Israel’s Opposition Leader Yair Lapid said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been fully informed by the Israeli security services well before October 7, 2023, that Hamas was prepared to attack Israel.
Testifying on August 29 before the unofficial citizens’ commission of inquiry into the failure to prevent and respond to Hamas’s October 7 attack, Lapid said, contrary to Netanyahu’s government’s claim that they were not informed of the danger of a Hamas attack, that “it was indeed informed. I was informed, and the intelligence material I saw was, of course, also seen by the prime minister and cabinet ministers. During the months leading up to the disaster, the Prime Minister and cabinet ministers received a series of serious, unprecedented warnings. From the middle of 2023, there were more and more voices within the terrorist organizations that said that the moment they had been waiting for had arrived.”
