There are moments when a voice from inside the establishment refuses to stay quiet, and Ilan Segev’s voice is one of them. Segev is not a political opponent searching for attention; he is a former senior official in the Shin Bet, Israel’s security agency, a man who spent years studying the enemy and trying to protect the country. On Friday, speaking to Kan News’ Reshet Bet, he listened to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that he was never warned before October 7 and simply refused to accept it. “We need to distinguish between an intelligence picture and an intelligence warning,” he said, and the distinction he drew cuts through the fog of politics. An intelligence picture is broad and layered; it tells you that an enemy has a desire, a doctrine, a plan that has been practiced and refined. It warns about capabilities and intentions without always pointing at a specific hour and day. An intelligence warning is sharper; it is the red light that says “now” or “soon.” Segev’s point is that even if no one shouted a last-minute warning, there was a picture, and that picture had been visible for years. “No one should tell us that we didn’t know Hamas wanted to attack or that we didn’t understand its capabilities,” he said. The frustration in his voice was genuine: “Come on, guys, seriously, there’s a limit.” These words carry the weight of someone who knows how intelligence works from inside. It is not always delivered in a neat envelope with a big red stamp. It is often fragmented, disputed, buried under other priorities. But to claim, as Netanyahu has, that he “didn’t know or hear anything” is, in Segev’s view, simply false. It is also deeply insulting to the professionals who invested their lives in tracking Hamas, who built analytical models of what the organization might do, who argued in classified meeting rooms for a more aggressive posture, and who then had to watch their warnings be flattened into a convenient story of national ignorance. What Segev is asking for is not drama. He is asking for the record to be preserved, even when it is inconvenient.
What makes Segev’s testimony even more striking is that Netanyahu did not need a confidential briefing to know what Hamas was planning; he had described it years earlier, in public, in one of the most authoritative settings in Israeli politics. In April 2017, seated before the State Control Committee at the Knesset, the prime minister laid out the scenario that would become the October 7 massacre. “Commandos, drones, the takeover of communities, the kidnapping of civilians, the kidnapping of soldiers,” Segev recalled. “It’s all there.” The video, he noted, is on YouTube, available to virtually anyone who wants to see it. This is one of those details that feels almost impossible to process. A leader is not supposed to be a prophet of his own country’s destruction. But here was Netanyahu, six years before the attack, using plain words to describe waves of fighters crossing into Israeli territory, drones flying overhead, settlements and kibbutzim being overrun, families taken hostage, soldiers dragged across the border. He was not describing a fantasy; he was describing a known threat. And yet when the actual attack came, the message from the top was not “we saw this coming and failed to stop it.” It was “we didn’t know.” That contradiction is not just a political problem; it is a moral one. It forces families who lost everything to wonder whether their loved ones would still be alive if those words had been followed by action. Would the army have been prepared? Would the fence have been reinforced? Would the warnings have been taken more seriously? These questions cannot be answered with certainty, but they cannot be silenced either. When leaders claim ignorance in the face of their own public statement, they ask citizens to accept an impossible story. Segev is not willing to do that, and his reminder that the video is sitting online for everyone to see makes the denial all the more painful.
If Segev’s account were the only challenge to the official narrative, it might be easier to dismiss as the anger of one man. But in the same period, another voice emerged from the heart of Netanyahu’s own office, and that voice added a deeply unsettling detail. Avi Gil, the prime minister’s former military secretary, revealed that Netanyahu’s chief of staff had allegedly tried to change the official record of the prime minister’s schedule. That tiny, bureaucratic phrase—“official record”—contains a world of meaning. In a democratic state, the official record is how the public holds leaders accountable. It tells us who they met with, when they knew, what they did at different hours. It is not a luxury for historians; it is the skeleton of collective memory. If someone tries to alter that record after the event, it suggests that the truth itself is being treated as a liability. Gil also described the hours before the attack, explaining that intelligence reports circulated through the security establishment’s systems overnight and reached computers in the offices of the head of the Research Division and the Military Intelligence Directorate. In other words, the information was not locked away in a sealed bunker; it was moving through the nervous system of the defense establishment. It was being read, assessed, and passed along in rooms where men and women made life-and-death decisions. The fact that this did not result in a dramatic mobilization is a failure that needs to be understood, not hidden. But when official schedules are adjusted after the fact, it becomes impossible to know what was happening in the leadership’s own inner circle at the critical moments. Gil’s decision to speak is significant because former military secretaries do not usually criticize their old bosses. They live in a world of loyalty and discretion. For him to raise this issue publicly is a sign that the weight of October 7 is heavier than personal allegiance. It is also a signal to the public that the full story is still not being told, and that some of the people who know it have chosen to protect history instead of power.
Segev’s most direct charge is that Netanyahu did receive intelligence from the Shin Bet, and that his claim to have known nothing is false. The implications of this are enormous. It means the crisis on October 7 was not a surprise hidden in the darkness; it was a danger that was placed in front of the country’s leader. What happened after that is what Segev calls “maintain readiness”—a phrase that echoes through his interview like a painful refrain. But hearing is not the same as listening, and being informed is not the same as being moved to act. This is one of the most tragic dimensions of human leadership. A person can sit in a room, receive a detailed threat assessment, nod thoughtfully, thank the briefers, and then return to the same habits, the same priorities, the same hesitation. The information exists in his head, but it does not exist in his hands. It is information without consequence. Segev has been in the room on the other side of the table. He knows what it feels like to present a plan, watch the emotional temperature drop, and then hear a response that is neither “yes” nor “no” but “be ready.” On the surface, “maintain readiness” sounds responsible. It sounds like someone who wants to keep every option open. But in reality, it becomes a way to postpone hard choices. It keeps entire teams on standby, sensors humming, operatives waiting, until the moment passes and the opportunity disappears. Then another opportunity comes, and the same response is repeated. Segev’s frustration, it seems, is not only about Netanyahu’s personal decision-making; it is about a culture in which caution becomes paralysis. He is not naive about the risks of military action. But he knows that there is a difference between calculated risk and endless hesitation. Every day that a dangerous enemy is allowed to grow stronger is also a decision. The failure to choose is itself a choice, and on October 7, that hidden series of small choices became a national catastrophe.
The story of Ahmed Jabari is the most concrete example of this pattern, and it is heartbreaking because it is so human. Jabari was a senior Hamas military commander, a man of habit. The Shin Bet tracked him, learned his daily routines, and identified a window in which he could be eliminated. This was not a vague idea; it was a complex operation involving sophisticated technological preparations. Segev and his team ran simulations in northern Israel, tested their equipment, and practiced the timing again and again until they were confident. The operation required the cooperation of everyone: the technology division, explosives experts, security operatives, command and control. It was the kind of plan that consumes months of work and thousands of hours of human effort. When they were finally ready, they brought the proposal to the prime minister. His response was “Maintain readiness.” Not a decision. Not a deferral with a timeline. Just “maintain readiness.” Segev explains that this is not a passive state, no matter how bureaucratic it sounds. It means keeping the whole apparatus in motion—teams ready to move, technology ready to deploy, plans ready to execute—while waiting for a green light that may never come. It means telling skilled operators to keep themselves and their families at the edge of their seats for an indefinite period. And every time they returned to Netanyahu and said, “We are ready,” they heard the same words: “Maintain readiness.” Somewhere along the way, that readiness must have soured into something else—exhaustion, perhaps, or frustration, or doubt. How many times can a professional prepare for an operation and be told to wait before the preparation loses its edge? How many windows close without anyone ever knowing? This is not an abstract strategic debate. It is about individual people who dedicated their lives to stopping the enemies of their country and were never allowed to finish the work. It is about a leader who, in Segev’s telling, preferred the safety of inaction over the risk of action. And it is about the unknown cost of that preference, a cost that may not have been fully paid until October 7.
Taken together, the words of Ilan Segev and Avi Gil are more than testimony; they are a summons to accountability. October 7 was not an accident of nature. It was a human event, shaped by human decisions, including decisions to ignore, postpone, minimize, and deny. It was a day in which the distance between knowing and doing became a canyon. And in the aftermath, the instinct to protect power has often won out over the instinct to protect truth. Official records are protected. Public statements are carefully crafted. Blame is shifted. But the families of those who died, and the soldiers who fought in impossible conditions, deserve something better. They deserve a reckoning that is honest even when it is painful. Segev’s refusal to let “we didn’t know” stand is an act of respect for those families. It says that the truth is not too expensive to tell. Gil’s decision to speak about altered records is another act of respect. It says that democracy depends on evidence, not on polished narratives. The country cannot bring back the dead, and no inquiry will undo the terror of that morning. But the future is not yet written. The next enemy is already watching, learning, and testing the borders of Israel’s will. If the lesson of October 7 is forgotten or hidden, the next failure will be even easier. If the lesson is learned, if the leaders of tomorrow understand that “maintain readiness” is not a substitute for courage, then something can be rescued from the wreckage. This is what Segev is essentially asking for: not revenge, but memory. Not drama, but duty. He is asking Israel to look at the intelligence picture it had, the warnings that were passed, the operations that were prepared, and the decisions that were avoided, and to tell the truth, whatever it costs. Because the only thing that can transform a tragedy into a lesson is the willingness to stare at it without flinching. And the only way to honor the fallen is to make sure that the voices who knew, who warned, and who were silenced are finally heard.