Netanyahu says officials deliberately did not wake him on Oct 7

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused security officials of deliberately not waking him on the morning of Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack, intensifying a political fight over responsibility for the security failures that preceded the assault.

Netanyahu said in a live Instagram interview on Tuesday that, if he had been woken, he would have ordered the army onto alert and warned towns near the Gaza border. He said the matter had been hidden from the public.

The prime minister made similar claims in a podcast interview published Monday, blaming senior military officials and Ronen Bar, who headed the Shin Bet security service at the time. Netanyahu said they did not wake him because they wanted to avoid what he described as a miscalculation over military escalation with Hamas.

His remarks came a day after his wife, Sara Netanyahu, claimed in a Channel 14 television interview that opposition figure Yair Golan knew of the Hamas attack plan before it happened. Channel 14 is close to the government.

Golan, a former deputy military chief of staff who leads Israel's centre-left Democrats party, threatened to sue Sara Netanyahu for 2.5 million shekels, about $830,000, unless she apologised within 24 hours and paid compensation to survivors of the Nova music festival attack.

Golan went to southern Israel on October 7 and rescued at least six people at the Nova site, where at least 370 people were killed. He accused Sara Netanyahu of spreading a false conspiracy to recast rescuers as traitors.

The Democrats party condemned her remarks, and Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief described as a leading potential challenger to Netanyahu, criticised what he called a “mad conspiracy of betrayal”.

The dispute comes before close-fought Israeli elections later this year and amid continuing debate over who was responsible for the failures before the October 7 attack. A Channel 13 poll in August found 40 percent of Israelis, including 63 percent of voters for the current right-wing coalition, believed internal treason led to the attack.

Hamas's attack killed 1,221 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures. Militants also took 251 hostages into Gaza, 44 of them already dead. Israel's offensive in Gaza has killed at least 73,462 people, according to the Gaza health ministry, whose figures the United Nations considers reliable.