October 7 attack
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The October 7 attack is the October 7, 2023 Hamas assault on Israel, which John Kiriakou analyzes as a policy failure rather than an intelligence one. He argues it "did not actually begin on October 7th" but in 1948, and that decades of settler land seizures, killings and incarceration made an eruption inevitable, "you can't treat people as subhuman." The intelligence, he says, was there: Egypt warned Israel twice and everyone was monitoring the same communications, but Itamar Ben-Gvir insisted any attack would come from the West Bank and had response teams moved there, leaving the Gaza fence breached at some 29 points with responses taking up to two days. Kiriakou believes Israel was "asleep at the switch" and also welcomed a pretext to strike back with overwhelming force, citing a leaked document drafted three days later proposing to expel Gaza's Palestinians.

Historical background

Kiriakou traces the region's administrative history: Gaza was administered by Egypt until 1973 (with the West Bank and East Jerusalem under Jordanian administration), and after the Camp David Accords, Egypt declined to take Gaza back, telling Israel it was "nothing but trouble." He also recalls a YouTube video of Harry Truman describing how both Arabs and Jews came to hate him after he brokered Israeli independence, because he forced them into a negotiated arrangement neither side wanted. On more recent diplomacy, Kiriakou calls the Abraham Accords a great victory for Israel and the Gulf Arab states but "a punch in the throat to the Palestinians," noting that Trump had promised during his campaign to fix the Israeli-Palestinian problem "in one day."

The warnings and Shin Bet's dismissal

In a separate, more detailed account of the intelligence failure, Kiriakou says Israeli settlers living in the villages along the Gaza border had been deputized by the government to report unusual activity to Shin Bet, and for roughly a year before the attack had reported unusual gunfire and wall-climbing activity near the fence. Shin Bet's response, he says, was to dismiss the warnings, telling the settlers the next fight would be in the West Bank rather than Gaza, and eventually stopped accepting the reports altogether. Kiriakou also says that as soon as hostilities began on October 7 and 8, the first thing to come out of the Israeli government was a request for U.S. help in bombing Iran, on the claim that Iran was behind the attack, a claim U.S. intelligence could not confirm. In at least one other telling, Kiriakou has himself called the failure to shore up the border despite having Hamas's battle plans in hand "a major intelligence failure on the part of the Israelis", rooted, as elsewhere, in Israeli officials' arrogance and their belief the next attack would come from the West Bank rather than Gaza.

"Slipped past the goalie"

By July 2026 Kiriakou was willing to state a stronger version of the same analysis. Offered his interviewer's framing, that intelligence services find plots constantly, and that letting one succeed for political reasons amounts to saying "oops, it got past the goalie", he accepted it directly: "Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think that's exactly what happened." He liked the phrase enough to say he might steal it.

He also supplied the settlers' reports in more detail than before. For two weeks beforehand, Israelis living in the settlements along the Gaza line were reporting to the ministry of national security what they were watching across the fence: Palestinians "flying kites along the border... releasing balloons... checking wind speeds," and the volume of their walkie-talkie chatter. Itamar Ben-Gvir's answer, as Kiriakou renders it, was "No, nothing is happening in Gaza. The next attack is going to be in the West Bank", and government assets were directed accordingly, against cells in a West Bank where nothing was happening.

He sets the six-hour IDF response time against the case then being made for merging American and Israeli military capability, and notes that some of the Israelis killed that day were killed by their own side, in cars, trying to evacuate.

Aftermath: the Washington demonstration

Kiriakou says his friend Brian Becker, founder of the Answer Coalition, organized a demonstration in Washington, D.C. shortly after the October 7 attacks, as Israel began bombing Gaza. Becker's permit application to the Department of the Interior estimated 25,000 to 30,000 attendees; Kiriakou says roughly 300,000 people turned up, with the line stretching from the White House to the Capitol Building.

"Past the goalie"

Put the proposition that an intelligence service can simply let a known plot succeed for political reasons, described to him as a plot getting "past the goalie", John Kiriakou answered: "Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think that's exactly what happened."

The warnings he cites are civilian. For two weeks beforehand, Israelis living in settlements along the Gaza border reported to the Ministry of National Security that something was happening: Palestinians in Gaza were flying kites, releasing balloons, checking wind speeds, and there was chatter on the walkie-talkies. Itamar Ben-Gvir told them they were wrong, nothing was happening in Gaza, the next attack would be in the West Bank, and, in Kiriakou's account, directed government assets against possible cells there. "Well, there was nothing happening in the West Bank."

He adds the response time as a separate indictment, noting it took the IDF six hours to react, and that Israeli forces then killed Israelis in cars attempting to evacuate the area, a record he sets against the argument that the United States should merge militaries with them under Section 219.

As a starting date

Kiriakou treats the date itself as a contested piece of political messaging. In his assessment the Israeli government "has actually been very successful" at convincing large publics, "especially in the United States and in Western Europe, that this whole problem began on October 7th."

Put to Roger Waters on Kiriakou's programme, the framing drew a categorical answer: the attack was "a natural reaction" on the part of an occupied population and "an absolute side issue" set against a history Waters dates to the Nakba of 1948, insisting that resistance to occupation is not only predictable but a right. Waters also rejected the surrounding claim that the situation is complicated: it has "never been complicated," he said, and traced the modern dispute to the second sentence of the Balfour Declaration, which conditioned a Jewish homeland on the civil and religious rights of the existing population of Palestine not being prejudiced.

The polling baseline

Kiriakou uses the date as the reference point for the swing in American opinion, and treats the swing as the single most important political fact about the war. "On October 7th, 2023, Americans supported Israel over the Palestinians by 46 percentage points. This week, Americans support the Palestinians by one percentage point over the Israelis. So the Israelis are losing American public opinion, and they're doing it very quickly."

He invokes it to explain why Charlie Kirk's late turn against Israeli conduct in Gaza mattered: someone with that following switching sides "would be a serious problem for the Israelis."

The dividing line

Asked on television whether he considered Hamas a terrorist organisation, John Kiriakou made October 7th the dividing line: "I didn't, until October 7th, when they attacked civilians. I believed that they were a liberation organization. But when they murdered civilians, yes."

Asked in the same exchange whether the attack itself was a terrorist attack, his answer was qualified, "in part, yes", and he immediately paired it with the judgement that Israel's response was itself indefensible. The exchange is recorded at the Piers Morgan panel.

See also

- Hamas
- Itamar Ben-Gvir
- Benjamin Netanyahu
- Kiriakou's mother's 2008 trip to Israel
- Truman's CIA op-ed
