Eleven Days Before October 7: The Egyptian Warning Israel Says It Never Received
Eleven days before Hamas launched the October 7 attack, Abbas Kamel, Egypt's intelligence chief and one of the region's most seasoned mediators, landed at Ben-Gurion Airport, stayed just over an hour, and warned his Israeli counterparts that Gaza was headed for an explosion, according to reporting by The Atlantic.
In a one-on-one conversation with senior Israeli officials, Kamel warned that Israel must change course quickly or risk an eruption of violence in Gaza. He even recommended that Jerusalem make further economic concessions to Hamas to defuse the situation. What is not clear, and what remains one of the most troubling open questions of the war, is what the Israeli authorities did with that warning.
A strategic warning, not an operational one
The warning carried no date, no scale, no battle plan. Kamel provided no accurate information about when the attack would take place or how it would unfold, a point Israeli officials have leaned on in their defense. It was a strategic alarm, not a tactical one: the kind of signal a decade of Egyptian mediation had taught Cairo to read, even when the specifics were missing. Such details matter in assessing the failure, but they do not erase the warning. Kamel's plane staying on the tarmac for barely an hour suggested a man delivering a message and leaving, not paying a courtesy call.
The denials
The denials were immediate and categorical. Tzachi Hanegbi, then Israel's national security adviser, told The Atlantic that Kamel had not visited Israel on September 26 and that no warning had come from the Egyptian side. Benjamin Netanyahu's office has likewise denied that Kamel personally warned the prime minister, a denial consistent with the government's line, maintained since the first days of the war, that "no warning reached the security echelon."
A paper trail of warnings
The September 26 visit was not an isolated signal. Two days after the October 7 attack, an Egyptian intelligence official told the Associated Press that Israel had ignored repeated warnings from Cairo that Hamas was planning "something big." In November 2023, the Israeli news site Ynet reported that Kamel had personally phoned Netanyahu ten days before the atrocities. Netanyahu's office rejected that report as well.
Taken together, the record describes an intelligence chief who pressed the alarm in person and by phone, through channels Israel knew well, and a government that, whatever it received, did not act as if war were imminent.
Why Egypt saw it coming
Egypt's prescience was not accidental. Cairo had brokered every major Israel–Hamas ceasefire since 2008, maintained direct lines to Hamas's political and military leadership, and had personally staked Kamel's credibility on Gaza's stability, it was Kamel who sealed the May 2021 truce. In the months before October 7, Egyptian officials were also openly aggrieved: Netanyahu had shifted the Gaza economic file to Doha, allowing Qatar to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas with Israeli approval, effectively cutting Cairo out of the equation it understood best. In the final weeks before the attack, Egyptian mediators were pressing Hamas to de-escalate; by most accounts, Hamas's leadership stonewalled them, too.
The AP's source offered the bluntest assessment: Israeli officials had underestimated Hamas, and had grown absorbed with the West Bank and the upheaval over the judicial overhaul while Gaza's "quiet" calcified into a false sense of deterrence.
One warning among many
Kamel's visit belongs to a wider pattern. The New York Times reported that Israeli intelligence had obtained Hamas's detailed invasion blueprint, the "Jericho Wall" plan, more than a year before the attack, and that the military had filed it away without acting. Female surveillance soldiers at the Gaza border warned superiors that Hamas was conducting training exercises that looked exactly like this scenario; their warnings were dismissed. When the Israeli military completed its own internal review of the failure, it conceded that the system as a whole — not one unit, not one officer, had failed to foresee what its own documents had predicted.
The unanswered question
There is no evidence Israel had foreknowledge of the attack's date or scale, and this article should not be read to claim otherwise. But the September 26 visit now sits at the center of a question Israel has yet to formally answer through a state commission of inquiry: when the man who knew Hamas best flew in to say, in person, that Gaza was about to explode, who in the Israeli government heard it, what did they do, and why did the answer, eleven days later, turn out to be nothing?