The U.S. intelligence community had no advance knowledge of Hamas’ plan to attack Israel on Oct. 7, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said on Sunday.
The New York Times reported last week that Israeli officials obtained plans for the attacks, they named code-named “Jericho Wall,” over a year before the attacks took place but the officials dismissed the idea, saying that Hamas lacked the capability to carry out the attacks.
“The intelligence community has indicated that they did not have access to this document,” Kirby said in an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
“Intelligence is a mosaic and sometimes you fashion things together and get a pretty good picture, and other times there’s pieces of the puzzle that are missing,” Kirby added in response to a question about whether Israel should have shared the document with the U.S.
He also declined to say if the attacks showed a failure on the part of Israel's intelligence, but said there would be “a time and a place” to examine what happened.
“Prime Minister [Benjamin] 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,” Kirby said, adding, “The focus has got to be on making sure that they can eliminate the truly genocidal threat” of Hamas.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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