Netanyahu for years declined to kill terror chiefs, downplayed Hamas threat — report
Channel 12 investigation asserts a pattern of inaction and attempts at appeasing terror group, despite security chiefs’ repeated warnings of invasion; PMO: ‘Baseless lies’
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, a report claimed Saturday, exploring what was presented as a longstanding doctrine of inaction and hesitation that preceded the Palestinian terror group’s unprecedented invasion and massacre in southern Israel last year.
Netanyahu’s office flatly denied the allegations made by Channel 12 news, whose in-depth report highlighted the premier’s priority of defending his image as “Mr. Security” and his aversion to taking risks as key reasons why Israel was unprepared for Hamas’s deadly attack, which killed over 1,200 people and resulted in the kidnapping of over 250 people into Gaza.
The investigation said 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.
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. Then-US president Donald Trump has since said that Netanyahu had “disappointed” him on this matter and that he had wrongly sought to take credit for the assassination.
A day after Biden’s Israel speech, Trump — the GOP frontrunner for president — blasts Israel for lack of intelligence re: Hamas attack and says I'll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down,” on Soleimani mission. “That was a very terrible thing.” pic.twitter.com/ULAVJe31O1
— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) October 12, 2023
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 reported. He once again refused.
Six days before the October 7 onslaught, 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.
Sinwar recordings
The report asserted that around 2018, the intelligence community obtained recordings of Sinwar discussing mass invasions at the Gaza border, in addition to repeated warnings from IDF surveillance troops of Hamas training for a large-scale attack on the border.
The context of the intercepted Sinwar conversations was a mass protest movement at the time dubbed the “Great March of Return,” which was a series of weekly protests and riots along the Gaza security fence, where protesters and Hamas terrorists clashed with IDF troops stationed on the border.
The report claimed that the IDF Intelligence Directorate recorded Sinwar briefing senior Hamas members on his idea of having hundreds of terrorists from the elite Nukhba force storm the border fence and “meet the IDF at the embankments, grab a soldier and return,” at which point the masses of young men would “run to the kibbutzim, where they’ll already know what to do.”
This was Sinwar’s blueprint for the October 7 attack, the report noted, and the IDF had proof of it over five years before it was carried out: Storm the border, kidnap soldiers, and attack the communities in the area.
The report quoted Zvi Hauser, former chairman of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, as saying that “the issue is not that the intelligence didn’t know, but that Israel, which knew the reality in the area, did not act proactively.”
Instead of focusing on the intelligence of the attack plans or on targeting senior Hamas leaders, Netanyahu was laser-focused on building a state-of-the-art border wall that would prevent any chance of large-scale threat to Israeli territory, the report said.
But the new barrier was primarily focused on underground tunnel defense: The report stated that NIS 3.5 billion ($945 million) was invested in underground work and blocking Hamas tunnels, and only 3 percent of the project’s budget, NIS 122 million ($33 million), was invested in the above-ground fence.
The wall was never built to withstand a mass, above-ground attack and infiltration, and at best would delay attackers by about 15 minutes, as it was built in such a way that it was not resistant to explosives and could be plowed through with heavy machinery like tractors or bulldozers, the report said.
Refusal to target terror leaders
The report also stated that Netanyahu repeatedly rejected military recommendations to eliminate Hamas leadership, instead prioritizing non-military solutions like garnering Qatar’s financial support for the terror group, even in the face of hesitation from the Gulf state, which ended up funding Hamas’s military buildup.
Despite repeated warnings by defense officials as a flareup between Israel and Hamas escalated in 2021, Netanyahu continued to downplay the risks, preferring political maneuvering, the report claimed. It said the premier defied IDF and Shin Bet suggestions that he should carry out targeted assassinations of senior terror leaders Sinwar and Deif when presented with the opportunities. (Both were eventually killed in recent months during the ongoing war.)
Then came the judicial overhaul plan and the mass anti-government protests of 2023, which senior IDF and intelligence officers repeatedly said would weaken the country and fracture the domestic landscape, leaving Israel vulnerable to attack. Netanyahu, hellbent on pushing the reform plans, painted military leaders as partisan political players who were working against him personally.
According to the report, the IDF’s research division sent a letter to Netanyahu claiming that “in closed rooms and discussions of our enemies in Iran, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, they assess that this [internal Israeli furor over the overhaul] is a deep crisis that places Israel at one of its weakest points since its establishment.”
The report claimed that over the course of 2023, Israel’s military and intelligence leadership continuously approached the prime minister with warnings of an imminent attack, but that Netanyahu shook off the warnings and dismissed the possibility.
On October 1 that year, six days before the attack, Netanyahu met with the IDF chief of staff and the head of the Shin Bet, where they warned him of the growing threat of an attack.
“We need to prepare for a major campaign against Hamas,” said IDF chief Herzi Halevi, according to the report.
“Sinwar feels increasingly free to act, he needs to be eliminated,” Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar reportedly said, presenting an action plan to eliminate Hamas’s leadership, including Sinwar and Deif.
But once again, Netanyahu reportedly brushed it off.
Six days later, Sinwar and Deif led Hamas’s coordinated, multipronged assault on Israel, sending thousands of terrorists into Israeli territory who massacred civilians in their homes and at a music festival while committing sexual assault and other atrocities, all while the military struggled to get a grasp of the scale of the attack.
That onslaught triggered a war that is entering its 14th month, and has spread across the region to multiple fronts.
‘They built a plan how to save Netanyahu’
Separately, Channel 12 quoted a source close to Netanyahu’s office as saying that already on October 8, a day after the attack, the premier “demanded that his advisers build a plan of action on how to get him out of [responsibility for] the incident. From there, everything started to unfold.”
“The police investigations that have been made public are just the tip of the iceberg,” the source claimed. “The public does not understand what happened in the Prime Minister’s Office after October 7. While parents still didn’t know what had happened to their children, while entire families were being taken hostage, they built a plan for how to save Netanyahu.”
‘Baseless lies’
Commenting on the in-depth report, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) called it “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 also rejected a claim in the report that Israel didn’t have the capabilities to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2018, while stating that “the claim about Soleimani is a lie.” It was unclear whether this was a denial of the claim that the premier had passed on an opportunity to kill Soleimani, or a denial of Trump’s remark that he had tried to take credit for the American assassination of the Iranian terror chief.
The statement insisted once again that the prime minister was only presented with intelligence about a Hamas plan for a mass raid into Israel after the October 7 attack.
Netanyahu’s office also asserted that he extended Operation Guardian of the Walls in Gaza in 2021 to try to kill Deif, and noted that he oversaw the killing of PIJ leader Baha Abu al-Ata in 2019.
The PMO said that the intelligence community had agreed that Hamas was deterred and could be incentivized to agree to long-term ceasefires through economic deals. The PMO also said that there was never any intelligence that Qatari money was being used for terrorism.
The main threat according to Israeli intelligence, said 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,” argued the PMO.
