National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Sunday that the U.S. intelligence was not aware of a document obtained by Israel last year that detailed the plans for Hamas’ October 7 attack. The New York Times reported the blueprint’s existence last week.
“The intelligence community has indicated that they did not have access to this document that there’s no indications at this time if they had any access to this document beforehand,” Kirby told NBC’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” Sunday morning.
Welker pressed Kirby on whether the U.S. intelligence should have been given access to the 40-page document, especially given the close ties between the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies. POLITICO reported Friday that there was no indication Israel had shared the blueprint for the attack with the United States.
“Intelligence is a mosaic, and sometimes you know you can fashion things together and get a pretty good picture,” Kirby replied. “Other times, you know that there’s pieces of the puzzle that are missing.”
Kirby also declined to say whether Hamas’ incursion into Israel should be seen as a failure of Israeli intelligence. “I think there’s going to be a time and a place for Israel to do that sort of forensic work,” he said. “Prime Minister Netanyahu has already spoken pretty candidly about this, calling it a failure on their part. They’ll take a look at this at the right time, they need to do that.”
The focus, Kirby said, “has got to be on making sure that they can eliminate the truly genocidal threat” of Hamas. Kirby’s comments echoed those of Secretary Antony Blinken, who addressed the report on Friday. “Right now, the focus is on making sure that they can do everything possible to ensure that it doesn’t happen again,” Blinken told reporters in Dubai, where he’s attending the COP28 climate summit.
Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer vowed Sunday in an interview with ABC News that Israel would “get to the bottom” of the questions raised by the NYT report but said he’d been unaware of the intelligence until the NYT reported on it last week.
The investigation, which drew on emails, documents, and interviews, describes a document laying out plans for an attack that Hamas ultimately followed “with shocking precision.” The plans, which Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” reportedly circulated “widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders,” who concluded that such an attack was “beyond Hamas’s capabilities.”
Jack McCordick
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