Egypt’s Warning to Israel
· The Atlantic
When Israel’s leaders gathered in Jerusalem on September 26, 2023, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the surprise assault by Syria and Egypt as a cautionary tale, one of missed intelligence warnings and self-delusion. “We do not underestimate any threat,” he said.
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Roughly two hours before Netanyahu took the stage, a chartered Cessna jet linked to Egypt’s intelligence service had touched down at Ben Gurion Airport, about 30 miles away. The jet rolled to a stop in an isolated section of the airport used for sensitive diplomatic and security missions. Abbas Kamel, Egypt’s intelligence chief and one of the region’s most influential security officials, had come to Israel on a most sensitive mission.
Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood–aligned terrorist group that controlled Gaza, appeared to be mobilizing for a major attack, Kamel said, according to Israeli, Egyptian, Arab, U.S., and European officials who were briefed about his visit after October 7. The window to prevent a disaster was closing. He recommended that the Israeli government grant Hamas economic concessions to avert conflict. His message, according to one former Israeli official later briefed on the visit, was: If you don’t change course, Gaza is going to blow up in your faces.
Kamel didn’t provide Israeli officials with a date or specific information on what turned out to be a multipronged attack on Israel less than two weeks later, on October 7. And it’s not clear exactly with whom he met. The Egyptian plane remained on the ground in Israel for 67 minutes, according to an Israeli-airport-authority flight log, before returning to Cairo. (Independent flight-tracking applications confirm the plane’s journey.)
What the Israeli officials did with Kamel’s warning remains an open question three years after the most devastating surprise attack in Israel’s history. But officials from seven different countries I spoke with said that Kamel’s visit should have set off alarms across the top ranks of the Israeli government. Netanyahu attended a classified briefing following the Yom Kippur War commemoration, according to his public schedule, and soon after approved some economic concessions to Hamas. Officials who spoke with me stressed that the mere presence of the Egyptian intelligence chief in Israel should have demonstrated the urgency of the issue. “The messenger was the message,” a former Israeli official told me. “There is no world,” this official said, where top Israeli officials meet with the head of Egyptian intelligence “and Bibi is not aware.”
Netanyahu’s office, in the days after the attack, denied that he’d received any warnings, directly or indirectly, from Egypt over the situation in Gaza. Spokesmen for Netanyahu and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi didn’t respond to my repeated requests for comment when I asked about Kamel’s visit. The then-head of Netanyahu’s national-security council, Tzachi Hanegbi, denied to me this week that there had been a visit from Kamel or an Egyptian warning of any kind.
Kamel’s 2023 visit, details of which have not been previously reported, underscores what dozens of sources have told me: that the Israeli government was repeatedly told of threatening activity by Hamas in the lead-up to October 7.
A United Nations envoy who was in the Middle East at the time publicly warned of a latent conflict that could bring “grave consequences” while privately scrambling to defuse tensions between Israel and Hamas. The president of the United Arab Emirates, Mohamed bin Zayed, called Netanyahu to warn about the possibility of an imminent attack, after being briefed on intelligence findings from Egyptian and Palestinian sources, according to U.S. and Arab officials with knowledge of the call. Earlier this month, Israel’s Haaretz reported the leaders’ call; I confirmed with multiple officials that the call took place. Netanyahu denied the report and has threatened to sue Haaretz. The UAE didn’t respond to a request for comment.
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Current and former Israeli, Arab, and U.S. officials in Israel tell me that they all experienced the same phenomenon in 2023: an arrogance on the part of Netanyahu bred by the deep-seated belief that Israel had the upper hand against Hamas. “It seemed clear that, for whatever reason, the West Bank was their priority,” a former senior U.S. official involved in talks with the Israeli government told me. “They were confident—even cocky—that they had the situation under control.”
The Hamas attack, 11 days after Kamel’s visit, resulted in the deaths of approximately 1,200 people, primarily civilians, and the abduction into Gaza of 251 hostages during coordinated raids on communities, military bases, and an outdoor music festival. Israel launched a crushing retaliatory campaign that killed more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of whom were civilians, according to the territory’s Health Ministry. Hamas’s leadership and thousands of combatants have been killed. The attacks on Israel and the Gaza war that followed produced one of the more devastating humanitarian tragedies of the 21st century.
The Netanyahu government’s stunning lack of preparation before the October 7 invasion is perhaps the most important issue in next month’s Israeli election. Netanyahu, who has been prime minister longer than any other politician in Israel’s history, is facing the most serious challenge of his career.
Many Israelis, including Netanyahu’s main rival, the former military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, have demanded an independent state inquiry into the military and intelligence failures in the run-up to the October 7 attacks. But Netanyahu has continuously refused to set up the kind of independent inquiry that followed past security failures, including the Yom Kippur War. The prime minister has instead attempted to establish a politically appointed commission of inquiry, which he said would include opposition representatives. The attempt was highly controversial; opposition leaders have refused to advance the proposal over concerns that the probe would favor Netanyahu’s government. While the wait for an inquiry continues, dozens of current and former Israeli, Egyptian, Arab, European, and U.S. officials have spoken with me, and their accounts help tell the story of what went wrong that fall.
Since Egypt and Israel signed the Camp David peace accords, in 1978, their relationship can be described as, at best, a cold peace. But the two nations have a common desire to subdue the threat of Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza, which borders both countries. Intelligence sharing between Egypt and Israel has thrived, particularly since al-Sisi became president, in 2014—even when their diplomatic relationship founders.
Most of the intelligence reports in the weeks before the October 7 attacks, including Egypt’s, pointed to the renewal of conventional attacks—such as rocket fire—by Hamas and other armed factions in Gaza. They also warned of a spillover of violence into the West Bank. But intelligence sources inside Gaza conveyed to Egypt a more ominous picture, leading Egypt and the UAE to flag to Israel the prospect that something unprecedented was in the works. “For Kamel to go to Israel” for a single hour, an Egyptian official told me about the September 2023 visit, “meant that al-Sisi himself felt: You need to go there and tell them yourself.”
The Israeli government’s focus, however, was elsewhere. The country was already in the grip of its deepest domestic crisis in decades. For months, Israel had been consumed by Netanyahu’s effort to overhaul the judicial system, a constitutional confrontation that was protested by hundreds of thousands and opened deep fissures within the military and within society. And a surge in Israeli-Palestinian violence in the West Bank had already made 2023 the deadliest year in decades for West Bank Palestinians, with Israeli military raids, Palestinian attacks, and settler violence contributing to the combustible atmosphere. Israel surged military personnel and resources into the territory. Biden administration officials sought to ease tensions in the West Bank while other international and regional negotiators focused on Gaza.
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Israel established a comprehensive land, sea, and air blockade of Gaza in 2007, when Hamas seized control of the territory, and crossings at Egypt’s border with Gaza, in Rafah, have been tightly restricted since. Freedom of movement became virtually impossible for the 2.1 million people who lived in the 141-square-mile territory. Israel and Hamas had last fought a war there in May 2021. That 11-day conflict ended in a cease-fire—brokered, notably, by Kamel, among others. Hamas appeared to have little interest in abandoning the uneasy truce. But international observers picked up on signs that the situation inside Gaza was changing. Long before the summer of 2023, one international negotiator in the region told me, contacts were reporting that “something was cooking,” though the details were vague and the signals confusing.
By August, tensions in Gaza had clearly heightened, in part because Qatar froze deliveries of Egyptian fuel that it had been sending to Gaza since 2021. Hamas resold the fuel and used the proceeds to help pay public-sector workers, a key mechanism by which it maintained control in the Strip. Hamas called for demonstrations at the Erez border crossing over Qatar’s delayed aid, as well as other lingering disputes like the treatment of Palestinian prisoners. The crossing is the primary pedestrian gateway between Israel and Gaza and an especially important one for Gazan workers. Israel responded to the protests in mid-September by closing the crossing.
Roughly 18,000 Gazans had permits to work in Israel. After those people were barred from going to work, “the escalation started to come much faster,” one negotiator told me. The Arabic outlet Rai al-Youm, citing Palestinian sources, reported on September 26 that Hamas had conveyed to the Egyptian government that Gaza would explode over the Erez closure. That same day, Kamel’s plane flew to Israel.
Negotiators from Egypt, Qatar, and the United Nations scrambled to maintain calm. Hamas officials responded with what one international negotiator described as a broad “shopping list” of demands, including more permits to work inside Israel and the restoration of the fuel-for-public-salaries arrangement with Qatar. After the talks concluded in the final days of September, Hamas agreed to pull people back from the border fence and to try to ease tensions. Israel agreed to reopen the Erez crossing and to restore a medical-supply line into Gaza, adding that it would consider increasing the number of work permits.
Still, the situation remained turbulent. On September 27, 10 days before the attack, Tor Wennesland, the UN’s special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, left Gaza with a stark warning: “The situation inside the Strip is dire and we must avoid another conflict that will have grave consequences for all,” Wennesland wrote on X. A day later, the new arrangement appeared to be taking hold. European diplomats who visited Erez watched as Gazan workers streamed back into Israel.
But negotiators told me it later became clear that Hamas was using the talks as a ploy to buy time while finalizing its attack plans. Documents recovered by Israel from Gaza revealed that Hamas regarded the 2021 conflict as a triumph, and in its aftermath began planning for a breathtakingly large operation. A detailed memorandum from August 2022, apparently handwritten by Yahya Sinwar, then the leader of Hamas in Gaza, laid out much of the operational plan that the group would put into effect the following year. Even as international mediators focused on issues such as work permits and fuel deliveries, believing that these could defuse tensions, Hamas continued its relentless preparations for a massive attack. U.S. and Israeli military analysts told me Israel misinterpreted Hamas’s intentions, concluding that the group had no desire for military confrontation.
Kamel’s visits to Israel are rare. His last known trips were in May and August 2021, following that year’s Israel-Hamas war. After Kamel’s September 2023 trip, Egypt continued to raise the alarm up until two days before the attack, according to U.S., Egyptian, and Israeli officials with direct knowledge of those communications. American and Israeli officials told me it is unclear whether Kamel’s message could have been understood as foretelling the unprecedented attack that followed. Most of the warnings that Israel received in 2023 contained no date, target, or method of attack. But they were frequent and persistent.
Around the same time, Netanyahu received the call from bin Zayed, whose country had normalized relations with Israel only three years earlier. In the call, bin Zayed reportedly sought to convey his assessment that Sinwar was planning a major attack. Like Kamel, bin Zayed urged Netanyahu to make economic concessions to Gaza. But Netanyahu seemed unmoved, two Arab officials familiar with the call told me.
UN negotiators, U.S. officials, and international groups sensed that tensions in Gaza were exceptionally high, but told me they hadn’t been aware of any particular plans for an attack. On September 28, the CIA issued an internal report about a possible Hamas escalation in Gaza, reportedly based in part on foreign intelligence services. U.S. officials told me that report described the possibility that Hamas would launch rockets into Israel over several days. A second report, dated October 5, built on the first but was more analytical than revelatory. Neither detected rehearsals for a coordinated, multipronged attack like the one Hamas carried out two days later.
On October 5, a message from Egypt to Israel also reiterated concerns that the situation was untenable, U.S., Egyptian and Israeli officials said. It provided no date or methodology, but conveyed urgency about a possible attack, the officials said. Egypt also shared its assessments with several other nations in the region, including Saudi Arabia, a senior Gulf Arab official told me. Jordan’s intelligence chief also conveyed concerns to his Israeli counterparts, according to Arab officials, that the situation had grown potentially explosive, especially in the West Bank, and needed to be addressed swiftly. (Spokespeople for Jordan’s government and intelligence service didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Biden-administration officials told me that neither Egypt nor the UAE shared such warnings with them ahead of October 7. U.S., Egyptian, Arab, and Israeli officials gave me a range of reasons why. Several people told me the warnings were too vague to warrant sharing with the U.S. Other officials, including those from the region, told me it was up to Netanyahu’s government to share the findings with Washington. (U.S. officials I spoke with dismissed this explanation, suggesting that if Egypt or Abu Dhabi had a pressing warning for Israel, Washington should have heard about it from them.) Several months after the attack, CIA Director William Burns was told, almost in passing, about both Kamel’s visit to Israel and bin Zayed’s call, but was not told about the specifics of their outreach, according to U.S., Israeli, and Arab officials.
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Two days after the attack, as Israel took stock of the tragedy and its military campaign in Gaza began, Netanyahu’s office rejected press reports that he’d received any outreach from Kamel or Egypt. “The Prime Minister has neither spoken, nor met, with the head of Egyptian intelligence since the formation of the government, neither directly nor indirectly,” his office said on X. But the distinction between direct contact and intelligence passed through aides and other officials would become central to the debate over whether Israel could have done more to anticipate the attacks. On October 11, then–House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul told reporters after a classified briefing for lawmakers that Egypt had warned Israel. “We know that Egypt had warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could happen,” McCaul said. “I don’t want to get too much into classified, but a warning was given. I think the question was at what level.” (McCaul didn’t respond to my repeated attempts to discuss his comments.)
In the months that followed, Israeli officials described a broader failure to interpret the signals coming from Gaza. In leaked recordings of briefings to bereaved families and residents obtained by Israel’s Channel 12, Herzi Halevi, then the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, described the military establishment as having been “lulled to sleep.” In a separate leaked recording, Halevi told local council chiefs that before the attacks, he had regarded Gaza “as the last border that needed attention.”
Halevi resigned from his position in March 2025, and that June, the head of the Israel Security Agency, Ronen Bar, resigned under pressure over intelligence failures linked to the October 7 attacks. Hanegbi, the head of Netanyahu’s security council, was replaced in October 2025. Kamel, who left Egypt’s General Intelligence Service in October 2024, is now an adviser and special envoy for al-Sisi.
Since the October 7 attacks, Israel not only launched a crushing retaliation in Gaza, but later opened military fronts against Lebanon’s Hezbollah and, this year, a war in Iran. It’s impossible to know what would have happened if the warnings from Kamel and others had been heeded at the time, but it’s hard to imagine that Israel wouldn’t have been better prepared. As it was, the attacks caught the Israeli security services flat-footed. Reserve forces weren’t immediately available after kibbutz communities were attacked, leaving them defended primarily by local, lightly armed civilian volunteer forces from about 6:30 a.m., when the attacks began, to 1:30 p.m., when significant IDF reinforcements arrived.
Netanyahu said in a campaign video clip last month that Israeli security officials failed to immediately wake him on the morning of October 7. “In the lead-up to October, there were so many warning signs, so many indications, that an attack was imminent,” Netanyahu said, without offering any specifics. “Had they woken me up, everything would have looked different. That is the story of October 7th—that is the story.”
Today, Gaza remains in ruins and violence continues, despite efforts by the Biden and Trump administrations to secure a cease-fire. An April assessment by the UN, the World Bank, and the European Union estimated that $71.4 billion would be needed over the next decade for Gaza’s recovery and reconstruction. The great majority of its population remains displaced. Meanwhile, the trauma of October 7 lives on for Israelis. And bereaved families from that day continue to search for answers about how Hamas was able to engage in a devastating attack on Israel that appeared to catch the government completely by surprise.
Jack Rodriquez-Vars contributed reporting to this story
* Illustration sources: Getty; Khaled Desouki / AFP / Getty; Anadolu / Getty; Fatih Aktas / Anadolu / Getty