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Less than two weeks before October 7, 2023, Egypt’s top spy flew to Israel to deliver a dire warning: Hamas appeared to be mobilizing for a major attack. According to officials who spoke with the Atlantic staff writer Vivian Salama, Cairo’s intelligence chief recommended that the Israeli government offer economic concessions to Hamas in order to avert conflict. What Israeli officials did with that warning remains an open question three years after the most devastating surprise attack in the country’s history. On this episode of Radio Atlantic, Salama says officials from seven different countries told her that the visit should have set off alarms across the top ranks of the Israeli government.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Adam Harris: I’m Adam Harris, and I’m here in the PBS studios of Washington Week With The Atlantic for a special taping of Radio Atlantic, with Atlantic staff writer Vivian Salama. Vivian, thank you so much for joining me. You have some new, exclusive reporting, and the headline of the story is “Egypt’s Warning to Israel.” It’s about the October 7th attack. What did you find out about the October 7th attack?
Vivian Salama: Adam, we’re coming up on the third anniversary of the tragic attacks of October 7th, and I set out several months ago to try to understand exactly what was known. I was starting to get bits and pieces of information from sources about possible warnings that came in advance of it—easy to dismiss on its face because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and most of his government have denied that there were prior warnings ahead of the tragedy.
But the more I looked into it and the more people I talked to, I realized a very peculiar incident that happened exactly on September 26th, 2023. And the reason this date was so significant and really stood out is because that was the day that the government held a very large 50th-anniversary commemoration of the Yom Kippur War: the war 50 years ago when, ironically, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel. And the whole premise of his speech was essentially that we need to be prepared, that we wouldn’t turn a blind eye to the threats around us and to our adversaries.
All the while, about two hours prior to Netanyahu taking the stage, a small Cessna jet arrived in Ben-Gurion Airport about 30 miles away from where Bibi was talking. I really had to dig deep and work for months to try to figure out who this Cessna belonged to. There had been some rumors and some tips that it belonged to the Egyptian security chief, the intelligence chief. But I really had to actually connect those dots and go down rabbit holes to try to really confirm that this was his plane; the flight plan was Cairo to Ben-Gurion. And what we found from multiple, multiple applications, but also the Israeli flight logs which we later discovered, is that that plane landed early that morning, kinda tucked away in this very restricted area at Ben-Gurion Airport, and stayed for about 67 minutes, according to the Israeli flight log. That is a very short time.
And through multiple sources, and I’m talking to people in Israel, in Egypt, across the Arab world, in Europe, and the United States, I managed to confirm that he was on that plane, the Egyptian intelligence chief. His name is Abbas Kamel. He’s now the former chief. He was there, and he came with a very ominous message of danger in Gaza. And so he met with security officials in the Israeli government, some senior officials, and essentially conveyed to them what they saw, which was that there was mobilization for an unprecedented attack of some kind. He didn’t know the date. He didn’t know the mode of attack. But he knew that the situation was so grave. And for him to go to Israel for 67 minutes to deliver a message—that alone signified that the situation was so urgent and so grave. And so the question then became: What happened with the message? Typically something like this—just the sheer presence of the Egyptian intelligence chief would send off red flags across the Israeli government. My sources tell me that after Netanyahu finished his speech at the Yom Kippur ceremony, he went into a classified meeting. Some believe that he would’ve gotten the warning then; however, the Netanyahu government refused to answer my questions, and so it remains unclear if those warnings made it to him or not. Countless Israeli officials I talked to said, There is no world—literally, that’s a direct quote—There is no world in which the Egyptian spy chief comes to Israel for an hour to deliver a message, where likely the Egyptian president commissioned him to go, and Bibi doesn’t know about that. And so the question then became: What more did they know? It seems clear, and even through U.S. officials, I later confirmed, that they had multiple warnings from the Egyptians. But in particular, within that two-week time frame of the October 7th attack, you had the visit from Abbas Kamel to Israel. You also had two written cables that went to them warning them of a possible attack. And so all of this is a collective body of evidence that really signaled that there was trouble brewing right on Israel’s doorstep.
Harris: You’ve mentioned that the prime minister had denied that there were warnings before. Were there other warnings in addition to these that you’ve mentioned, that we have confirmed? Or were these the only warnings?
Salama: So through months of investigating this, I was able to determine that the United Arab Emirates’ president, Mohamed bin Zayed, also picked up the phone probably the same day or around the same time as Abbas Kamel visited Israel. Now, that story, to the credit of Haaretz, the newspaper in Israel, they got that element of it out a couple of weeks ago and were able to report it. I have independently confirmed that the story’s absolutely correct. And my understanding through all my sources that I talked to is that that phone call was actually largely inspired by the Egyptian intelligence he received. I want to emphasize that when it comes to Gaza, there are two countries that basically have eyes on it, and that is Israel and Egypt. They both border Gaza. They have sources within the Strip, and they follow it very closely because both countries, despite all their differences, really view Hamas’s activity within the Strip as a security threat to both of their countries. And so they do work very closely on intelligence sharing when it comes to Gaza. And so for the Egyptian intel chief to travel to Israel—that is someone who knows what he’s talking about. But it also appears that Egypt dispersed that intelligence throughout the region, that officials in the region knew he traveled to Israel as well. And MBZ, Mohamed bin Zayed, was so disturbed by the findings he was hearing, both from the Egyptians and from his own Palestinian sources, that he picked up the phone and called Netanyahu directly. And so again, a growing body of evidence that signals the fact that the Netanyahu government had warnings that should have at least sent off some signals or mobilized the Israeli military in a way to reinforce that border with Gaza.
Harris: I want to talk about Israel in the current, present day. They have a really big election coming up. What does this mean for the upcoming election? How might this impact the upcoming election?
Salama: So just to emphasize, Benjamin Netanyahu served as prime minister longer than anyone else in Israel’s history. He has come and gone, but he has been serving for quite some time and is increasingly a very polarizing figure in Israeli society. In fact, in the lead-up to 2023—and this is something I get into in the story—Israelis were consumed by domestic issues regarding some of Benjamin Netanyahu’s more controversial moves. Obviously, after October 7th, one of the biggest matters that has consumed the Israeli public is the security issues, and particularly what happened on October 7th and whether or not his government has handled that correctly. One of the big things that one of his prime adversaries or his political opponents, Gadi Eisenkot—who used to be the IDF’s chief of staff before October 7th; he left—has been calling for is an independent state inquiry. And those calls have really been growing in the public in Israel, where they want something similar to, I should mention, what was done during the Yom Kippur War 50 years prior, where they did launch an independent state inquiry into the intelligence failures and the military failures that took place then. But Netanyahu and his government have rejected it. They’ve proposed as an alternative a sort of politically appointed inquiry that would be what the opposition calls very orchestrated. And so they’ve really pushed back, and the opposition in particular has refused to take part in that. And so this is a very contentious issue. Israeli officials, the Israeli public—I’ve spoken to bereaved families as part of this investigation, and they feel that accountability has just never happened when it comes to this. This is the largest tragedy in modern Israel, and certainly the largest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. And Israelis keep saying, If this was such a trauma, and we acknowledge collectively that this was such a trauma for our country, then why are we not taking time to dig into what happened? And obviously, we know it wasn’t just a trauma for the Israelis; 1,200 Israelis killed that day on October 7th in a multi-pronged attack by Hamas. But obviously, the war in Gaza that followed as well, where more than 73,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza. In both cases, most of them were civilians. So over the past three years, you increasingly see not just Israelis demanding accountability, but all over the world, a demand for accountability on the war that followed with obviously the death of tens of thousands of civilians being a flash point all over the world.
Harris: Well, Vivian, thank you so much for your reporting, and thank you for sharing with us. Thanks for joining us for this bonus episode of Radio Atlantic. You can read Vivian’s full story at theatlantic.com.
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