Lapid says Netanyahu knew for months before Oct. 7 that a violent eruption was looming
Opposition leader: Disaster could have been prevented, PM seemed ‘bored’ when told of dangers during joint briefing; PM’s office: He ‘did not receive any warning about the war in Gaza’
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
Despite being warned for more than a year that his government’s policies had weakened Israel’s deterrence and that terrorist groups believed their “moment had arrived,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to act and even appeared “bored and indifferent to the issue” during one joint briefing on the issue, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid testified on Thursday.
Addressing an independent civilian commission of inquiry in Tel Aviv into the October 7 Hamas invasion and massacre, the Yesh Atid party chief and former prime minister detailed multiple instances when Netanyahu was told by security officials that policies being pursued by his government had eroded Israeli deterrence and that Israel’s enemies saw weakness and opportunity.
Lapid said he was determined “to debunk the claim” that the political echelon had not been updated that Hamas was no longer deterred from attacking Israel. He said he had been updated, and so had the prime minister. While he stressed that “on October 7 there was no tactical, concrete warning of the breaching of the fence,” he said there were “repeated strategic warnings of an eruption of violence and the loss of deterrence.”
“It is not true that the political system was not alerted to the October 7 disaster. For months, the prime minister and cabinet ministers received a series of severe and unprecedented warnings, and did nothing,” Lapid told members of the commission, which was recently established by groups representing survivors and victims of the massacre in the wake of Netanyahu’s refusal to establish an official state probe.
Lapid recalled receiving a security briefing from Ronen Bar on the evening before the Knesset voted to pass the so-called reasonableness law in July 2023, during which the Shin Bet chief provided him with “unprecedented warnings” about “the security consequences of the coup d’état and the internal rift it was causing.”
The reasonableness bill was part of the highly divisive judicial overhaul the government advanced last year, which was denounced by some critics as an attempted coup.
“From the middle of 2023, there were more and more voices within the terrorist organizations who said that the moment they had been waiting for had arrived, and these voices appeared in the intelligence assessments, and in discussions in the IDF, Shin Bet and Mossad,” Lapid stated.
The opposition leader recalled asking Bar “if these warnings were also brought before the prime minister and cabinet ministers, and the answer was: ‘Of course they were.’”
“President [Isaac] Herzog also received updates regarding the growing security risk and expressed this in his talks with the prime minister,” Lapid continued, adding that Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had “tried to reach an agreement with us” over the judicial overhaul legislation due to his concerns about the harm being caused to national security by the sharp societal polarization over the matter.
Gallant’s issue with the overhaul stemmed from threats by IDF reservists that they would not be able to serve in an undemocratic Israel, prompting him to warn that the proposed reforms posed “a clear, immediate, and tangible threat to the security of the state.”
Netanyahu announced he was firing Gallant last March for issuing this warning publicly; he rescinded the defense minister’s dismissal two weeks later under intense public pressure.
According to Lapid on Thursday, IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi sought to meet with Netanyahu about the national security repercussions of the divide in Israel regarding the judicial overhaul, and was refused. Halevi instead resorted to writing to Netanyahu about the dangers.
While he had not read Halevi’s missive, Lapid said “the only reason for sending such a letter would be to document an unanswered security warning.”
Lapid also cited an August 21, 2023, joint briefing with Netanyahu’s military secretary Brig. Gen. Avi Gil, in which the senior defense official told Netanyahu and Lapid that Iran and terror groups in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza “all identified weakness, an internal divide, tensions, and a loss of preparedness in the army, alongside an emerging crisis with the Americans.”
Gil’s presentation, which synthesized material from all the defense establishments, indicated that Israel’s enemies saw an opportunity to harm it, said Lapid.
While he considered this warning to be dramatic, Lapid said that “the prime minister — and here I am giving only a personal impression, so it can be disputed — seemed bored and indifferent to the issue, and did not comment on it.”
Lapid highlighted his joint briefing with Netanyahu during an interview with The Times of Israel last week, in which he stated that “all the signs, all the red flags, all the warnings” were there but Netanyahu “ignored them all.”
During his testimony on Thursday, Lapid maintained that while “the discussion about Prime Minister Netanyahu’s motives or mental state is none of my business,” he believes that “the definition of the role of the prime minister and the cabinet — perhaps the most critical definition of that role — is the duty to stop everything in the face of this type and quality of intelligence and information, and mobilize the entire system to stop the threat.”
In the weeks after Gil’s briefing, Lapid continued, he viewed classified intelligence material provided to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that indicated that deterrence had indeed eroded. He saw highly classified material, made available to him as a former prime minister.
One warning, which he viewed at the committee less than a month before Hamas’s attack, “was unequivocal: Israeli deterrence has eroded dramatically; our enemies think they have a rare opportunity to harm us,” Lapid recalled — adding that it showed that Israel was “at the greatest level of danger.”
The information he had seen was serious enough to prompt Lapid to hold a press conference on September 20 in which he warned of a looming “multifront confrontation,” Lapid told the commission of inquiry; he quoted from that press conference, including remarks in which he stated that Israel was “drawing close to a multifront confrontation” and that “recent events at the Gaza border are precisely of the kind that in the past have led to rounds of fighting.”
Netanyahu, he charged on Thursday, “knew that deterrence was weakened, and knew that the terror groups were watching [the rifts in] Israeli society.” The prime minister was also aware of the fact that he had appointed ministers “who should not be anywhere near Israel’s sacred security” — namely far-right Finance Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.
Netanyahu knew Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad saw “an opportunity,” Lapid said. “He knew it was the government’s responsibility to act on the warnings and did not do so.”
Despite reserving most of his criticism for the current government, Lapid also had harsh words for the defense establishment, stating that “instead of acting, it waited for the political echelon’s instructions,” an approach he deemed “inexcusable.”
Nonetheless, Lapid stressed, the IDF’s responsibility for the disaster “does not negate the political echelon’s responsibility” for the worst mistake in Israeli history, which he called “preventable.”
“I have been asked many times if I think the October 7 disaster could have happened on my watch, when I was prime minister. The answer is no,” he argued. “Even as the head of the opposition, I did not ignore [the warnings], and in the face of lesser warnings, in August 2022 I embarked on a proactive operation to eliminate the commanders of the Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip.”
Lapid noted that Hamas had used commercial vehicles and widely available Kalashnikov assault rifles to carry out its attack, asserting that “the dramatic change was not in capabilities, but in opportunity” and that there is “no doubt that a prepared army and an alert political echelon could have prevented” October 7.
“Hezbollah has much more capability in the north in terms of weapons and readiness than Hamas had. The discussion on capacity building is part of the attempt to remove the blame for the lack of preparedness,” he said.
While calling out intelligence failures and the redeployment of a large number of forces to the West Bank prior to October 7, Lapid laid the primary blame on Netanyahu, who he said has advanced “a concept of conflict management” in which we “proceed from a view that says that it can be managed forever, and one of the means to do this is to turn Hamas into a counter force to the Palestinian Authority, in order to maintain a balance of power between them.”
“His wrong conception was that he would be able to steer and manage an Islamic terrorist organization for his political and policy goals without any consequences,” Lapid alleged, calling it “the most serious political and security error in the country’s history” and “a kind of wishful thinking.”
Responding to a question about Netanyahu’s policy of allowing suitcases bearing millions in Qatari cash to enter Gaza through Israeli crossings since 2018, Lapid stated that his short-lived government had “stopped the bags of money” and instead “transferred the money to the UN, and the UN purchased food vouchers.”
“Someone asked me not long ago on a TV program what I would do if I were the prime minister on October 7; I said I would resign on October 8,” he said.
“There is no country in the world where the prime minister, the head of state, is responsible for the biggest civil disaster in the country’s history, and the biggest security disaster in the country’s history, and is also accused of criminal corruption, and he is still the prime minister.”
Netanyahu has not publicly accepted direct personal responsibility for October 7 and has blocked the establishment of a state commission of inquiry into the catastrophe.
The Prime Minister’s Office issued a scathing response to Lapid’s testimony, accusing him of “lying again” and asserting that Netanyahu “did not receive any warning about the war in Gaza — not a month before and not even an hour before October 7. The opposite is true and the protocols prove it.”
“Lapid, who brought in workers from Gaza and gave free gas to [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah while promising that this would prevent war, is the last one who can preach in matters of security,” it added, referring to a 2022 US-brokered maritime deal with Lebanon signed by Lapid.
Lapid’s testimony followed that of former prime minister Ehud Olmert, who accused Netanyahu of silencing dissenting voices in the security establishment, and former defense minister Avigdor Liberman, who said that he had warned about a Hamas attack similar to the one that occurred last October as far back as 2016.
