Netanyahu claims defense officials intentionally failed to wake him in hours before Oct. 7 attack

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday claimed that senior IDF and defense officials deliberately chose not to wake him hours before Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught because “they knew that, as prime minister of Israel, I would have immediately given the order to put the entire military on alert” and would thereby have prevented the invasion.

The remarks made during an Instagram livestream and broadcast on Channel 12 were similar to comments he made on a podcast on Monday and on Channel 14 on Sunday night, and mark a shift from Netanyahu’s previous claim that events would have unfolded differently had he been woken up before the attack began. Now, the premier alleged that defense officials intentionally kept him uninformed.

In both the podcast clip Netanyahu posted on Monday and the Sunday Channel 14 interview, the prime minister said that the security chiefs saw multiple signs of an impending attack but were still convinced Hamas was deterred. He alleged that they knew that if they woke him up, he would mobilize the air force and the entire IDF and ensured that anyone who approached the fence from the Gaza side “would be killed immediately.” The security chiefs believed this would have prompted an actual Hamas attack or exchange of fire, Netanyahu claimed, without proof.

Israel’s security chiefs at the time have said that based on the information they had that night, they did not assess that Hamas was about to attack. Netanyahu’s office acknowledged last year that the premier’s intelligence officer received an IDF memo detailing suspicious Hamas activity three hours before the invasion and onslaught, but did not pass it on to Netanyahu because it was not framed as urgent.

Netanyahu’s allegations came as his wife, Sara Netanyahu, peddled a conspiracy theory targeting Democrats chief Yair Golan, insinuating without evidence in a Monday interview aired with the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 that the left-wing lawmaker, a former deputy IDF chief of staff, had advance notice of the onslaught. Golan said he will sue her for libel if she does not apologize. She has refused and has threatened to countersue.

Sara Netanyahu was reportedly accompanied to her Channel 14 interview by Topaz Luk, a senior adviser to the prime minister. Netanyahu’s Likud party reportedly demanded and received the full raw footage before the edited interview was aired.

Later Tuesday, Netanyahu posted a video on social media stating that neither he nor his wife was accusing top security officials of “betrayal” regarding the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, just “failure.” He again denounced them for neither waking him nor preemptively attacking Hamas that night, when “all the signs were there.”

Netanyahu’s allegations

Netanyahu said in his Tuesday Instagram livestream that, had he been alerted by security chiefs in the hours before the Hamas onslaught, he would have “woken up all the communities, woken up all the security coordinators and told the air force to be ready to strike and kill anyone approaching the fence.”

“I am not telling you that some [invaders] wouldn’t have breached [the fence],” he clarified, adding that he could have also canceled the Nova music festival where several hundred people were mowed down. “It is so obvious that all of this could have been done.”

Netanyahu made similar remarks in the Monday podcast clip, alleging that senior defense officials deliberately did not wake him before the attack. He said there were innumerable signs that Hamas was about to attack, and that these were seen by then-IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi, then-Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar and then-IDF intelligence chief Aharon Haliva. The natural thing would have been for them to wake him, he said.

Explaining why they had chosen not to do so, Netanyahu first singled out Bar, accusing him of seeking to maintain a discreet, mid-level state of readiness while avoiding broad military action for fear of provoking an escalation with Hamas. The trio of named security chiefs believed Hamas was deterred and would not attack, he said. Netanyahu claimed the security chiefs considered him to be majnun — a lunatic in Arabic — and did not wake him because they knew he would mobilize the military and order the air force to strike anyone approaching the Gaza border. “And they said that would cause an attack or exchange of fire with Hamas and that had to be prevented. If they had woken me, everything would have been different. That’s the story of October 7.”

שאלתם: למה לא העירו אותי ב-7 באוקטובר >> pic.twitter.com/3EnyY4Xeea

— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) August 31, 2026

On Sunday, he had likewise told Channel 14 that Israel’s security chiefs, dismissive of indications that Hamas was about to attack, chose not to wake him in the hours before the attack because they feared he would order a major alert and actually prompt a Hamas attack.

“On that night” of October 6-7, “there was an assessment [by Israel’s military and security chiefs] that ‘we generals, heads of the security establishment, we are responsible people. And these politicians, including the prime minister, are laymen. They were elected? So what. We know how to act responsibly. And acting responsibly requires preventing a situation of miscalculation. And how would there be a miscalculation? If, heaven forbid, we wake the prime minister, he’ll say, ‘Wake up the whole IDF immediately. Scramble the air force. Nobody should be allowed to cross that fence; maybe some will cross, but it doesn’t matter. This [prime ministerial alert] could cause Hamas to attack us.'”

Netanyahu added: “If you think I’m exaggerating, wait and see,” insisting that when the protocols of that night are published, he will be vindicated.

He went on: “You asked me what would have happened if they had woken me? This [October 7 invasion] would not have taken place.”

“I’m not telling you that nothing would have happened. [Hamas] had prepared it,” he continued, blaming the failure in part on the security establishment’s prewar “conception” that Hamas was deterred, which he sought to distance himself from, even though he proclaimed the same thing in the months and years leading up to the attack.

“There was never any underestimation [on my part]… As for [Hamas’s] desire to destroy us, [to underestimate] that is such a disconnect from reality,” Netanyahu said.

Failure, not betrayal

After Channel 12’s political correspondent said Tuesday night that the various comments by Netanyahu and his wife appear to be part of a concerted effort by the Netanyahu family to reframe the narrative surrounding the failures of October 7 ahead of the upcoming election, Netanyahu issued a video dismissing the notion.

Asked about allegations that he and his wife are stoking conspiracy theories and implying top officials knew of the Hamas plan to carry out an invasion and massacre ahead of time, he rejected this as “complete nonsense,” adding, “They have asked me several times, Do I think there was a betrayal, and I said ‘No, I don’t think there was a betrayal. I think there was a failure, a great failure.’”

“It played out in the night and on the morning before the attack, when all the signs were there, and they [the security chiefs] decided — because of a fear of a miscalculation, so as not to annoy Hamas — not to wake me up, and not to attack beforehand. That’s a failure, but it’s not betrayal. It happened, to my sorrow, at terrible cost. But it’s not betrayal, and my wife also didn’t say betrayal. That’s just nonsense.”

Yair Golan, in response, demanded that Netanyahu issue a more definitive response. “You don’t think, Bibi?” he tweeted, bitterly echoing Netanyahu’s choice of language. “You know full well that there was no betrayal. On October 7, we went out to save lives while you froze. A real leader does not stutter in the face of a blood libel. He apologizes to the warriors and condemns the lies spread from the home.”

Contradictory narratives

In February this year, Netanyahu released a 55-page document with selected quotations from cabinet meetings in the years leading up to October 7, which painted a picture in which the premier ostensibly pushed for aggressive policies against Hamas, while his political rivals and security chiefs urged long-term deals with the terror group and blocked the assassinations of its leaders.

That document omitted the protocols of an October 1, 2023, meeting at which Netanyahu reportedly instructed his top advisers and security chiefs to maintain the status quo that saw the terror group receive economic incentives to maintain quiet.

“The prime minister expressed great appreciation to all the security services on their activities to maintain the quiet on all fronts,” read the leaked summary from the protocol of that meeting, reported by Channel 12, “with an emphasis on the holidays, and stresses that we must act with moderation in order to cool down the fronts and avoid escalation.”

In the meeting, according to the network, the security chiefs recommended that Israel move toward assassinating Hamas leaders. However, Netanyahu conditioned any such operations on conflict breaking out, and even then instructed the defense establishment to focus on the West Bank leadership.

At a Likud faction meeting in May 2023, reported by Kan and cited by Tel Aviv University’s INSS think tank, Netanyahu argued that 2021’s “Operation Guardian of the Walls … inflicted on Hamas the heaviest blow in its history —destroyed its aerial capabilities, its maritime capabilities, its underground capabilities. This caused a change in the balance of deterrence and at least it has worked like this for years, two years… Anyone who comes to harm us will now better understand the meaning of the words: ‘your blood is on your own heads’.”

In his 2022 memoir, “Bibi,” Netanyahu wrote that Hamas was sufficiently constrained and that he did not want to wage all-out war in Gaza when he was more concerned about Iran, Time magazine noted. “Did I really want to tie down the IDF in Gaza for years when we had to deal with Iran and a possible Syrian front?” he wrote. “The answer was categorically no. I had bigger fish to fry.”

Netanyahu for years maintained and publicly championed a policy under which Qatar delivered hundreds of millions of dollars into Gaza, saying the cash infusion was necessary to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in the Hamas-run enclave. Documents reported by The Times of Israel in March 2024 showed that Israel sought and valued Qatari aid for Gaza in the years leading up to Oct. 7.

According to a December 2023 New York Times report, in talks in Doha weeks before the Hamas invasion, then-Mossad chief David Barnea urged Qatar to continue the funding, since “Netanyahu’s government had recently decided to continue the policy.” In September 2023, Israel asked Qatar to increase the financial assistance it was giving to Gaza, the Yedioth Ahronoth daily reported in January 2026. Netanyahu denied the claim.

The payments continued even though Netanyahu was warned at least twice before the Hamas onslaught that the terror group’s military chief Muhammad Deif was diverting the funds to the Hamas military wing, Hebrew media reported in March 2025. Netanyahu denied the reports.

According to a Ynet report earlier this year, Netanyahu was presented with IDF intelligence reports detailing Hamas’s “Jericho’s Walls” plan to invade Israel as early as April 2018, despite his repeated public denials that he had ever seen or heard of such a plan before the October 7 attack.

Netanyahu’s office acknowledged in March 2025 that the premier’s intelligence officer received an Israel Defense Forces memo detailing suspicious Hamas activity three hours before the terror group’s October 7, 2023, invasion and onslaught, and didn’t pass it on. The premier’s office argued that this was justified given what it said was the document’s non-urgent framing.

In an affidavit to the High Court in April 2025, then Shin Bet chief Bar wrote that at 3:03 a.m. on October 7, all security agencies were issued an alert about “unusual preparations and the possibility of offensive intentions by Hamas.” Bar added that, at 5:15 a.m., “alongside various directives, I instructed that the Prime Minister’s military secretary be updated.”

Bar added: “I say this with pain – no one anticipated an attack of this scale, certainly not on that morning. The update to the Prime Minister was part of a series of directives I gave at the conclusion of that meeting, and it was delivered immediately, as part of the continuous chain of command from the moment I was alerted during the night until the end of that discussion.”

Netanyahu has for three years resisted the establishment of a state commission of inquiry into the failures surrounding the Hamas invasion and massacre.