From the Liveblog of
Saturday, November 23, 2024
Netanyahu ignored warnings over Hamas threat for years, ruled against assassinating terror leaders — TV report
Lazar Berman is The Times of Israel's diplomatic reporter
In an in-depth report, Channel 12 news claims that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for years ignored warnings from security chiefs about the growing Hamas threat from Gaza and turned down repeated proposals to kill Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar and Muhammad Deif.
Netanyahu’s office flatly denies the allegations.
According to the TV report, Netanyahu received detailed intelligence in 2014 about Hamas’s plans to invade Israel. In the ensuing years, Hamas operatives repeatedly approached the border fence, but the prime minister blocked any significant Israeli response.
Instead, Netanyahu chose a strategy based on defense and paying Hamas off, according to the report. He invested billions of shekels in a new border fence to block tunnels into Israel, only three percent of which was invested in the above-ground portion of the fence that Hamas easily penetrated on October 7.
In 2018, according to Channel 12, Netanyahu turned down a proposal from the Shin Bet and then-defense minister Avigdor Liberman to kill senior Hamas leaders — including Sinwar and Deif — instead choosing to send then-Mossad chief Yossi Cohen to Qatar to convince the Gulf emirate to send money to Hamas in exchange for quiet in the south.
According to the report, Netanyahu chose to ignore intelligence that Qatar was also sending funds to Hamas’s military. He even sent the then-head of the IDF Southern Command Herzi Halevi to Qatar in 2020 to convince its leaders to keep funding Hamas after Doha indicated it wanted to stop sending money to the terror group.
Netanyahu also ruled against plans to kill Palestinian Islamic Jihad leaders and West Bank Hamas terrorists, along with an opportunity to assassinate the powerful Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps leader Qassem Soleimani, according to the report. Soleimani was assassinated in 2020 in a US drone strike.
After a Hezbollah operative carried out a bombing attack deep inside northern Israel in March 2023, Halevi and Bar warned Netanyahu that chances of a war erupting were high and that he should take offensive action against terror leaders, Channel 12 reports. He once again refused.
Six days before the October 7 attack, Bar reportedly presented Netanyahu with a plan to kill Hamas leaders, while Halevi said that Israel must prepare for war with the Palestinian terror group.
Netanyahu demurred, and National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi went on the radio to say that Hamas was deterred.
In a statement, the Prime Minister’s Office calls the report “a recycling of baseless lies that have been refuted in the past, and which are intended to discredit Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is leading Israel to unprecedented achievements on seven fronts.”
The PMO rejects a claim in the report that Israel didn’t have the capabilities to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2018, along with the claim about Soleimani, again insisting that the prime minister was only presented with intelligence about a Hamas plan for a mass raid into Israel after October 7.
Netanyahu’s office also asserts that he extended Operation Guardian of the Wall in 2021 to try to kill Deif, and that he oversaw the killing of PIJ leader Baha Abu al-Ata in 2019.
The PMO says that the intelligence community agreed that Hamas was deterred, and could be incentivized to agree to long-term ceasefires through economic deals. It also says that there was never any intelligence that Qatari money was being used for terrorism.
The main threat according to Israeli intelligence, says the PMO, was from subterranean tunnels, which was thwarted when Netanyahu built the underground barrier, despite opposition from security chiefs.
“No attempt to rewrite history will change the facts,” says the PMO.
