The October 7 warnings threatening Netanyahu’s Israeli election campaign

The controversy over warnings Benjamin Netanyahu is alleged to have received in advance of the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attacks continues to dog the Israeli prime minister ahead of knife-edge elections slated for October 27.

The latest blow to Netanyahu came on Sunday, after a Wall Street Journal report suggested that he had been warned of the attack by Egypt’s intelligence chief, Abbas Kamel, who reportedly phoned the prime minister just days before the attack, underscoring previous warnings in September 2023, when he is said to have flown to Israel to warn security officials in person that Hamas was planning an attack.

News of Kamel’s warnings follows reports in Israeli and US media earlier this month suggesting that Netanyahu had been warned by United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ) in the week before the attack that Hamas’s then-leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was planning the assault.

Netanyahu has been emphatic in his denials of having received any warning of an attack, and has sued over the claims.

Neither Kamel nor the Egyptian government has commented on the reports. The UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said it does not comment on media reports or speculation concerning conversations between government leaders.

Netanyahu has attempted to shift the blame for not being alerted to the attack onto the former head of Israel’s internal security service, Ronen Bar, who announced on Monday that he would sue the prime minister, a longtime political nemesis, for defamation as a result.

Polling suggests that events surrounding the October 7 attacks, which killed 1,139 people in Israel, and questions over responsibility for security failures that preceded them remain important issues for voters ahead of the upcoming parliamentary elections. Continued media coverage has also kept the trauma of the attack at the centre of public debate, more than three years after Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza, killing more than 74,000 Palestinians.

“We know that Egypt’s Chief of Intelligence flew to Israel on September 26 and warned Israel of a … Hamas attack,” Ahron Bregman, an Israeli security analyst and senior teaching fellow at King’s College London, said. “We also know that similar messages came from MBZ.”

“Why they were ignored? That’s the magic of what we call ‘conception’,” he said, referring to ha-conceptzia, the Hebrew term for the underlying assumptions on which Israeli security decisions are often based. “And Israel, not only Netanyahu, believed in the conception that Hamas was deterred and all it wanted was to [push] Israel a little bit to ease the pressure and blockade on Gaza.”

Entrenched politics

Netanyahu’s two main rivals in the race for prime minister have both seized on the alleged warnings.

Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, leader of the Beyachad (Together) alliance, said if the allegations were proven true, Netanyahu “cannot continue to serve in his position for another minute”. Former military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, whose Yashar party leads Netanyahu’s Likud in the polls by the slenderest of margins, said, “Netanyahu received dozens of warnings for October 7 and ignored them all. He is unfit.”

The reports do not appear to have had a significant effect on the election polls, but, all the same, the latest revelations in The Wall Street Journal were likely to concern those within Netanyahu’s campaign who had already invested significant time and effort in rebutting the initial round of stories claiming he had been warned by the UAE leader, London-based Israeli academic and media analyst Ayala Panievsky told Al Jazeera.

“However, the opinion polls have been quite stable for years now. I wouldn’t expect a significant portion of Netanyahu voters to break with him over this,” she said. “It could hurt him with voter turnout and excitement among his base, however, which could be significant as the polls seem relatively close.”

Analysts suggested that part of the explanation lay in the Likud party’s and Netanyahu’s longstanding portrayal of themselves as political outsiders under attack from what they were encouraged to see as a hostile political establishment. That narrative may make supporters more inclined to accept the prime minister’s denials and his criticism of the security services and other institutions.

“I think everyone expected [the reports on Netanyahu being given warnings] to be a landmark story, one serious enough to really damage Netanyahu,” Israeli political analyst Nimrod Flaschenberg said.

“However, Netanyahu’s rebuttals and threats to sue have given his supporters something to hold on to,” Flaschenberg said. “They’re now free to dismiss the stories as fake, just as the opposition is pushing them. The politics of this really have become that entrenched.”

Years of persecution

However, analysts cautioned that it remains unclear whether acting on any warnings would ultimately have prevented an attack on the scale of October 7. They also pointed to the wider context in Gaza, where years of Israeli restrictions and military actions, widely condemned by rights groups, the United Nations, and a number of states, had contributed to deep grievances and a heightened risk of violence.

“Strategic surprises cannot be prevented,” Bregman continued.

“A determined opponent will eventually inflict on you an October 7. You can delay it. Prevent it temporarily, but you can’t stop it,” he said, “Israel’s next October 7 will come from the West Bank. Not now, but in the future. Maybe in five, 10, 30 years, but it’s inevitable.”