Recent reports suggest that Arab governments warned Israel of a looming Hamas attack prior to Oct. 7, 2023. But former Biden administration officials have told The Washington Sun that if such warnings existed, they never made their way to Washington.
Haaretz, The New York Times and The Atlantic have reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu overlooked Egyptian and Emirati alerts about an imminent attack. Netanyahu, who is seeking reelection this month, has denied the claims, saying the information is coming from his political opponents.
Former Biden administration officials said the U.S. did not receive intelligence about a potential incursion ahead of time.
“We were as surprised as the Israelis were,” said Harrison Mann, a Defense Intelligence Agency official at the time who would resign from the military in protest of President Joe Biden’s Gaza policy. Another former official said it’s “very plausible” that the Egyptians and Emiratis got wind of something and passed it along to Israel, “as they often do.”
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But the former official said the relationships between Israel and regional governments are “some of the most sensitive channels in the world” because Arab countries are loath to be seen engaging with Israel. As a result, they said, the U.S. would be unlikely to get such intelligence “unless we stole it ourselves somehow.”
Brett McGurk, Biden’s chief Middle East adviser, also denied the U.S. had prior knowledge of the attack.
“We have really looked, we did not have … anything in our system that would have been a warning and indicator,” McGurk told CBS News in a weekend interview. He suggested Israel should conduct an inquiry into the circumstances around the Oct. 7 attack.
Discussions about pre-attack intelligence have spurred questions about U.S. reliance on Israeli intelligence, two of the former officials told The Sun.
“The U.S. intelligence community had delegated this portfolio to Israel,” said Mann, now the associate director for campaigns and policy at the advocacy group Win Without War. “What the U.S. missed is that the Israelis were not completely surveilling Gaza.”
Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) told The Sun that “we rely too heavily on Israel rather than developing our own ability to get information.”
“What that’s meant in practice is that our policy is informed by what they want us to know, and we have blind spots in the same places they do,” said Castro, a congressman since 2013 who serves on the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees.
Security experts in Israel and observers internationally have faulted Netanyahu for enabling Hamas’ entrenchment in Gaza between 2007 and 2023 without considering the risks involved.
Mann said Israel had become heavily focused on Lebanon, where the armed group Hezbollah — a Hamas ally — had developed significant weaponry and battlefield experience. The other former official noted that the situation was compounded by Israel’s outsize focus on gathering intelligence about Iran, to the detriment of tracking other foes.
“We can’t outsource our intelligence needs to any country, especially one that is so distracted along different fronts,” they said, describing “lackluster infrastructure” among Israeli monitoring of Gaza that “atrophied over time.”
Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vermont) tied the intelligence questions to broader concerns about the U.S.-Israel relationship.
“Congress needs answers about our over-reliance on Israeli intelligence before the October 7 attacks — as well as the quality of the intelligence Israel has provided since, especially given the tens of thousands of deadly airstrikes in Gaza that U.S. taxpayers have been forced to fund,” Welch told The Sun.
Americans’ view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has evolved in the years since the Oct. 7 attack and Israel’s retaliation in Gaza and beyond. A rising crop of Democratic lawmakers is wary of the country. And a survey conducted in May by the Pew Research Center found a drop in the favorable view of the Israeli government among Republicans from 65% in 2022 to 51% this year. Meanwhile, other Western countries are moving to pressure Israel to address concerns about Palestinian welfare and rights.
Netanyahu formed the most far-right government in his country’s history in January 2023, then soon began shrinking Gaza’s economic ties with Israel — its lifeline, given Egypt and Israel had largely cut off the Palestinian territory from the rest of the world. Netanyahu’s administration also bolstered Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, land that would be key to eventual Palestinian statehood.
Several former Biden administration officials said the U.S. may have missed how Netanyahu’s rightward political shift — and worsening humanitarian conditions for Palestinians — could lead to desperation and, ultimately, drive violence.
I delve into those warning signs more deeply in my recently published book “Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors and Israel’s War in Gaza” (W.W. Norton, 2026). A lightly adapted excerpt follows:
Indications of a new all-out conflict grew in 2023, as income into Gaza plummeted and Israel and Palestinian Islamic Jihad–one of the strip’s armed groups–clashed in May. The flare-up killed eleven Palestinian and two Israeli civilians. The year 2023 also saw far more Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, and Hamas claiming responsibility for Palestinian attacks inside Israel, fueling suspicions that Netanyahu would launch an offensive in both Gaza and the West Bank, and that Hamas might try to preempt him, said Mike Casey, a U.S. diplomat stationed in Jerusalem at the time. (He also eventually quit the U.S. government over its approach to Gaza.)
Casey described the Biden administration as “in denial” about the effect of U.S. support for Israel. “Come on, the IDF doesn’t participate in settler violence!” Barbara Leaf, the top Middle East official at the State Department and a former ambassador, protested to diplomats on a visit, he recalled. (Leaf did not respond to a request for comment.) In fact, analysts and human rights groups had for years agreed the Israeli military enabled attacks by Israelis who have developed settlements and outposts in the occupied West Bank in violation of international law.
Biden had granted greater autonomy to the office of Palestinian affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, rather than fulfilling his campaign promise to re-establish an American consulate to the Palestinians. But as officials in that office issued warnings that Palestinian desperation would boil over, “We heard crickets from Washington,” Casey said.
Casey said his team issued a report days before Oct. 7 describing Gaza’s “unsustainable” economic situation. “This place is going to go off a cliff,” Casey said the memo effectively argued.
Steve Gabavics, a U.S. colonel also based in Jerusalem at the time, said he saw five American intelligence reports sent to Washington in the three months before the Hamas invasion that warned of a rising threat but were seemingly ignored.
In U.S. national security circles, it was clear the administration saw Israel-Palestine as “a managed conflict” that was unlikely to erupt in unpredictable ways, according to Mann.
When top Biden aides did consider Israeli-Palestinian peace, it was in the context of a moonshot plan for an alliance between the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia – which involved throwing a bone to Palestinians for the sake of demonstrating Arab solidarity, and which they felt would earn them a place in history. McGurk and then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken were finalizing a draft U.S.-Saudi agreement with concessions to Palestinian demands in the days leading up to October 7. And days before the Hamas attack, then-national security adviser Jake Sullivan publicly stated that under Biden, “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been for two decades.”
The assertion was not only inaccurate; it angered Biden administration critics from pro-Palestinian progressives to national security hawks, who noted that Sullivan and his team had done little to stem the power of Iran, a U.S. foe that armed Hamas.
Both before and following the eventual attack, Biden aides were aware of the Israeli leader’s ability to manipulate the U.S.-Israel relationship for his own interests and his cynicism, exemplified by his tacit support of Hamas’s rule in Gaza and split from the Palestinian Authority, which controls part of the West Bank.
“If anyone is most responsible for the empowerment of Hamas… it’s not [Yahya] Sinwar, it’s not [Hamas political chief Ismail] Haniyeh, it is Bibi,” a senior State Department official told me, using a nickname for Netanyahu. “Over the course of his twenty-five years in and out of office, it is the by-product of a strategy predicating on seeing to it that there was no united Palestinian governance [but] dueling power centers.”
More generally, U.S. officials were developing a better understanding of Israel’s military and intelligence capabilities – long assumed to be exemplary, and central to any retaliatory campaign against Hamas. “We were all surprised by the ineffectiveness of the Israeli defenses and by the unpreparedness on the part of Israeli intelligence,” the senior State Department official told me. Israeli officials obtained and reviewed Hamas’ battle plan for October 7 more than a year before the assault but doubted it was feasible and ignored advice to prepare, a New York Times investigation found. And just weeks before the attack, the chief of intelligence for the IDF, Aharon Haliva, told his U.S. counterparts that Hamas had been “domesticated,” a top Biden aide told me.
With U.S. spies focusing on Al Qaeda and its offshoots since the 9/11 attacks, Gabavics said the CIA was “horrible” in analysis on Gaza. Well before Oct. 7, Washington had clues Israel’s capacity was exaggerated, a former U.S. intelligence official argued, saying Israeli counterparts were evasive in giving American spies access to their raw intelligence and techniques.
Excerpted from Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel’s War in Gaza. Copyright (c) 2026 by Akbar Shahid Ahmed. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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