Netanyahu admits Egypt’s spy chief landed in Israel before October 7, on Channel 14

In an interview with the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14, Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that Egypt’s then-intelligence chief Abbas Kamel flew from Cairo to Israel on a chartered flight days before the October 7 attack, retracting earlier denials issued by the Prime Minister’s Office, Haaretz reported on 14 October. Netanyahu denied meeting Kamel and said he did not know who received the warning. Haaretz’s editorial board ran the admission the following morning under the headline “Netanyahu: The Prime Minister Who Was Never Told.” The paper’s 7 October investigation had already catalogued warnings reaching Netanyahu from Israeli security officials, a Gaza mediator conveying a threat from the Hamas leader, the chief of Egyptian intelligence and the ruler of the UAE.

Two days earlier, on Wednesday 14 October, former Shin Bet director Ronen Bar filed a defamation suit against Netanyahu at the Tel Aviv District Court seeking NIS 3 million, roughly $970,000, over a Netanyahu social media post of 28 September accusing him of withholding intelligence in the hours before the attack. Bar’s filing details at least 20 warnings on the Gaza security situation and, per Haaretz, evidence that the service shared intelligence with the Prime Minister’s Office hours before the attack; Bar has also demanded the release of documents and testimony from Netanyahu’s staffers. Bar called the post a “blood libel” and said Netanyahu disregarded an “extraordinary series of warnings of impending disaster.” Netanyahu’s answer, the same day: “How many lives could we have saved if you had only called in time?” He accused Bar, per JTA, of trying to shift responsibility for “all of Ronen Bar’s failures and crimes.”

Assessment: Note where the admission was placed. Netanyahu did not correct the PMO’s denial in a press conference or to a hostile interviewer; he did it on the one outlet certain not to press him on it, eleven days before a vote. That is damage control, not disclosure. Amos Harel in Haaretz, writing as analysis on 16 October, reads Bar’s suit as an opening move toward a state commission of inquiry — the mechanism Netanyahu has spent two years avoiding. The courtroom is the point: discovery forces documents and staff testimony into the open on a timetable no coalition can control. Treat both men’s filings as instruments. Bar is defending a record; Netanyahu is running out the clock.