Israel’s Netanyahu says security officials deliberately didn’t wake him during Hamas’ Oct 7 attack
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that the attack would have been contained if he had stepped in earlier.
PHOTO: AFP
- Israeli PM Netanyahu accused security officials of deliberately not waking him on Oct 7, claiming earlier action could have prevented the Hamas attack.
- Netanyahu’s wife claimed opposition figure Yair Golan knew about the attack plan, prompting outrage and a lawsuit threat from Golan.
- The Oct 7 attack caused over 1,200 Israeli deaths and 251 hostages, leading to a massive Israeli offensive in Gaza with over 73,000 Palestinian deaths reported.
AI generated
JERUSALEM – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused security officials on Sept 1 of intentionally failing to wake him on the morning of Hamas’ Oct 7 attacks, a day after his wife claimed an opposition figure knew of the onslaught in advance.
Netanyahu is heading into close-fought elections later in 2026, and has come in for sustained criticism in the national debate over who is responsible for the failures that led to the Oct 7, 2023, security fiasco.
The Prime Minister has alleged in the past that security officials refrained from waking him that morning, insisting that the attack would have been contained if he had stepped in earlier, but only in recent days has he begun to claim that the move was intentional.
“Why didn’t they wake me? Because they knew that I, as Prime Minister of Israel, would immediately have ordered to put the entire army on alert, to wake up all the towns (on the Gaza border)... It’s so obvious that all of this could have been done. This has been hidden from the public,” the Prime Minister said during a live interview on Instagram.
Netanyahu’s assertions echo those he made in another podcast interview published on Aug 31, in which he blamed the military’s top brass and Ronen Bar, head of the Shin Bet security service at the time, for refusing to wake him in order to avoid the “miscalculation” of a military escalation with Hamas.
“They didn’t believe Hamas would attack,” he added. “They knew exactly what I would do.”
His remarks on Sept 1 came after his wife, Sara, in a separate television interview broadcast the night before, claimed that opposition figure Yair Golan was aware of the plan for the Hamas attack before it happened.
The comments drew outrage from the opposition and a lawsuit threat from Golan, a former deputy military chief of staff who heads the centre-left Democrats party.
On the morning of Oct 7, upon hearing about the Hamas attack, Golan rushed to southern Israel to rescue at least six people at the site of the Nova music festival, where at least 370 people were killed.
Sara Netanyahu claimed that Golan was “already dressed and ready” at dawn that day, “while others knew nothing, including the Prime Minister”.
Her interview was broadcast on Israel’s Channel 14, which is close to the government.
In a post on X, Golan threatened to sue the First Lady for 2.5 million shekels (S$1.05 million) unless she issued “an apology within 24 hours and compensation to be donated to survivors of the Nova” festival.
“Sara Netanyahu spread a false conspiracy in an attempt to rewrite Oct 7, turning those who went out to save lives into traitors and those who abandoned Israel’s security into victims,” he said, in a jab at the Prime Minister.
Golan’s party strongly condemned her “vile and deceitful” remarks.
“Spreading conspiracies against Major General Yair Golan, and smearing his heroism on Oct 7, is crossing a red line that borders on insanity,” it wrote on X.
‘Mad conspiracy’
Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief who has emerged as the front runner to challenge Netanyahu in the upcoming October election, slammed the “mad conspiracy of betrayal” spread by the Prime Minister’s wife.
Sara Netanyahu’s accusations reflect recurrent conspiracy theories among a part of the Israeli political class.
According to a poll conducted for Channel 13 in August, 40 per cent of Israelis, and 63 per cent of voters for the current right-wing coalition, believe that internal treason led to the Oct 7 attack – the deadliest day in Israel’s history.
Hamas’ attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures. Militants also took 251 hostages, 44 of them already dead, into Gaza.
Israel responded with a massive offensive in Gaza that has killed at least 73,462 people, according to the Palestinian territory’s health ministry, which operates under the Hamas authority and whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations. AFP
