JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused security officials on Tuesday of intentionally failing to wake him on the morning of Hamas's October 7 attacks, a day after his wife claimed an opposition figure knew of the onslaught in advance.
Netanyahu is heading into close-fought elections later this year, and has come in for sustained criticism in the national debate over who is responsible for the failures that led to the October 7, 2023 security fiasco.
The prime minister has alleged in the past that security officials refrained from waking him that morning, insisting that the attack would have been contained if he had stepped in earlier, but only in recent days has he begun to claim that the move was intentional.
"Why didn't they wake me? Because they knew that I, as prime minister of Israel, would immediately have ordered to put the entire army on alert, to wake up all the towns (on the Gaza border)... It's so obvious that all of this could have been done. This has been hidden from the public," the premier said during a live interview on Instagram.
Netanyahu's assertions echo those he made in an another podcast interview published Monday, in which he blamed the military's top brass and Ronen Bar, head of the Shin Bet security service at the time, for refusing to wake him in order to avoid the "miscalculation" of a military escalation with Hamas.
"They didn't believe Hamas would attack," he added. "They knew exactly what I would do."
First lady tars Golan
His remarks on Tuesday came after his wife Sara, in a separate television interview broadcast the night before, claimed that opposition figure Yair Golan was aware of the plan for the Hamas attack before it happened.
The comments drew outrage from the opposition and a lawsuit threat from Golan, a former deputy military chief of staff who heads Israel's centre-left Democrats party.
On the morning of October 7, upon hearing about the Hamas attack, Golan rushed to southern Israel to rescue at least six people at the site of the Nova music festival, where at least 370 people were killed.
Sara Netanyahu claimed that Golan was "already dressed and ready" at dawn that day, "while others knew nothing, including the prime minister".
Her interview was broadcast on Israel's Channel 14, which is close to the government.
In a post on X, Golan threatened to sue the first lady for 2.5 million shekels (around $830,000) unless she issued "an apology within 24 hours and compensation to be donated to survivors of the Nova" festival.
"Sara Netanyahu spread a false conspiracy in an attempt to rewrite October 7, turning those who went out to save lives into traitors and those who abandoned Israel's security into victims," he said, in a jab at the prime minister.
Golan's party strongly condemned her "vile and deceitful" remarks.
"Spreading conspiracies against Major General Yair Golan, and smearing his heroism on October 7, is crossing a red line that borders on insanity," it wrote on X.
'Mad conspiracy'
Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief who has emerged as the frontrunner to challenge Netanyahu in the upcoming October election, slammed the "mad conspiracy of betrayal" spread by the premier's wife.
Sara Netanyahu's accusations reflect recurrent conspiracy theories among a part of the Israeli political class.
According to a poll conducted for Channel 13 in August, 40 percent of Israelis, and 63 percent of voters for the current right-wing coalition, believe that internal treason led to the October 7 attack -- the deadliest day in Israel's history.
Hamas's attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Militants also took 251 hostages, 44 of them already dead, into Gaza.
Israel responded with a massive offensive in Gaza that has killed at least 73,462 people, according to the Palestinian territory's health ministry, which operates under Hamas authority and whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations.