Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed back against accusations that he and his government bear any responsibility for failures that led to Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught and reaffirmed his assertion that the security establishment — not political leaders — failed to prevent the deadliest attack in Israel’s history, in an English-language video shared on his social media accounts Monday night.

With the stability of his coalition again under threat, and amid growing allegations that he has prolonged the war in Gaza for his political benefit — including an investigative report in the New York Times over the weekend, Netanyahu sat down with his recently appointed international affairs adviser, former journalist Caroline Glick, for an eight-minute staged interview, in which he issued some of his harshest public criticism yet of the Israeli security establishment and defended his wartime policies.

Answering what Glick called “some hard questions that keep coming up in the international media,” Netanyahu claimed that he was misled by defense officials, kept unaware about critical intelligence, and ultimately made all the key wartime decisions himself—while rejecting allegations that his political agenda or coalition considerations framed his handling of national security.

‘Just the facts’

In the video, captioned “Just the facts” on his X account, Netanyahu responded to accusations that domestic turmoil caused by his government’s 2023 judicial overhaul agenda created the conditions for the attack, dismissing the idea as “bogus.”

“Don’t mistake our internal democratic debate,” he said. “On the day of reckoning, if we are attacked, we shall all be there, left and right — and that’s exactly what happened.”

Asked about claims by former IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi and ex-Shin Bet head Ronen Bar that they warned Netanyahu of an impending attack months earlier, Netanyahu denied that they issued such warnings.

“It’s exactly the opposite,” he insisted, referencing “recorded conversations with the entire cabinet.”

Netanyahu repeated previous claims that the security establishment “convinced the government not to worry about it,” and that its former heads instead told him that “Hamas is deterred. Hamas wants workers, they want economic benefits, there’s no danger of an impending attack. And they said it again, and again, and again.”

Furthermore, he again claimed that at midnight on the eve of the attack, there were “a lot of intel signs” suggesting something was coming. But, he said, “they didn’t call me. They didn’t wake up the commander-in-chief. Because let me tell you, if I’d received a call, I would have acted differently — and that didn’t happen.”

The premier also pointed to the so-called “Jericho’s Walls” plan as evidence that the defense establishment failed to correctly interpret intelligence on Hamas.

In 2022, the IDF Intelligence Directorate obtained information from Hamas dated August 2021, which outlined a large-scale ground invasion of Israeli border communities and IDF posts, and was put into a report dubbed Jericho’s Walls.

“We never saw it,” Netanyahu stated, referring to the report. He argued that the very existence of the plan contradicts those blaming the judicial overhaul for creating the conditions for the assault. “It was hatched by Hamas in 2022, when a leftist government was in power. It didn’t have anything to do with the judicial reform.”

The prime minister accused the intelligence community of burying the plan. “It basically described exactly what Hamas was going to do… but these guys were working on a fixed idea: Hamas was deterred, and even if we got this incredible information, they didn’t really mean it. They want goodies, they want benefits, they’re not gonna attack us.”

Contradicting accounts

Despite Netanyahu’s assertions, official reports from security bodies show that several warnings were issued to the political echelon by the security establishment in the years and months before October 7.

Netanyahu received at least four official documents in the spring and summer of 2023 warning him about how the country’s enemies were viewing the societal upheaval over the judicial reform at the time, the IDF revealed in May 2024.

In March, the Shin Bet security agency published a summary of its investigations into its failures during the lead-up to October 7, wherein it named an overly defensive government policy regarding Gaza over the years as a key contribution to the attack.