Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims, for the first time, that senior defense officials deliberately chose not to wake him on the morning of the October 7, 2023 Hamas invasion, according to The Times of Israel. The claim escalates the prime minister's public criticism of the security establishment's decisions during the attack.
In a significant escalation of his public criticism of the security establishment, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now claims that senior defense officials deliberately chose not to wake him on the morning of the October 7, 2023 Hamas invasion, according to a report by The Times of Israel. The accusation—which Netanyahu had not made before in public—marks a hardening from his prior acknowledgments that he was not woken and shifts the blame from omission to intentionality.
The prime minister's account of that morning has evolved across multiple statements. On July 7, Netanyahu told Israeli media that he immediately understood the Hamas attack was a war. The following day, July 8, he said in an interview that security officials feared a miscalculation and that he would have ordered the military to attack had he been woken. Then on Monday evening, Aug 31, Netanyahu told Mossad Director Roman Gofman that he was not woken during the attack, adding that "everything would have looked different" if he had been. Later that evening, Netanyahu publicly addressed the question of why security brass did not wake him, offering an explanation without attributing deliberate intent. The current claim of a deliberate decision to keep him uninformed goes a step further.
As The Zioneer has reported previously, the question of who knew what and when on Oct 7 has been a recurring fault line in Israeli public discourse. Netanyahu's evolving narrative—from immediate recognition of war, to miscalculation by security officials, to now alleged deliberate omission—reflects the ongoing political and legal scrutiny of decision-making during the deadliest attack on Israel.
It remains unclear whether Netanyahu's latest claim is based on new information or a reinterpretation of known events. The Times of Israel report attributes the assertion to the prime minister, but his office has not issued a formal statement. The defense establishment has not officially responded to the accusation of deliberate omission.
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