Israeli major media—just published an editorial entitled, “Netanyahu Bears Responsibility for This Israel-Gaza War.”

To be clear, this is in no way an exculpation of Hamas for what was unquestionably a vile terrorist attack and war crime. At the Nova Music Festival alone—a celebration of love and peace being held near the Gaza border wall—Hamas militants killed as many as 360 multinational concert-goers, all of them civilians, in cold blood. There is no doubt (except at my law school alma mater, Harvard University, unfortunately) that Hamas bears primary responsibility for the carnage we’re seeing in Israel and Gaza, which has left 700+ Israelis and 370+ Palestinians dead and at least 130 Israelis (many of them civilians) and other foreign nationals held as hostages in tunnels under Gaza.

So how did the most advanced, competent, experienced, aggressive, famously alert intelligence services in the world—Mossad and Shin Bet—miss the planning for an all-out, Iran-funded, seven-point invasion of Israel that all parties agree would have taken months to plan? And why are all fingers now pointing at Israel’s prime minister?

The “Intelligence Failure” That Wasn’t

As first reported by The Middle East Eye (MEE), a British media outlet that focuses on the Middle East and was founded by a former Guardian editor—and was a key source for information contained in Proof of Conspiracy, along with hundreds of other major media outlets (to the point that this author has been in contact with their investigative reporters by phone)—the “Egyptian Intelligence Minister called Netanyahu ten days before [the] Hamas attack and warned him of ‘something unusual, a terrible operation’ that was about to take place from Gaza.”

ABOVE: A tweet by MEE reporter Ragip Soylu about its forthcoming report.

Even more stunning than Netanyahu’s alleged foreknowledge of the attack, however, is how he responded to that foreknowledge. MEE reports that the “Egyptians were ‘surprised by the indifference shown by Netanyahu’ [to the coming attack from Gaza].” MEE’s report has since been confirmed in all particulars by The Times of Israel.

So if there wasn’t an intelligence failure—but rather a decision by the Prime Minister of Israel to ignore ample (ten-day) warning of a major attack whose point-of-origin he was clearly told of—what could possibly explain Netanyahu choosing a course of action (indifference) that could lead to tens of thousands of civilian deaths in the Gaza Strip and Israel and a protracted war that threatens to erupt into a regional conflagration?

The Perverse Incentives of Far-Right Israeli Politics

It will surprise no one reading this to learn that the far-right Likud Party in Israel—of which Netanyahu is the current chairman and leader—does better in elections when the nation of Israel is under imminent threat of coordinated, sprawling external attack.

Just as Netanyahu ally Donald Trump’s MAGA Party plays off fears of “rapist” illegal immigrants, “terrorists” crossing the southern border en masse, and—as Trump is sure to mention in nearly every post on his failing Truth Social disinformation instrument—America being overrun by leftist “Communists”, “Marxists”, “fascists”, “socialists”, “thugs”, “criminals”, and “crazies” (never mind that all those words mean different things, and that Trump understands none of them at the level of a dictionary, or that there’s no evidence of any of the threats he warns of), Likud uses both fear and bigotry to animate its prospective voters.

But Netanyahu’s “constitutional coup” has created a situation in which fear alone is going to be insufficient for Likud to maintain its tenuous, coalition-bred hold over Israeli politics. Even disinterested observers would have been able to clearly see, in the days preceding the Hamas invasion, that—starting at least few months ago—what Netanyahu and Likud really needed was a “hot” war.

And so it is that The Times of Israel now reports the following:

[An Egyptian intelligence official aware of direct, pre-invasion telephonic contact between the Egyptian intelligence minister and Netanyahu] said [the Netanyahu administration told the Egyptians that] Israeli officials were focused on the West Bank and played down the threat from Gaza.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is made up of supporters of West Bank settlers who have demanded a security crackdown there in the face of a rising tide of violence over the last eighteen months.

We focus here on the second sentence above, which establishes that Likud needed its voters and Israeli independents to focus on “a rising tide of violence” in the West Bank—arguably a tide of violence precipitated by ultra-nationalist Israeli settlers seeking to stoke conflict with the Palestinians (this being a subject for another report)—to continue distracting them from the nation’s harrowing slide into autocracy. It is demonstrably easier, history has shown us, for autocrats to scare voters in a healthy democracy into permitting the collapse of that democracy when an external threat is close. But can this alone explain Netanyahu’s indifference to the coming Gaza threat?

After all, wouldn’t violence in Gaza be as politically useful to Likud as violence in the West Bank?

Here’s more from the Egyptian intelligence official who spoke to The Times of Israel:

“We ha[d] warned them [that] an explosion of the situation [was] coming, and very soon, and it would be big. But they underestimated such warnings”, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the content of sensitive intelligence discussions with the media, told The Associated Press.

In one of the said warnings, Egyptian Intelligence Minister General Abbas Kamel personally called Netanyahu only ten days before the massive attack [to tell him] that the Gazans were likely to do “something unusual, a terrible operation”, according to the Ynet news site.

So now we have (1) multiple warnings to Netanyahu, which (2) identified the origin of the attack, and (3) said it was coming “very soon.” These multiple, reasonably specific warnings also (4) discussed the scope of the attack, saying that it would be “unusual”, “big”, and “terrible”—meaning, quite clearly, that it would (a) involve tactics Israeli intel had not encountered before, (b) involve a war theater much larger than earlier Hamas incursions, and (c) target civilians rather than exclusively military personnel.

All of those warnings turned out to be 100% accurate.

In sum, one would say that Netanyahu knew quite a lot about this attack in advance, but still chose to do nothing—indeed, displayed little interest in the intelligence at all.

For instance, we know that the ten-day warning the Egyptians provided Netanyahu was enough for an emergency redeployment of IDF ground forces and air assets so that they wouldn’t all be clustered in the West Bank—where Netanyahu’s political funders and political base wanted them to be—and we know this because this exact redeployment is happening right now and is taking only about 48 to 72 hours to finish.

Likewise, in intel terms, “very soon” would have meant as little as a matter of hours to Israeli intelligence; “terrible” would suggest not only a mass-casualty event but one attributable to terrorism—thus, one ensuring civilian casualties—rather than a purely military maneuver; “unusual” would have signaled to the Netanyahu administration that it was already dangerously behind the ball, as what it faced was something the State of Israel had never seen before (and that’s really saying something if you know Israeli history at all, as the Egyptians most certainly do); and Egyptian intelligence telling Netanyahu that the attack would emanate from a comparatively small space—keep in mind that the Gaza Strip is equal to just two Districts of Columbia—was more than enough in terms of specifics for Netanyahu to be getting on with. His menu of options was long, and choosing from among that menu was unambiguously a matter of uncommon urgency; indeed, he would have believed, from what he’d been told, that he perhaps had only a matter of hours rather than days or weeks to act.

And instead, he did… nothing. Absolutely nothing. This striking fact bears thinking about right now, as there can be no doubt that criminal investigators and national security personnel in Israel will be thinking about it quite clearly once the dust of the Israel-Hamas War has settled.

A Harrowing Truth

According to the Egyptians, the one thing Netanyahu told them by way of explanation (we now know) for him doing nothing at all with the dire warning he’d just gotten was that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were “submerged” in actions in the West Bank—though perhaps this was just his acknowledgment that he might not actually be able to call up enough IDF reservists to deal with a fast-arriving situation in Gaza due to large numbers of such reservists saying they’d refuse any callup in light of his nascent coup.

In other words, we have the following sequence of events:

1. Netanyahu faces countless felony charges for which he is universally expected to be found guilty, and therefore he

2. announces a constitutional coup designed to overhaul the Israeli judiciary, end Israel’s democracy, and protect himself from consequences for his many crimes, which coup understandably, predictably, and justly results in

3. hundreds or even thousands of IDF reservists refusing to be called up in support of a would-be dictator’s autocratic ambitions, which refusals conspicuously caused

4. a diminishment of Israel’s combat readiness in a way Netanyahu knew would be exposed—and to his own political detriment—if he acknowledged the coming threat in Gaza and attempted unsuccessfully to mobilize the IDF to prepare for it.

The Times of Israel confirms that it may well be wrong to denominate any of the above a mere “intelligence failure”:

For Palestinians in Gaza, Israel’s eyes are [in fact] never very far away. Surveillance drones buzz constantly in the skies. The highly secured border is awash with security cameras and soldiers on guard. Intelligence agencies work sources and cyber capabilities to draw out information.

….

Even after Hamas overran Gaza in 2007, Israel appeared to maintain its [surveillance] edge, using technological and human intelligence.

It claimed to know the precise locations of Hamas leadership and appeared to prove it through the targeted killing of terror leaders in surgical strikes, sometimes while they slept in their bedrooms. Israel has known where to strike underground tunnels used by Hamas to ferry around fighters and arms, destroying miles of the concealed passageways.

….

[So] some say it is too early to pin the blame solely on an intelligence failure. They point to a wave of low-level violence in the West Bank that shifted some military resources there and the political chaos roiling the country over steps by Netanyahu’s far-right government to overhaul the judiciary. The controversial plan has threatened the cohesion of the IDF, seen as the people’s army.

While The Times of Israel does note that Hamas has of late begun downsizing its use of high-tech equipment to evade intelligence collection, and Israel’s government—as to both major parties—has presumed Hamas to be more interested in governing than violence in recent years, it also (quoting well-known Israeli defense commentator Amos Harel) expresses astonishment that “Hundreds if not thousands of Hamas men were preparing for a surprise attack for months, without that having leaked.”

None of the above alternative explanations for this coming attack not being prepared for explain how the planning of thousands of terrorists went unnoticed—and the recent revelations from Israel’s allies in Egypt now suggest that they did not go unnoticed at all.

So what evidence do we have that Benjamin Netanyahu wanted this attack to unfold?

Well, putting aside his criminal history; his willingness—as a war criminal—to let innocents die; his well-known bigotry against the Palestinians, which might cause him to thirst for an excuse to kill large numbers of them; the obvious political advantage to Likud if such an attack came off more or less successfully, at least in its first 24 hours; the obvious political disadvantage to Likud if Netanyahu unsuccessfully tried to call up IDF forces and failed to do so due to just protests against him (which exigency could end his political career, as if a leader fails to call up his troops he can hardly remain a leader); there’s the fact that the attack—despite being anticipated in advance—being allowed to unfold immediately led to the following results:

1. Netanyahu successfully executing (per CNN) the “quickest” and “largest” IDF call-up in Israeli history (300,000 reservists) without any protests whatsoever;

2. Netanyahu having good reason to call for—and good reason to expect the creation of—a “unity government” with “no preconditions” (meaning that not only will he stay in power despite being in the midst of a constitutional coup, but the ability of any minority party joining his unity government to curb his authority approaches zero);

3. Netanyahu being able to declare that his unity government will have to exist for a “long” time in order to deal with this threat (which elongation of his hold on power is a direct result of him not pre-undermining Hamas’s plans, and thereby not pre-limiting the scope of the threat it now poses to Israel);

4. Netanyahu being able to declare that the goal of the coming “long” war will be to (a) eradicate Hamas completely, long a goal of his, and (b) reassert absolute Israeli control over the millions of Gazans in the Gaza Strip, a scope for his military call-up that never would have been deemed politically or logistically permissible if so many Israelis hadn’t died or been wounded at the hands of Hamas first; and

5. Netanyahu accomplishing all of the above with “only” the following drawbacks for his people: (a) having to call Israel’s second-closest regional allies (the Egyptians) liars in public, (b) allowing thousands of Israelis to be needlessly killed, wounded, or kidnapped; (c) allowing scores of foreign nationals to likewise be killed, wounded, or kidnapped, including (that we know of so far) Americans, Brits, Germans, and Nepalese; (d) risking a regional war that would expand outside Netanyahu’s control if the much-better-armed-than-Hamas Hezbollah forces operating in Lebanon invade Israel from the north, as increasingly seems likely now that the IDF has initiated military operations on the Israel-Lebanon border; (e) requiring American aid at a time when the United States has no Speaker of the House and therefore can’t pass any legislation intended to send such aid; (f) creating a situation in which, per CNN reporting, the world could see the most “collateral damage” in a war “since WWII”, including as many as “hundreds of thousands of civilian dead”; and (g) ironically, requiring that IDF attention be moved away from the West Bank now that the events in Gaza have spiraled out of Netanyahu’s control.

Even American sources—normally inclined toward absolute neutrality on the matter of Israeli politics in times of crisis for the Middle Eastern democracy—are issuing statements that can only be read as blaming Netanyahu’s political ambition for what is now happening in Gaza:

Martin Indyk, who served as a special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations during the Obama administration, said internal divisions over the legal changes [sought by Netanyahu] was an aggravating factor that contributed to the Israelis being caught off guard. “That roiled the IDF in a way that was, I think, we discovered was a huge distraction”, he said.

Is it fair to suppose that a demonstrated war criminal did more war-criming simply because every political and personal calculation we know he would have made would have inclined him toward doing so even if his bigotry, callousness, and immorality weren’t enough in themselves? No. But it is reasonable for the investigation that will ultimately be conducted as to how this war was allowed to happen to start from the presumption that Netanyahu lied about his foreknowledge of this attack for a reason— and that he had ample cause to know that his constitutional coup was weakening his nation’s national security in precisely the way that would’ve left it open to a massacre.

Conclusion

Just hours ago, Al Jazeera published a report with this headline and sub-headline: “Netanyahu is Drawing the United States Into War With Iran; the Israeli Prime Minister’s Persistent Obsession With the Islamic Republic May Finally Drag the United States into Another Disastrous Regional War.”

Those of you who read the “Trump-Iran” chapter of my 2020 national bestseller Proof of Corruption (Macmillan) will recall that in January of 2020 then-president Donald Trump used repeated public lies to justify his assassination of popular Iranian general Qasem Soleimani—an admittedly monstrous man whose killing nevertheless came not for any of the reasons Trump provided to American voters and which, per scores of major-media reports, brought America to within minutes of a hot war with Iran.

Why did Trump almost lie America into an unthinkably bloody war—a war that quite easily could have expanded into World War III—as he faced his first impeachment (as part of the Trump-Ukraine Scandal) and had just entered the year of the 2020 U.S. presidential election?

That question seems to answer itself, doesn’t it?

Trump saw great political advantage in using an avoidable foreign crisis to evade significant consequences for his crimes, and didn’t care how many people had to die for him to avoid those consequences—especially as the benefit he felt he stood to gain in being seen as a domestic hero was a continuation of his presidential powers.

And what would we say of Trump’s friend (and 2016 coconspirator in an election theft plot)? Well, we would say that Netanyahu saw great political advantage in using an avoidable foreign crisis to evade significant consequences for his crimes, and didn’t care how many people had to die for him to avoid those consequences—especially as the benefit he felt he stood to gain in being seen as a domestic hero was a continuation of his presidential powers.

{Note: Recall that, after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, the gravest fear at the Pentagon was that Trump would launch a pretextual war against Iran to say in power.}

There’s a reason Trump, Netanyahu, and Vladimir Putin are all on the cover of Proof of Conspiracy—there’s a commonality to how sociopathic career criminals think (as I know from many years of being a public defender) just as there is to how would-be autocrats think (as I know from many years of being a Donald Trump biographer).

There’s always a consequence for not justly but expeditiously incarcerating criminals like Trump and Netanyahu, and that consequence is never one paid by the criminals themselves. It is paid by innocent men, women, and children who do not get half of the protections of the law—perhaps not even a quarter—that rich, famous, powerful, influential far-right sociopathic criminals like Trump and Netanyahu do. While we in America have due cause to feel shocked by what we’re seeing on our televisions today, we cannot pretend it was unforeseeable; both Trump and Netanyahu want a war with Iran because it satisfies their own political and legal needs, and even the deep-seated bigotry both men feel toward nonwhite Muslims.

What is unfolding in Israel is a tragedy for Israel and Gaza. Soon it will also become a tragedy for the West Bank and the Golan Heights. And then possibly for both Egypt and Lebanon. And then possibly for Syria, Jordan, and any nation suddenly facing the prospect of trying to welcome hundreds of thousands of refugees from Gaza—where reliable major-media reports indicate the water and electricity have been turned off.

And soon enough the tragedy may spread to Iran and the United States and beyond.

And whether Netanyahu plotted out this war in advance, negligently or recklessly or deliberately allowed it to happen, or is simply the victim of his own highly illegal constitutional coup, what can be said for certain is two things: (1) Hamas retains the primary responsibility for all the suffering that may emanate from this war, and (2) had Netanyahu and Trump both been prosecuted to the full extent of their nations’ laws in a timely fashion, much of the suffering that is coming in the days ahead would never have arrived, and the even greater suffering that could come with a wider regional war would be outside the realm of possibility entirely.

I’ll add to the two points above the following question: with so many millions of lives at stake, can we continue to afford to give a career white-collar criminal, war criminal, and unrepentant racist who illegally aided Donald Trump’s efforts to steal the 2016 U.S. election the benefit of the doubt and assume that he did not act, in this instance, consistent with his lifetime of sociopathy, cruelty, bigotry, and demagoguery? Or is it too late in the history of human civilization for us to keep being so stubbornly naive about the persistence, predictability, and perniciousness of evil?