The man who predicted the October 7 attack

You heard it here first, and only now, nearly three years later, the Free Press has reported on this.

When I was in Israel in September of 2023, I met Yigal Carmon, the head of MEMRI. He’s described this way by Wikipedia:

Yigal is an email friend of Malgorzata, and she put me in touch with him before I went to Israel last September. The second day I was in Jerusalem, I visited MEMRI, and Yigal took me to lunch, along with a reporter named Benjamin Weinthal (name given with permission). During that lunch, Yigal said offhandedly, “You know, I think there will be a war between Hamas and Israel in September or October.” I was stunned, but the reporter wasn’t taken aback and in fact was the first journalist to report Yigal’s prediction.  I said “How do you know this?”  Apparently the buzz that MEMRI got from the Arab world had given him a hint.  Yigal added that there might be a terrorist attack, and if, say five or fewer IDF soldiers were killed, there probably wouldn’t be a war. But if it were ten or more, he added, Israel would probably go to war.

Of course at that time Yigal had no idea that the attack would be on Israeli civilians, not IDF soldiers, and far more than ten would die.

Later, Yigal gave us a “security tour” of the Jerusalem area, pointing out spots of interest in the Arab/Israeli conflict. When I returned to America, I sent his wife (who also gave me several great tours of Jerusalem) a copy of my two trade books as a token of gratitude. They were sent to the MEMRI offices. [JAC: They were returned six months later. No packages got into Israel at that time.]

On October 6, I informed Yigal that I mailed the books, and wrote this email (I’ve bolded the interesting bits):

A few excerpts:

In August 31, 2023, Yigal Carmon, a counterterrorism adviser to Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin more than a generation ago, published a warning on the website of his think tank, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). “Signs of Possible War in September–October,” said the headline of the article, written from Jerusalem in Carmon’s succinct, often brusque style.

Carmon, MEMRI’s 80-year-old founder, didn’t predict specifically that Hamas would instigate the war, or that it would begin on Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. But he stressed that there were increased rumblings and threats of a major operation coming from the militant chiefs in the Middle East that he and MEMRI constantly monitor through Arabic- and Persian-language media channels. “The leaders of the terror organizations have recently increased their threats of a comprehensive regional war, in response to Israeli threats to assassinate terror operatives and those who dispatch them,” wrote Carmon.

Carmon’s warning proclaimed that Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and other Iranian-backed proxy groups were acquiring and deploying increasingly sophisticated weapons and tactics that would compel a major Israeli reprisal. Those weapons “can cause a large number of Israeli fatalities,” Carmon wrote.

But that didn’t cause alarm in Jerusalem or Washington—or cause much reaction at all. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said the week before Hamas’s attack that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”

And those in Israel’s national security establishment who did respond to Carmon’s prediction of doom resolutely dismissed it. “At this time, I believe that neither Hezbollah nor Hamas have an appetite for a full-blown confrontation with Israel, because they understand how devastating it would be for them,” retired Israeli general Amir Avivi told Iran International on September 5, 2023.

. . .Three years later, Carmon’s credibility has been bolstered by a string of recent reporting by the American and Israeli media claiming that he was not the only one sounding the alarm, and that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu received advance warnings about a possible attack, including from the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. According to The Atlantic, Egypt’s intelligence chief flew to Tel Aviv less than two weeks before Hamas’s attack to report that the group seemed to be preparing for a major assault. Netanyahu’s office has denied that claim.

When I spoke to Carmon, he told me that Israel’s government didn’t need secret intelligence from Egypt or anywhere else to see that a catastrophic war could be coming. “It was all open-source. We’re not dealing with secrets,” he said about himself and MEMRI, the NGO that he started in 1998 and still leads, and that’s headquartered in Washington but has offices in Jerusalem and a number of European and Asian capitals. “We believed them. We didn’t dismiss it as bullshit,” he said of the threats issued by Israel’s enemies.

This week, Carmon is expanding on his warnings with the publication of a new report titled Chronicles of a Disaster Foretold and shared exclusively with The Free Press. In it, he lays out in much more detail the Arabic-language media and social media posts that pointed to Hamas’s preparations for an attack in 2023. The report also outlines evidence that the Palestinian militant group was channeling outside aid into weapons development.

I won’t describe the rest of the piece, which you can read for yourself (a subscription is worth it), but here are two more bits:

Particularly alarming in retrospect was a large Hamas military drill staged in Gaza in September 2023. MEMRI reported on the military drill at the time, and Carmon now believes it was essentially a “final walkthrough” for what occurred a month later.

. . . So how did Israel fail to better anticipate an attack? Carmon now believes that Netanyahu and his government were lulled into a false sense of security by their views that Hamas’s leadership was focused on this economic growth and that Qatari-supplied cash flowing into Gaza was essentially buying peace. That money was easily diverted into Hamas’s military growth, such as “building Hamas military power and its labyrinth of underground tunnels,” according to the new report by MEMRI.

I remember asking Yigal, after hearing him and the reporter, why the Israeli secret services (there are three) didn’t pay attention to MEMRI.  I don’t recall his answer, but it was something along the lines of “the security services are jealous of their own information and don’t pay attention to stuff coming from other sources.” Pity, that. Imagine if Israel had beefed up security at the border with Gaza before October!

h/t: Anna