Egypt’s spy chief called Netanyahu’s office days before October 7, the Wall Street Journal reports
A second foreign warning has surfaced in four days, three weeks before Israelis vote. The call is denied, the meeting minutes are not.
The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Abbas Kamel, then Egypt’s intelligence chief, telephoned Benjamin Netanyahu’s office in early October 2023 with a warning of an impending assault from Gaza, after two earlier Egyptian warnings went unanswered. Kamel told Israeli officials the situation in Gaza was dire and “could blow up in everyone’s faces,” the paper reported; the Israelis told him they had it under control. Arab government officials, unnamed, told the Journal that the Egyptians continued warning Israel until 48 hours before the attack, and that none of the warnings specified timing or scale. i24NEWS counted it as at least the third Egyptian warning in the run-up. Netanyahu has previously denied speaking to Kamel in the months before 7 October. Every Israeli outlet — Haaretz, Ynet, the Times of Israel, Arutz Sheva — ran it Monday as a דיווח, a report, not as an established fact.
The Egyptian story attaches to a firmer spine reported three days earlier. Two sources, including a person who spoke directly with him, confirmed to the New York Times that UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed warned Netanyahu of a “major attack” by Hamas shortly before 7 October — corroborating a Haaretz exposé by Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval published earlier this month. Netanyahu denies the call took place. The genuinely new element was documentary: according to minutes of a 1 October 2023 meeting obtained by the Times, Netanyahu convened senior security officials to discuss Gaza and did not mention the warning. Per those minutes he said the goal was to preserve calm, opposed proposals to strike senior Hamas figures directing West Bank attacks, and argued Israeli action in Gaza could undermine a Saudi normalisation deal he then believed was close.
Assessment: Separate the two tiers. The phone calls are single-outlet, anonymously sourced and carry a standing denial from the man they accuse; the 1 October minutes are paper, and paper is harder to shout down. The defence that has to be made is no longer “no one warned me” but “what I was told did not warrant telling the chiefs” — a much narrower ledge. On timing, the Israeli press is already arguing with itself: the Times of Israel’s 27 September Daily Briefing with Lazar Berman was titled “The curious timing of the Oct. 7 allegations against the PM.” That suspicion is legitimate and does not make the minutes less real. Both can be true at once, and with 27 October three weeks out, both will be argued as if they cannot.