Despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's outright denial of having received any advance warning about the devastating Hamas attack, a senior US official has confirmed that Israel was indeed alerted by Egypt three days before the incident.
According to BBC, Michael McCaul, the head of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, revealed this information to reporters after a confidential intelligence briefing.
Ignored warnings and intelligence failures
An anonymous Egyptian intelligence official corroborated McCaul's statement, telling the Associated Press that Cairo had cautioned Israel about a significant impending event from Gaza.
The official noted that Israel had downplayed the warnings, focusing instead on potential threats from the West Bank. This oversight has led to scrutiny of Israeli intelligence services, as they failed to prevent the deadliest attack in Israel's 75-year history.
Sir Alex Younger, former chief of the UK's foreign intelligence agency, attributed the failure to "institutional complacency" within Israel.
He suggested that Israel might have disregarded any information that contradicted their assumption that Hamas was not interested in initiating a new conflict. Younger also pointed out that Israel's over-reliance on technology for monitoring Gaza could have contributed to a false sense of security.
The attack resulted in a death toll of 1,200 in Israel, with more than 1,000 Palestinians killed by subsequent Israeli airstrikes on Gaza.
