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.”[1][2][3] 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.[4][5][6] 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.[7][8]
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.”[9] 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.[10] 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.”[11]
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.[12] 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.[13] 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.[14] 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.[15]
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.[16]