Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took at least two hours to leave his Caesarea home and head to the IDF’s Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv after being told immediately that Hamas-led terrorists were attacking Israel at 6.29 on the morning of October 7, 2023, according to an Israeli television report on Friday.
He did not contact the IDF chief-of-staff Herzi Halevi or Shin Bet head Ronen Bar in that time, or en route to the Kirya, the TV report further said, asserting an inexplicably sluggish and limited initial response by Netanyahu to the Hamas onslaught. According to his own published schedule, the prime minister only ordered the Gaza border closed and a full IDF mobilization at 9.55 a.m.
Earlier this week, Netanyahu denounced Israel’s security chiefs for purportedly choosing not to wake him in the hours before the attack when, he said, “all the signs were there” that Hamas was about to invade, and claimed he would have immediately mobilized the IDF and taken other steps necessary to ensure that October 7 “would not have taken place.” Those security chiefs have repeatedly stressed they did not assess that Hamas was about to invade, but did send an IDF memo detailing suspicious Hamas activity to Netanyahu’s intelligence officer three hours before the invasion.
