Netanyahu: Oct. 7 would have been different 'if they had woken me'

(Oct. 15, 2026 / JNS)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Army Radio on Wednesday that he would have mobilized the military and canceled the Nova music festival had he been woken when warning signs of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre emerged.

“If they had woken me, I can tell you exactly what I would have done,” he said, speaking in Hebrew. “I would have woken the IDF, I would have woken the rapid-response squads, I would have canceled the Nova, I would have prepared the Air Force.”

Netanyahu said security forces failed to act on warning signs, including activated SIM cards and orders for Hamas terrorists to gather in mosques.

He likened the failure to U.S. failures at Pearl Harbor and on 9/11. “There was blindness here,” he said.

He noted that no one told U.S. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt or George W. Bush to “go home” after those attacks.

Netanyahu also denied meeting with Egypt’s then intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Abbas Kamel, when he visited the Jewish state in the days before Oct. 7. He said he was attending a memorial ceremony for those who fell in the 1973 Yom Kippur War at the time.

“Now we need to know if he did meet [anyone]. That interests me no less than it interests you,” he said.