Nationwide Safety Council spokesman John Kirby mentioned Sunday that the U.S. intelligence was not conscious of a doc obtained by Israel final yr that detailed the plans for Hamas’ October 7 assault. The New York Instances reported the blueprint’s existence final week.
“The intelligence neighborhood has indicated that they didn’t have entry to this doc that there’s no indications presently if that they had any entry to this doc beforehand,” Kirby instructed NBC’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” Sunday morning.
Welker pressed Kirby on whether or not the U.S. intelligence ought to have been given entry to the 40-page doc, particularly given the shut ties between the U.S. and Israeli intelligence businesses. POLITICO reported Friday that there was no indication Israel had shared the blueprint for the assault with the USA.
“Intelligence is a mosaic, and generally you understand you possibly can style issues collectively and get a fairly good image,” Kirby replied. “Different occasions, you understand that there’s items of the puzzle which can be lacking.”
Kirby additionally declined to say whether or not Hamas’ incursion into Israel ought to be seen as a failure of Israeli intelligence. “I feel there’s going to be a time and a spot for Israel to do this form of forensic work,” he mentioned. “Prime Minister Netanyahu has already spoken fairly candidly about this, calling it a failure on their half. They’ll check out this on the proper time, they want to do this.”
The main target, Kirby mentioned, “has received to be on ensuring that they’ll remove the actually genocidal menace” of Hamas. Kirby’s feedback echoed these of Secretary Antony Blinken, who addressed the report on Friday. “Proper now, the main target is on ensuring that they’ll do every thing attainable to make sure that it doesn’t occur once more,” Blinken instructed reporters in Dubai, the place he’s attending the COP28 local weather summit.
Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer vowed Sunday in an interview with ABC Information that Israel would “get to the underside” of the questions raised by the NYT report however mentioned he’d been unaware of the intelligence till the NYT reported on it final week.
The investigation, which drew on emails, paperwork, and interviews, describes a doc laying out plans for an assault that Hamas in the end adopted “with stunning precision.” The plans, which Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” reportedly circulated “broadly amongst Israeli army and intelligence leaders,” who concluded that such an assault was “past Hamas’s capabilities.”
