3 years after October 7, evidence mounts that Israel had advance knowledge of attacks

@Andre__Damon7 October 2026facebook iconIsrael's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at a state memorial ceremony in memory of those killed in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, at Mount Herzl Cemetery in Jerusalem, Monday, Oct. 5, 2026. [AP Photo/Debbie Hill/Pool Photo]Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received repeated, detailed warnings about the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, according to multiple reports published in Israeli and American media outlets over the past month.

The reports substantiate the assessment made by the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) in a December 2, 2023 perspective titled “Documents expose Israeli conspiracy to facilitate October 7 attack,” which concluded that Israeli officials had “made a deliberate decision to stand down in order to facilitate the attack.”

The stand-down, the WSWS wrote, was part of a conspiracy “aimed at establishing a pretext for a long-planned genocide against the people of Gaza.” The Israeli government, in alliance with US imperialism, used the attack as the pretext for a genocide in Gaza and a war that has since spread to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Qatar and Iran.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported September 8, citing three senior foreign sources, that Emirati President Mohamed bin Zayed telephoned Netanyahu about a week and a half before the attack to warn him of a major Hamas move. Bin Zayed “urged Netanyahu to take the situation seriously,” the newspaper wrote, but the prime minister “reacted with relative calm.” According to Haaretz, none of the heads of the army, the Mossad or the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, “knew about bin Zayed’s warning.”

The New York Times reported September 25 that two people told it bin Zayed had warned Netanyahu that Hamas was weighing a major attack. Netanyahu met his security chiefs on October 1, 2023 to discuss Gaza “and never mentioned the warning, according to minutes of the meeting reviewed by The Times.” He said any Israeli move against Gaza could wreck the chance of diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia, the Times wrote.

Abbas Kamel, then Egypt’s intelligence chief, flew to Israel on September 26, 2023, 11 days before the attack, The Atlantic reported September 25. The magazine wrote: “His message, according to one former Israeli official later briefed on the visit, was: If you don’t change course, Gaza is going to blow up in your faces.”

The Wall Street Journal reported September 27, citing an official of an Arab government, that the Egyptians “continued to warn Israel up until 48 hours before the attack.”

Sufian Abu Zaida, a Palestinian mediator, told NPR in a Wednesday report that Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, dictated a message for Israel on September 14, 2023: “There will be an earthquake in the negotiations, and the Israelis should prepare to empty their prisons.” Ronen Bar, then Shin Bet chief, briefed Netanyahu on Sinwar’s “earthquake” threats the next day, according to Haaretz’s September 8 report.

Netanyahu’s office called the Haaretz report an “absolute lie” on September 8. Netanyahu then flew secretly to Abu Dhabi on September 27 and asked bin Zayed to deny it, the Associated Press reported September 28. Netanyahu confirmed the trip but denied the request. That week he sued Haaretz and other Israeli outlets for defamation, calling their reports “blood libels.”

Netanyahu has refused for three years to establish a state commission of inquiry into the attack. In a campaign video in August, quoted by The Atlantic, he blamed security officials for not waking him immediately on October 7: “In the lead-up to October, there were so many warning signs, so many indications, that an attack was imminent ... Had they woken me up, everything would have looked different.”

The New York Times reported November 30, 2023 that Israel had held Hamas’s battle plan, code-named “Jericho Wall,” for more than a year before the attack and that officials “dismissed the plan as aspirational.”

In July 2023 a veteran analyst in the army’s signals intelligence agency, Unit 8200, warned in emails the Times later viewed that Hamas had held an intensive daylong exercise resembling the plan. A colonel in the army’s Gaza Division replied: “In short, let’s wait patiently.” She wrote back: “It is a plan designed to start a war.”

The Shin Bet’s investigation concluded in March 2025 that the massacre could have been prevented had the agency acted differently and faulted a policy of quiet in Gaza that let Hamas build up its forces. Netanyahu had ordered the army and the intelligence agencies to keep Hamas in power as “an effective, restrained, and restraining governing authority,” according to a state ombudsman’s report the New York Times cited September 25.

In the same weeks that the warnings were arriving, Netanyahu was promoting his plans to remake the Middle East. He told the UN General Assembly on September 22, 2023, 15 days before the attack, that peace with Saudi Arabia “will truly create a new Middle East,” and displayed a map that included the West Bank and Gaza within Israel’s borders.

Can you explain the role of Unit 8200 and the Shin Bet within Israel's state apparatus and how they relate to the political leadership?How does the bipartisan continuity between the Biden and Trump administrations on striking Iran fit into the broader history of US foreign policy being independent of which party holds office?Ask more questions at SocialismAI.comThe war was the occasion for the launching of a campaign for what Netanyahu called the “new Middle East,” as part of a broader eruption of imperialist violence, whose central target was Iran. On October 9, two days after the attack, Netanyahu promised local leaders from southern Israel that “we are going to change the Middle East.”

The Gaza Health Ministry’s count of Palestinians killed by Israel since October 2023 reached 74,250 on Wednesday, 1,467 of them since the cease-fire that took effect October 10, 2025. A UN commission of inquiry found in September 2025 that “Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” Israel invaded Lebanon in 2024 and again this year, seized the buffer zone in southern Syria after the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and bombed Yemen and Qatar. Netanyahu told the Israeli channel i24NEWS on September 2, 2026, in Israel National News’ translation: “My intention was that ultimately we would confront Iran, the head of the octopus, and cut off its tentacles.”

Within weeks of the attacks, the World Socialist Web Site warned that US imperialism was preparing to attack Iran. “The US is using the present crisis to put into effect long-standing plans for a war with Iran, as the Middle Eastern front of the US war with Russia and war plans against China,” it wrote in an October 16, 2023 perspective, “As it gives Israel a green light for genocide, US prepares war against Iran.”

These preparations were initiated under the Biden administration and then launched under the Trump administration. Amos Hochstein, a senior adviser to former US President Joe Biden, said on CBS’s Face the Nation on April 19 that the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites in June 2025 carried out “the strikes that we had thought internally in the Biden administration, we may have to take if there was a second term.” He added: “We did war games. We did some practice runs on what it would look like.” It was a totally bipartisan policy.

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a new war against Iran, assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on its first day. Al Jazeera reported August 28 that Iranian authorities had counted 3,527 dead. After a cease-fire broke down in July, US warships resumed their blockade of Iranian ports.

US President Donald Trump asked the UN General Assembly on September 22 whether he should “annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly.” On September 25 the Wall Street Journal wrote, citing US officials, that Trump “has told aides he expects to resume bombing Iran after the November midterms.”

The Trump administration is sending a third aircraft carrier strike group and an additional Marine expeditionary unit to the Middle East, adding up to 10,000 troops.

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