Three years after the October 7 massacre, the anniversary is not a quiet memorial. It is a political battlefield, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party made that unmistakably clear in a sharply worded statement accusing Channel 12 of running a campaign of “false political propaganda against Netanyahu and Likud with the aim of bringing down the right-wing government and leading to a left-wing government that will establish a Palestinian state.” The statement landed on the third anniversary of the deadliest day in Israel’s modern history, a date still raw with grief and unresolved anger. For many Israelis, the anniversary is not abstract. It is the sound of sirens, the faces of the murdered, the desperate phone calls from the Nova festival, the images of hostages being dragged into Gaza. And for families and survivors, the political fight over who is to blame can feel like another layer of trauma. Yet this is exactly where the country now finds itself: in an election campaign, with the right and left trading not only policy proposals but also competing versions of what happened that morning. Likud’s statement was not just a defense of the prime minister; it was an offensive strike, aimed at the media, the security establishment, and the opposition. The party framed the Channel 12 coverage as deliberate psychological manipulation, “false consciousness engineering,” designed to reshape public opinion in the middle of an election and replace the current government with a coalition that would make dangerous concessions. In Likud’s view, the stakes could not be higher: a left-wing government, in its telling, would withdraw from Gaza, Judea and Samaria, Lebanon, and Syria, and would move toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. It is a stark and sweeping accusation, and it sets the tone for everything that follows.
At the heart of Likud’s statement is a defense of Netanyahu’s personal responsibility for the intelligence and policy failures that allowed Hamas to launch the attack. In Likud’s telling, Netanyahu did not receive any advance warning before October 7 about the Hamas attack from Gaza—and, the party said, neither Egypt nor the UAE passed along any warning. The party quoted Brett McGurk, a senior adviser to then-president Joe Biden, who appeared to corroborate the idea that Netanyahu was not given a heads-up. But the party went further, insisting that the opposite of the public narrative is true. According to Likud, the official protocols Netanyahu submitted to the State Comptroller show that the heads of Israel’s security establishment repeatedly claimed Hamas was deterred, that Hamas was seeking an arrangement, and that humanitarian easements should be given to Hamas to “preserve the quiet.” This is a crucial point in the party’s argument because it shifts blame away from the prime minister and toward the military and intelligence leadership, who are accused of feeding Netanyahu a consistent, reassuring picture. Likud points to a May 31 intelligence report that supposedly stated Hamas was “looking for new arenas in order to keep the Gaza Strip stable,” and a July 23 intelligence report that assessed no escalation from Gaza was materializing. That same report, Likud said, warned that the clear and immediate danger was in Lebanon, with an emphasis on Hezbollah. In other words, the party is saying the professionals whose job it was to predict the threat were looking in the wrong direction, and they gave the prime minister no reason to believe a catastrophic invasion from Gaza was imminent.
The party’s timeline continues with the days just before the attack. On October 1, Brig.-Gen. Amit Saar, then the head of the Military Intelligence Research Division, reportedly said that “Sinwar’s desire is to return to quiet.” Saar later resigned after the massacre, left the military in April 2024, and died of cancer on January 1, 2026. His death adds a tragic human layer to these debates, because he is no longer here to speak for himself, and yet his words are now being used in a political battle. On October 3, the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, reportedly told Netanyahu that “security quiet in exchange for easements embodies the potential to preserve stability in the Gaza Strip, possibly even for a long time.” This, Likud argues, was not a warning of imminent attack but exactly the opposite: a recommendation that the policy of allowing humanitarian goods and economic ease into Gaza was working. Likud also repeated its core assertion that Netanyahu was first updated about the Hamas attack at 6:29 a.m. on the morning of October 7, after the invasion had already begun. “During the night,” the party said, “there were those who saw in real time all the warning signs and did nothing with them. They did not update Israel Police, the emergency response squads, the kibbutzim, the soldiers on the border fence, the people at the Nova music festival, or the prime minister.” Likud’s conclusion is simple: if Netanyahu had been updated in real time, everything would have looked different. The party also praised Netanyahu as the leader who decided on the ground maneuver in Gaza and who stood up to American pressure to limit the response to an aerial attack.
From there, Likud moved from defense to a long list of achievements, all credited to Netanyahu personally. The party claimed that, against the heaviest pressures from home and abroad, including pressure from former security officials, Netanyahu led the conquest of Gaza and Rafah, the release of all of the hostages “down to the last one,” the pager operation against Hezbollah, the elimination of Hassan Nasrallah, Yahya Sinwar, and Mohammed Deif, the conquest of the Mount Hermon peak, and the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The statement also credited him with killing Iranian nuclear scientists and, above all, with saving Israel from annihilation by Iran’s atomic bombs. This is a sweeping, almost mythic narrative, intended to overshadow the failures of October 7 by pointing to everything that came after. But then the party returned to its enemies, accusing Channel 12 of “false consciousness engineering” and alleging that the broadcaster is trying to bring down the right-wing government and crown a new coalition made up of Gadi Eisenkot, Yair Golan, Avigdor Liberman, and Naftali Bennett. Likud described this prospective bloc as a “left-wing, Arab bloc” and claimed it would withdraw from Gaza, Judea and Samaria, Lebanon, and Syria, and establish a Palestinian state. The language is deliberately charged, designed to energize the right-wing base and to paint any political shift as an existential threat to Israel’s security and sovereignty.
Yet for all the confidence of Likud’s statement, The Jerusalem Post’s own earlier reporting has complicated the picture. In February, the Post revealed what happened among the security leadership in the critical hours of October 7, and the details are difficult for any single narrative to contain. Not one single IDF general was in the main operational command center underneath Tel Aviv’s Kirya Headquarters, known as “the pit,” when the attack occurred. By 7:30 a.m., the IDF General Staff knew only about 40 percent of the terror infiltrations. Israel’s top commanders did not really begin to manage the nation’s defense until about 1:00 p.m., around the same time Netanyahu released his first video to the public. Then-defense minister Yoav Gallant is described as the only top official whose staff did not receive any warning before the 6:29 a.m. invasion. Then-IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi was woken up between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. and received initial updates about a possible Hamas border threat. There were additional consultations between the IDF and the Shin Bet between 4 a.m. and 5:15 a.m., with then-Shin Bet director Ronen Bar ordering his staff to update the prime minister at 5:15. But the Shin Bet staff only carried out that order at 6:13 a.m. In those sixteen minutes between the Shin Bet’s warning and the start of the infiltrations, the official named Gil chose not to wake Netanyahu, believing—along with the entire security apparatus—that no large-scale threat was imminent. The Post also reported that Netanyahu, Gallant, and Halevi did not speak until almost four hours into the war. These facts matter because they show a systemic collapse, not simply a failure by one person, and the Post noted that Netanyahu consistently leaves out the detail about Gil’s decision when he discusses the timeline, because it undermines his effort to portray the defense establishment as intentionally leaving him in the dark.
In the end, this is more than a battle over political careers. It is a struggle over the meaning of October 7 itself. For the bereaved families, the former hostages, the survivors of the Nova festival, and the soldiers who fought in the south, the anniversary is a time of profound loss, and the question of who failed them is inseparable from the question of what kind of country Israel will be. Likud’s statement offers a version of reality in which Netanyahu was a victim of misinformation from every direction, a leader who somehow saw through the false security, even though he was reportedly not told about the attack until it was already happening. The opposing version, informed by investigative reporting, suggests that the entire national security establishment, including the prime minister’s office, was functioning in a fog of assumptions and procedural delays. Neither story is comfortable. But the human need behind both is the same: to understand how so much blood was spilled, and to make sure it never happens again. As Israel moves through another election season, the risk is that the memory of the dead becomes a rhetorical weapon, used not to seek truth but to win power. For Israelis, and especially for those whose lives were shattered that day, the most human response is not to choose a side in a propaganda war but to demand accountability, transparency, and an honest reckoning with what went wrong. The pain of October 7 is still too fresh to be reduced to political spin, and the country’s leaders, in every party, owe the victims more than that.