Let Me Sleep… Netanyahu Blames Security Officials for October 7
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused security officials of deliberately failing to wake him on the morning of Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks, one day after his wife claimed that an opposition figure had prior knowledge of the attack.
Netanyahu is heading toward a fiercely contested election later this year and has faced persistent criticism amid the national debate over who bears responsibility for the failures that led to the October 7, 2023 security disaster.
Netanyahu had previously claimed that security officials refrained from waking him that morning, insisting that the attack could have been contained had he intervened earlier. However, it was only in recent days that he began alleging that the decision had been deliberate.
During a live interview on Instagram, Netanyahu said: “Why didn’t they wake me up? Because they knew that, as Prime Minister of Israel, I would immediately have ordered the entire army to be placed on alert and all the communities bordering the Gaza Strip to be awakened… Clearly, all of this could have been done. This was concealed from the public.”
Netanyahu’s remarks echoed statements he made in another interview on a podcast published on Monday, during which he blamed senior military commanders and Ronen Bar, who was then head of Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, for failing to wake him in order to avoid what was described as a “miscalculation” that could have led to a military escalation with Hamas.
He added: “They did not believe Hamas would launch an attack. They knew exactly what I would do.”
His remarks came on Tuesday after his wife, Sara Netanyahu, claimed in a separate television interview broadcast the previous evening that the former deputy chief of the Israeli military’s General Staff and leader of the center-left Democrats Party had prior knowledge of Hamas’s attack plan before it took place.
Her comments sparked widespread outrage within the Israeli opposition and also highlighted the deep political polarization gripping the country less than two months before the parliamentary elections scheduled for October 27.
In the interview aired on Israel’s Channel 14 on Monday evening, Sara Netanyahu attacked Yair Golan, saying that he was “ready and dressed from the early hours of the morning” on October 7, 2023, “while no one else knew anything, including the Prime Minister.”
In response to the remarks, Golan threatened to sue the Prime Minister’s wife for 2.5 million shekels, approximately $830,000, unless she issued “an apology within 24 hours and provided compensation to be donated to survivors of the Nova festival.”
The Nova music festival, held in Re’im in southern Israel near the Gaza Strip, was among the sites targeted during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack in Israel. More than 370 people were killed there, while others were taken hostage.
Writing on X, Golan said, in a thinly veiled criticism of the Prime Minister: “Sara Netanyahu promoted a false conspiracy theory in an attempt to rewrite October 7, turn those who went out to save lives into traitors, and portray those who abandoned Israel’s security as victims.”
Meanwhile, Gadi Eisenkot, a former Chief of the General Staff and one of Netanyahu’s leading rivals, criticized what he described as the “insane theory of betrayal” promoted by the Prime Minister’s wife.
He wrote on X that the remarks “serve no purpose other than to fuel hatred and prolong Netanyahu’s rule.”
Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, who has consistently portrayed himself as the guarantor of the country’s security, continues to reject responsibility for the attack, arguing that security officials should have woken him.
The October 7 attack killed 1,221 people, according to an Agence France-Presse tally based on official Israeli figures. Its perpetrators also took 251 hostages to the Gaza Strip, including 44 who were later declared dead.
Meanwhile, Israel’s war in Gaza has killed more than 73,000 people, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run Ministry of Health.
