John Kirby, the National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications, says the U.S. intelligence community has indicated it was not aware of Hamas’ plan to attack Israel, despite recent reporting that Israeli officials knew about the terrorist group’s plans for more than a year.
The New York Times reported that a 40-page blueprint detailing Hamas’ plans for its October 7 attack circulated among Israeli military and intelligence officials who dismissed the plans, believing they would be too difficult for Hamas to carry out. Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people and abducted 200 others during the attack.
Meet the Press host Kristen Welker asked Kirby about the Times report and whether the U.S. was aware of the intelligence and if not, why not.
“The intelligence community has indicated that that they did not have access to this document. That there’s no indications at this time that they had any access to this document beforehand,” Kirby said.
Welker asked if U.S. intelligence officials should have had access to the document.
“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.”
“As I said, our own intelligence community said that they’ve looked at this,” he added. “They have no indications at this time that they had any advance warning of this document or any knowledge of it.”
Kirby declined to say whether the attack represented a failure of Israeli and U.S. intelligence.
“I think there’s going to be a time and a place for Israel to do that sort of forensic work,” he said.
“I mean, [Israeli] Prime Minister Netanyahu has already spoken pretty candidly about this and calling it, you know, a failure on their part,” he said. “They’ll take a look at this at the right time. They need to do that. Right now, though, the focus has got to be on making sure that they can eliminate this truly genocidal threat to the Israeli people.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken responded to the Times report by saying there would be “accountability, looking at what led up to Oct. 7.”
“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.