A parked Cessna at Ben Gurion, and four incompatible versions of Egypt’s warning

The Atlantic published on 25 September an account, relayed here through the Times of Israel, Ynet and the US aggregator Political Wire, holding that Egypt’s then-intelligence chief Abbas Kamel flew to Israel on 26 September 2023 — eleven days before the 7 October attack — and told senior Israeli officials that Hamas appeared to be preparing a major escalation. Per the reporting, a chartered Cessna linked to Egypt’s General Intelligence Service landed at Ben Gurion, taxied to an isolated area and stayed there. Kamel gave no date, no target and no operational plan, and pressed for economic concessions to Gaza to head off a conflict. That same afternoon Israel’s leadership was in Jerusalem marking the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, where Benjamin Netanyahu said: “We do not underestimate any threat.”

The magazine attributes the account to Israeli, Egyptian, Arab, American and European officials briefed on the visit — multi-sourced, entirely anonymous. Netanyahu’s spokespeople did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Tzachi Hanegbi, national security adviser in 2023, denies to the magazine both that Kamel visited on 26 September and that any Egyptian warning was delivered: a denial of the event, not of its reading. No Egyptian government or GIS response had appeared as of Saturday morning. The claim that a warning existed is three years old and never settled. Two days after 7 October, AP quoted an Egyptian intelligence official saying Israel ignored repeated warnings of “something big”; Ynet reported Kamel warned Netanyahu personally ten days before, and separately that a “senior Egyptian source” had him phoning Netanyahu’s office three days before about “something unusual, a horrific operation.” Israel Hayom reported the Ben Gurion landing in December 2025; Israel’s National Security Council declined to comment.

Assessment: Four timelines — eleven days, ten days, three days, a phone call versus a face-to-face on a parked aircraft — cannot all be true, and the discrepancies are the story rather than a detail of it. What is new here is the physical visit and the spread of nationalities among the sources, not the warning itself, which has been in circulation since October 2023 and has served Cairo well each time it resurfaces. A documented Egyptian warning converts Egypt from the party that ran the Rafah border into the party that tried to stop the war, which is useful capital for a mediator now negotiating phase two. Note also the calendar: the piece ran the day before the third anniversary of the flight it describes. We have not obtained The Atlantic’s original text and are relaying Israeli outlets' account of it.