Netanyahu, who set policy and held the levers of power, now seeks to pin all blame for October 7 on others

Nobody in Israel — literally nobody — has seriously claimed that Israel’s security chiefs were not profoundly to blame for the failure to prevent the Hamas-led  invasion, massacre and abductions of October 7, 2023.

Benjamin Netanyahu, however — the prime minister today, on that blackest of all days in modern Israeli history, and for almost 16 of the past 17 and a half years — is now seeking to assert that they were solely to blame.

They failed to read the signs ahead of the invasion, notably in the final hours before Hamas burst through the fence, and in their hubris and “miscalculation” deliberately chose not to wake him, he claimed this week. If they had alerted him, he would have ordered a mobilization and prevented the attack. “If they had woken me, everything would have been different. That’s the story of October 7,” he declared.

IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi, Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, IDF intel chief Aharon Haliva et al indeed failed to read the blood-red writing on the wall in the days, months, even years before the catastrophe. But so, too, of course, did Netanyahu — and he set the policy through those days, months and years.

He backed — indeed passionately championed — years of Qatari funding of Hamas-controlled Gaza, to the tune of hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars, right up until the invasion, proclaiming that it was essential to keep Gaza from humanitarian disaster, when it was manifestly easing Hamas’s rule in Gaza and helping finance its terrorist army.

Hindsight is a wonderful and terrible thing. Simply looking back at the photographs of Mohammed Al-Emadi — Qatar’s envoy to Gaza and chairman of Doha’s National Committee for the Reconstruction of Gaza; the man with the suitcases of cash — holding press conferences at Hamas-run Gaza hospitals, meeting in Gaza with the Hamas-appeasing UNRWA’s Gaza head, guarded by Hamas gunmen, it is impossible not to internalize that this money was enabling the Hamas war machine.

And yet, despite being reportedly warned at least twice that this was the case, Netanyahu kept the money flowing. According to a December 2023 New York Times report, in talks in Doha just weeks before the Hamas invasion, then-Mossad chief David Barnea urged Qatar to maintain 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 denies that he was warned against the continued funding, and denied the Yedioth report, too.

Post-October 7, moreover, Netanyahu allowed Qatar a central role in negotiations on ceasefires and hostage deals, despite the assessment from within Israel’s own negotiating team that Qatar continued to represent Hamas’s interests rather than mediate. To this day, he employs one of several of his prime ministerial aides alleged to have been working from the PMO during the war to promote Qatar’s interests and image. To this day, he refuses to bar that kind of employment by classifying Qatar as an enemy state.

Likewise, he now derides those security chiefs for holding to the false conception that Hamas was deterred from attacking Israel, and maintained this week that “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.” Yet he told a Likud faction meeting in May 2023, as reported by Kan and cited by Tel Aviv University’s INSS think tank, that Gaza’s terrorist rulers were indeed deterred. He 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.”

In his memoir published in 2022, he contended 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, as 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.”

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.

The security chiefs on whom he now seeks to pin all responsibility for the failures surrounding October 7 have long since left the scene. Ronen Bar stepped down in June 2025, Herzi Halevi departed in March of that year, Aharon Haliva in August 2024 — all of them directly acknowledging their personal culpability in the disaster.

(The defense minister of the day, Yoav Gallant, who publicly warned Netanyahu six months before the invasion that the judicial overhaul their government was advancing was creating an internal rift that had penetrated into the defense establishment and was emboldening Israel’s enemies, was fired for that speech, quickly rehired, but fired permanently in November 2024. Netanyahu cited a “lack of trust” between them. Gallant noted that this related to his insistence on Haredi conscription, his prioritizing of efforts to return the hostages, and his demands for a state commission of inquiry into October 7.)

Only Netanyahu, the man who directed all policy and held all the levers of power, remains in situ — unrepentant, increasingly unwilling to acknowledge any responsibility, cynically attempting to place all blame on others, and resisting the establishment of a state commission of inquiry that would get to the bottom of everything that went so terribly wrong.

He says the security chiefs deliberately chose not to wake him that fateful early morning. They have said they updated his office. His office admits it did receive an IDF memo detailing suspicious Hamas activity three hours before the invasion, but says that it was framed as non-urgent and therefore was not conveyed to Netanyahu. He says the protocols of those ominous hours will vindicate him, but won’t agree to the powerhouse inquiry that would delve into them.

He claims that he’s not accusing those security chiefs of “betrayal” — just of failure: failure, born of arrogance and hubris, to recognize what was unfolding in Gaza and thus to safeguard the country. All of which they are indeed guilty of… and so is he.

Meanwhile, his wife is plainly accusing the security establishment of betrayal, by targeting a current political rival, left-wing Democrats party leader Yair Golan, a former IDF deputy chief of staff who rushed to help fight the invaders on the morning of October 7. In a pre-recorded interview with the slavishly pro-Netanyahu Channel 14, Sara Netanyahu suggested Golan knew ahead of time that Hamas was about to invade. “When you’re a military man of such high rank, claiming that you fought on October 7, already early in the morning you were there, already dressed and ready at a very, very early hour when others didn’t know, such as the prime minister…,” she falsely told the watching world. In fact, the retired general headed south at around 8.30 a.m., two hours after the Hamas attack began.

The latest Netanyahu husband-and-wife offensive is designed, of course, to bolster his chances of reelection. Far from following the security chiefs in vacating the scene, Netanyahu is desperately attempting to convince the electorate not only that he was a deliberately uninformed prime ministerial victim on October 7, but that he has risen superbly to the challenge of fighting back against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran for the three years since, and is the only politician capable of seeing the fight through to the definitive victory he maintains is at hand.

Yet his post-October 7 record, too, is one of failure — tactical successes on several war fronts, but strategic drift. Hamas was massively degraded, but Netanyahu continues to block US-led attempts to cement diplomatic benefits from the IDF’s achievements. And so Hamas is recovering. Hezbollah was devastated by those thousands of exploding beepers two years ago, but is attempting a revival.

And the head of the octopus, the extremist regime in Iran, has thus far resisted the joint US-Israel effort to destroy its rogue nuclear program and liberate the Iranian people and the rest of the world from its tyranny. This largely resulted from the US failure to prevent Tehran’s takeover of the Strait of Hormuz at the start of the war in February. But, also in large part, it stems from the flawed planning for the regime’s takedown, as advocated by Netanyahu — the reliance on invading Kurdish forces, the wooing of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the belief that an entrenched regime demonstrably ready to mass-murder its own populace could be rapidly ousted.

At home, meanwhile, Netanyahu has weakened our nation, empowering lawless ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, resolutely maintaining the mass exemption from military service of ultra-Orthodox males at terrible cost to the overstretched standing army and reservist forces, continuing to pursue the subjugation of the judiciary.

His government essentially indulges settler extremists, who set out every Shabbat, and most days in between, to attack Palestinian civilians, at times accompanied by uniformed IDF troops and other security forces, at times with vehicles and weapons provided by the state. These attacks shame all of us, further corrode Israel’s dire international standing, give fresh fuel to those around the world who work to destroy Israel and harm Diaspora Jews, and highlight the army’s inability and apparent unwillingness to fulfill its West Bank responsibilities.

While settler extremists this week kidnapped/detained a pro-Palestinian British activist, subsequently handing him over to the police, the IDF proves relentlessly incapable of detaining alleged settler terrorists until the police can arrive to make arrests.

Netanyahu’s main election rival, Gadi Eisenkot, has declared that anybody who held a central role at the time of October 7 needs to step down. Netanyahu counters that Eisenkot, and indeed the entire Zionist opposition bloc, would lead Israel to existential disaster, partner with Arabs within and without, and create a Palestinian state.

But no matter how much he tries to deflect all blame, it was on Netanyahu’s watch that the Hamas terrorist government he strategically funded for years burst through the border, with an ambition — a declared ambition that it came all too close to fulfilling — to turn all of Israel into a Palestinian state.

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This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.