Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ignored multiple warnings in the days and months leading up to the October 7 massacre, opposition leader and former prime minister Yair Lapid claimed following the release of pre-October 7 intelligence documents on Thursday.
The documents, spanning from February 2023 to an hour before the attack, indicate that Israel's defense echelon misread Hamas’s intentions, characterizing the terror group as deterred and seeking long-term economic arrangements.
"In complete contrast to his claims, Netanyahu was warned again and again before October 7, including by me, and he ignored every single warning," Lapid wrote on X/Twitter.
Lapid also posted a clip of himself from September 20, 2023, less than a month before the attack, warning the public that the nation was getting "dangerously close to a violent, multi-front confrontation."
In the 2023 statement, Lapid went on to say that based on defense establishment reports, clashes in the West Bank were reaching a dangerous volume and recent activity on the Gaza border was "precisely the type that led to past phases of war [with Gaza]."
In the video, Lapid then claimed that the Israeli government has established ways to deal with such threats, but that Netanyahu refused to work with the defense establishment to implement those strategies.
Gallant disputes Netanyahu's claims of fighting with defense establishment
Former defense minister Yoav Gallant also responded to the newly-published documents in a post on X, accusing the prime minister of lying about the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.
Specifically, Gallant claimed that Netanyahu waffled when initially presented with the plan to eliminate former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and did not make the decision fully independently, as was presented in the documents.
Additionally, Gallant clarified that the IDF and the entire defense establishment were fully ready for the January 2024 invasion of Rafah, and that the war cabinet and the IDF were in complete agreement on the subject.
The operational delays in March and April of that year were due to a shortage of ammunition.
Finally, the former defense minister asserted that he decided to mobilize IDF reservists at 9 a.m. on October 7, 2023, during the first situation assessment at the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv, which occured before the prime minister arrived.
Netanyahu, he claimed, simply restated Gallant's directives during a later security assessment meeting.
The order to mobilize the reservists, Gallant said in his post, was supported by the National Security Council and the IDF. "Not," he said, "going against an imaginary [force] that Netanyahu invents."
This is a developing story.