Did Israel have advance knowledge of 7 October?

There’s a theory about Pearl Harbor that has been circulating almost since the day the Japanese attacked the American Pacific Fleet on 7 December 1941.

It says that President Franklin Roosevelt knew the attack was coming and allowed it to happen because he wanted the United States to enter the Second World War and needed an event dramatic enough to change American public opinion.

It’s a compelling story, which probably explains why it has survived for more than 80 years. There’s just one problem. There’s no credible evidence that it happened.

That doesn’t mean there weren’t warnings before Pearl Harbor – there were plenty – the United States knew its relationship with Japan was deteriorating rapidly. It knew military action was increasingly possible and had it intercepted important Japanese communications. But historians have never uncovered evidence demonstrating that Roosevelt knew, unequivocally, that Pearl Harbor would be attacked on December 7 and deliberately stood aside. Instead, the Roosevelt Presidential Library says that most scholars regard Pearl Harbor as the result of missed clues, intelligence errors and overconfidence rather than conspiracy.

That’s an important distinction there because something remarkably similar is now happening over the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. Israel goes to the polls on October 27 in its first national election since the massacre, and the question of who knew what before October 7 has inevitably become politically charged. Recent reports have claimed that UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed warned Benjamin Netanyahu shortly before the attack that Hamas might be planning a major operation. Netanyahu strongly denies receiving such a warning, while his political opponents have seized on the reports as further evidence that warnings were ignored.

But behind those latest claims sits a much larger body of evidence, and some of it is deeply uncomfortable for Israel. For example, we now know that Israeli intelligence had obtained a Hamas invasion plan known as “Jericho Wall” well before October 7. It envisaged a large-scale ground invasion of Israeli communities and military positions. The Israelis treated the document as ‘aspiration’ because they didn’t believe that Hamas was capable of carrying out such a widescale attack. But in the months before the attack, Israeli Intelligence Unit 8200 personnel saw Hamas training in ways that increasingly resembled the plan and warned that it appeared to have become an operational capability rather than a theoretical ambition. Surveillance soldiers at Nahal Oz had also been reporting increasingly unusual activity along the Gaza border, including repeated Hamas training, digging and explosives near the fence, while one described Hamas constructing a replica Israeli observation position and practising drone attacks against it. Then, during the night before October 7, the Shin Bet detected the activation of 45 Israeli SIM cards by Hamas operatives, alongside other suspicious indicators. The problem wasn’t that Israel saw nothing. It was that the individual signs were repeatedly interpreted through an existing belief that Hamas neither wanted nor was capable of launching a war of this scale.

Israel’s own investigations have since been remarkably blunt about what went wrong. The IDF has concluded that its intelligence establishment badly misunderstood Hamas’s intentions and capabilities and, critically, failed to identify Hamas’s decision to actually launch the attack. It had information about what Hamas wanted and might be capable of doing – but failed to recognise the point at which planning and preparation became an imminent operation.

That distinction matters. Knowing your enemy has drawn up a plan to attack you isn’t the same as knowing when that plan will be used. Watching your enemy train for war isn’t the same as knowing war will begin next Saturday morning. Even receiving an ominous warning isn’t necessarily enough when you don’t know what it refers to, how reliable it is or when something might happen.

That last point has been reinforced over the past few days in media reports which claim that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar sent a message through an intermediary in September 2023 warning of a coming “earthquake” in prisoner negotiations and saying Israel should prepare to empty its prisons. This was echoed by a claim that UAE intelligence apparently also warned Israeli authorities that Hamas might carry out some form of violent action before the end of September.

Read those words today and they sound chilling.

But we’re reading them knowing what happened next. At the time, Israel was dealing with Hamas prisoner negotiations, continuing violence and instability elsewhere, and a steady flow of intelligence about multiple threats. Sinwar’s message didn’t say that thousands of Hamas terrorists were about to cross the Gaza border. He didn’t provide an attack date. He didn’t identify the communities that would be targeted. In fact, the reported warning pointed toward something happening before the end of September, which passed without the threatened event occurring.

And this is where hindsight becomes dangerous. Human nature is very good at gleaning insight after the fact. Once we know how a story ends, the clues suddenly arrange themselves into a neat line pointing directly toward the outcome. Something that looked ambiguous on October 1 can look blindingly obvious on October 8.

We do this all the time. An economy enters recession and suddenly everybody knew the government was making the wrong decisions. A company collapses and people discover all the warning signs that management apparently should have recognised. A disaster happens and somebody produces a memo from six months earlier and asks why nobody acted on it.

Sometimes that criticism is justified. Sometimes people really did miss things they should have seen. October 7 clearly falls into that category because Israel’s own military inquiries say there were serious systemic failures, entrenched assumptions about Hamas and intelligence that wasn’t properly interpreted or acted upon. A later IDF review concluded that the surprise did not occur in an absence of information. On the contrary, there was significant information available that should have produced a higher level of warning and readiness.

But that isn’t the same thing as knowing October 7 was coming.

So what is Israel really guilty of? There are really three different claims being mixed together in the debate.

The first is that Israel somehow helped facilitate the attack or deliberately allowed it to happen. There is zero credible evidence to support that claim.

The second is that Israeli leaders knew specifically that Hamas would attack on the morning of October 7 and chose not to prevent it. The investigations conducted don’t establish that either. In fact, the IDF’s own inquiry found that intelligence failed to identify Hamas’s final decision to launch the attack.

The third is that Israel possessed substantial information about Hamas’s plans, intentions and growing capabilities, but failed to correctly interpret what it was seeing and consequently wasn’t ready when the attack came.

This one is clearly true. And it’s serious enough without turning it into a conspiracy theory. There were people who got things wrong. There were assumptions about Hamas that should have been challenged. There were warning signs that deserved more weight. Israelis are entirely entitled to ask who made those decisions and why, particularly the families whose loved ones were killed or taken hostage.

But there’s another point here which risks getting lost in the rush to assign blame, and I think it’s an enormously important one.

Yes, Israel should have been better prepared for the attack which, we now know, took place on 7 October 2023. Its intelligence services should have placed more weight on some of the information they were receiving and people at senior levels made should have been more prepared to listen to warnings from subordinates.

But Israel didn’t launch October 7.

Hamas did.

Hamas planned the attack. Hamas trained for it. Hamas chose the date and gave the order. Hamas fighters crossed the border into Israel and murdered civilians in their homes and communities. They committed sexual violence, slaughtered families and carried 251 people back into Gaza as hostages.

Those were choices made by Hamas.

Israel’s failure was that it didn’t anticipate that evil as effectively as it should have and therefore failed to stop it. That’s a profound failure of national defence and it deserves accountability. But it isn’t remotely the same thing as responsibility for committing the atrocity itself.

Losing sight of that distinction takes us into very dangerous territory because it allows the aggressor to disappear from the story. Before long, instead of asking why Hamas deliberately murdered Israelis, we’re asking why Israelis didn’t do a better job of preventing themselves from being murdered.

That’s the wrong moral equation. If someone leaves their front door unlocked and a murderer walks through it, there may be a lesson about locking doors. It doesn’t make the householder responsible for the murder.

If there’s a positive to be taken from the terrible failures of October 7, it’s that Israel hasn’t simply shrugged and moved on. The IDF has conducted extensive investigations into what went wrong and has already begun restructuring the way its intelligence system thinks about warning and surprise. Intelligence warning has been explicitly restored to the centre of the Intelligence Directorate’s mission, while commanders have been told that critical thinking and a diversity of views must be encouraged so that a dominant interpretation of an enemy doesn’t harden into unquestioned orthodoxy.

None of that guarantees there will never be another surprise. Of course, and October 7 provides a brutal reminder of the importance of eternal vigilance.

But let’s be clear about what Israel is guilty of – and what it is not.

There’s a world of difference between saying someone should have known and proving that they did. Israel had warnings. It had intelligence. It had pieces of the puzzle and failed disastrously to put them together in time.

What it did not have, was advance knowledge that Hamas would launch its attack on the morning of October 7.

And whatever legitimate questions remain about Israel’s failure to foresee it, we shouldn’t allow those questions to obscure responsibility for the event itself.

Hamas decided to attack Israel and Hamas carried that attack out – raping, murdering and torturing over 1,200 innocent people.

Israel is guilty of leaving the front door open – but it isn’t the bloodthirsty murderer that exploited that weakness.

That was Hamas.

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