The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has denied allegations that it had been warned about a possible operation prior to the unprecedented terrorist attack carried out this weekend.
Israel's military was caught flat-footed on Saturday as hundreds of fighters affiliated with Hamas, a terrorist group based in Gaza, and militants affiliated with other groups carried out a multipronged attack in the southern part of the country that resulted in the deaths of roughly 700 Israelis. Israel has said it will investigate the catastrophic intelligence failure.
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An Egyptian intelligence official said his country had warned Israel that “something big” could happen, though both U.S. and Israeli officials have denied that any such warning occurred.
“We have warned them an explosion of the situation is coming, and very soon, and it would be big. But they underestimated such warnings,” the official from Egypt, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told the Associated Press.
“We have warned them an explosion of the situation is coming, and very soon, and it would be big. But they underestimated such warnings,” the official said.
Netanyahu's office denied that Egypt warned Israel of a possible attack.
“No early message came from Egypt and the prime minister did not speak or meet with the intelligence chief since the establishment of the government — not indirectly or directly. This is completely fake news,” the statement read.
Israel has been preoccupied with controversial judicial overhauls proposed by Netanyahu's ultra-conservative coalition during much of this calendar year. The proposed legislation prompted hundreds of thousands of Israelis to protest in the streets weekly. This occurred as Israel's military had its attention from a security perspective on the West Bank, where they conducted multiple raids.
A senior Biden administration official said the United States had not seen intelligence to indicate an attack was imminent.
"I can't speak to what Egyptians are saying there, but I don't want to characterize the intelligence, and I don't want to get ahead of also what the Israelis will be looking at. But if the allegation is that we had some specific warning or indicator from another country, it's certainly not something that we've seen," the official said on Saturday.
"So I think that's really not ... accurate, other than just general concern, as we have had concern about, obviously, rising tensions, particularly in the West Bank, which we've been working very hard on," the official said. "But in terms of the level of sophistication of what transpired overnight here, and what continues to transpire, that's a very different, a different issue. And I've not seen anything to support that."
There is also conflicting information on Iran's level of involvement in the terrorist attacks. Iran has praised the militants' actions, though Israeli and U.S. officials have said they haven't seen the intelligence to indicate Tehran helped plan the attack yet.
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On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers met in Beirut with Hamas last week, giving final approval for the details of the planned attack, though the Biden administration has denied the claim.
"We don't have any direct intelligence at this point that would show Iran's direct involvement in this terrorist attack," State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said on CNN Monday morning. "We will continue to examine what information we can about what directly led to these attacks and whether or not Iran or any other country may have been involved, but at this point, we don't have any evidence to confirm that."