Gallant says Shin Bet received Sinwar ‘quake’ warning before Oct. 7, but misread its meaning

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 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 immediately before the attack.

Gallant pointed in particular to discussions held by then-IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi on October 6 and 7, saying that had Halevi known the prime minister had received an earlier warning, it could have affected how he interpreted the signs emerging at the time.

He said senior officials had held numerous security discussions in the weeks before the war, including on the Iranian threat, but that he did not recall Netanyahu mentioning during those meetings that he had received such a warning.

Gallant also said no warning from Egypt had been brought to his attention before October 7. “It was not said; not to me, not to the chief of staff, and in my opinion not to the head of the Shin Bet either,” he said.

He added that during the war he sometimes learned about sensitive exchanges involving Netanyahu only after US officials contacted him to verify what the prime minister had told them, because, he said, the Americans had little confidence in Netanyahu’s account. Gallant said he subsequently tried to clarify the matters with Netanyahu, noting that he had received no written or verbal report about them beforehand.

His remarks came after former Palestinian Authority minister Sufian Abu Zaida said he had personally conveyed Sinwar’s “earthquake” warning to Shin Bet officials in September 2023. Abu Zaida said he passed the message in both Arabic and Hebrew and was summoned to an urgent meeting with Israeli security officials the following morning, where he was questioned about what Sinwar meant and was told that members of the security team had not “slept that night.”

Separately, reporting earlier this week from Channel 12 suggested that the UAE’s intelligence service also warned the Shin Bet in September 2023 that Hamas could carry out violent action by the end of that month.

The news site reported that the Emirati warning was essentially identical to information received separately from Sinwar. Israeli officials involved in a Shin Bet assessment, however, understood Sinwar’s message against intelligence suggesting Hamas could become involved in negotiations to free Tsurkov, and did not interpret it as warning of an impending attack.

Channel 12 originally reported on Sinwar’s warning in 2024, but reports of the phone call between bin Zayed and Netanyahu only emerged in recent weeks with a Haaretz exposé. The call was confirmed to The Times of Israel by an Emirati source. Netanyahu has denied that any such conversation took place.