From the Liveblog of
Thursday, August 29, 2024
Netanyahu was warned a year before Oct. 7 that Hamas saw its ‘moment had arrived,’ Lapid tells civilian inquiry
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"
On the evening before the Knesset voted to pass the so-called reasonableness law in July 2023, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid received a security briefing from Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, who provided him with “unprecedented warnings” about “the security consequences of the coup d’état and the internal rift it was causing,” the Yesh Atid party chairman says.
Lapid’s remarks, delivered in his testimony before an independent civilian commission of inquiry into the failures of October 7, refer to the government’s highly divisive judicial overhaul it advanced last year, which was derided by some critics as an attempted coup.
Pushing back against the frequent claim that the government had not received advance warning that Hamas was no longer deterred, Lapid states that “it was indeed informed. I was informed, and the intelligence material I saw was of course also seen by the prime minister and cabinet ministers.”
“During the months leading up to the disaster, the prime minister and cabinet ministers received a series of serious, unprecedented warnings. From the middle of 2023 there were more and more voices within the terrorist organizations that said that the moment they had been waiting for had arrived,” he says.
Lapid recalls 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 adds.
“The next day, about two hours before the vote, I spoke with President Herzog on the phone, and he informed me that the prime minister had withdrawn from all agreements after having a tense meeting with [Justice] Minister Yariv Levin and following messages sent to him by ministers [Bezalel] Smotrich and [Itamar] Ben Gvir. I informed the media that all attempts at compromise had come to naught, and the government was presenting the law in its original and extreme version,” Lapid continues, adding that Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had “tried to reach an agreement with us” and that “his motive was purely security.”
