The chair of the powerful US House foreign affairs committee has said Israel received a warning from Egypt of potential violence three days before Hamas caught Israeli forces off-guard in a large-scale attack.
“We know that Egypt has warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could happen,” the Republican Michael McCaul told reporters on Wednesday, after a closed-door intelligence briefing for lawmakers on the crisis.
“I don’t want to get too much into classified [details], but a warning was given. I think the question was at what level.”
McCaul said the attack may have been planned as long as a year ago. “We’re not quite sure how we missed it. We’re not quite sure how Israel missed it,” he told reporters.
Netanyahu sets up emergency Israeli unity government and war cabinet Read more
Cairo has not commented officially on suggestions that it may have offered an early warning to Israel. However, Egyptian media with close ties to intelligence services on Wednesday quoted senior security sources denying Israeli press reports that such a warning was issued.
Egyptian intelligence services repeatedly warned Israel that the desperate humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip meant it could “explode”, the Financial Times quoted two officials as saying on Wednesday. The warnings were not of a specific attack but were more general, the officials reportedly said.
On Monday, an Egyptian official told the Associated Press that Egypt, which often serves as a mediator between Israel and Hamas, had spoken repeatedly with the Israelis about “something big”, without elaborating.
The unnamed official claimed Israeli officials were focused on the West Bank and played down the threat from Gaza. “We have warned them an explosion of the situation is coming, and very soon, and it would be big. But they underestimated such warnings,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Israel is reeling from the deadliest attack in its 75-year history, after more than 1,500 militants stormed through the Gaza security barrier in a coordinated land, air and sea strike on the Jewish Sabbath.
Hamas’s ability to remain undetected while preparing and launching such a big, complex assault from the closely monitored and heavily guarded Gaza Strip represents an unprecedented intelligence failure for Israel.
Sir Alex Younger, a former head of MI6, said Israel’s failure to pre-empt the attack stemmed from a “failure of imagination”.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s The Today Podcast, Younger said he believed there were two main reasons why Israel’s intelligence community had no knowledge of the impending attack.
“The first is, the really big failures that are labelled as intelligence failures … are in fact failures of imagination,” said Younger. “9/11 classically was that. The assumption was not that we were vulnerable to anything in terms of this type of attack. The assumption was that it essentially wasn’t possible.
<p…
2023-10-12 02:20:56
Article from www.theguardian.com
rnrn