Atlantic says Egypt’s spy chief flew to Israel with a warning; Netanyahu’s office calls it a lie

The Atlantic reported on Friday that Abbas Kamel, then director of Egypt’s General Intelligence Directorate, travelled to Israel on 26 September 2023 — eleven days before the Hamas-led attack, and, as Haaretz noted, the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War — to tell senior Israeli officials that Hamas was preparing a major operation and that the window to prevent it was closing. “If you don’t change course, Gaza is going to blow up in your faces,” Kamel is quoted as saying at Ben Gurion Airport, in wording relayed identically by Haaretz and Middle East Eye. Ynet, alone among the Israeli relays, specified that the meeting lasted roughly an hour and that Kamel’s message carried no date and no attack plan; he urged economic concessions to Hamas instead. The Atlantic’s sourcing, per Haaretz, is Israeli, Egyptian, Arab and American — multi-sourced, not documentary.

The Prime Minister’s Office responded on Saturday: “The Prime Minister’s Office, in response to the lies in The Atlantic: his allegation is false. It was denied at the time and is being recycled to manipulate the Israeli public.” It added that Egypt itself officially denied any warning on 11 October 2023. Tzachi Hanegbi, Netanyahu’s national security adviser at the time, told The Atlantic that Kamel did not fly to Israel on 26 September and that no Egyptian warning was delivered — a denial of the event, not merely of its content. The Atlantic says Netanyahu’s spokespeople did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Ynet recirculated the PMO’s 2023 statement on X: “The Prime Minister has neither spoken, nor met, with the head of Egyptian intelligence since the formation of the government, neither directly nor indirectly.”

Three other strands landed in the same 48 hours. The New York Times, carried by the Times of Israel, reported that Netanyahu resisted security chiefs' proposals for strikes in Gaza before 7 October and opposed targeting Hamas leaders out of concern for the Saudi normalisation track; a ToI liveblog entry dated 25 September records him telling a security meeting six days before the attack that calm in Gaza should be preserved so as not to thwart a normalisation deal. A Haaretz investigation by Shlomi Eldar and Ruti Yuval reported that a warning Yahya Sinwar would carry out an “earthquake” reached UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed via associates of Mohammed Dahlan, and that bin Zayed telephoned Netanyahu with it; ToI reports separately that Netanyahu is said not to have passed it to the security establishment. On Sunday, Israel Hayom — the pro-Netanyahu paper — ran a piece by Bini Ashkenazi framing The Atlantic’s story as confirmation of its own reporting six months earlier.

Assessment: The load-bearing detail is Ynet’s, and it is the one most relays dropped: the 2023 denial answered whether Netanyahu personally met Kamel, not whether Egypt warned Israel. Two different questions have been collapsed into one denial for three years, and the PMO’s Saturday statement collapses them again. Hanegbi’s denial is broader and therefore more falsifiable — flight records and airport logs either exist or they don’t, and nobody has produced them. Meanwhile Israel Hayom is claiming credit for a story the Prime Minister’s Office calls a fabrication. That contradiction on the right is a better indicator of where this goes than any poll. Thirty days out, expect the fight to move from what Kamel said to whether he landed.