Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not speak to then-IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi on October 7 until three hours after the Hamas attacks began, KAN News reported on Thursday, following an earlier comprehensive exclusive story by The Jerusalem Post.
On Thursday, when Netanyahu released a copy of his schedule, he omitted the fact that Maj.-Gen Avi Gil, Netanyahu's personal military secretary, chose not to wake him up because he believed that no large-scale attack was imminent.
According to the KAN report, Netanyahu only spoke to Halevi at 9:45 a.m. that day during the situational assessment, despite receiving two separate phone calls about the ongoing terrorist attack at 6:29 a.m. and 6:40 a.m., and the prime minister did not ask to speak with Halevi during or immediately after either call.
One reason it took so long for them to speak, the Post revealed, is that Netanyahu waited until his chief of staff, Tzachi Braverman, arrived at military headquarters to assist with the Halevi meeting.
Braverman, unfortunately, was pinned down in his house as rocket sirens sounded.
The KAN report follows comments by Sara Netanyahu that the Democrats party chief, Yair Golan, had prior knowledge of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack in which over 1,200 Israelis were slaughtered and that launched the war that continues to this day.
"You claim to have been a fighter on October 7," said Sara Netanyahu. "You were there early in the morning, dressed and ready. At a very early hour, when others did not know, such as the prime minister."
Later, in an Instagram post, the prime minister claimed that IDF officers deliberately did not wake him for over an hour because they knew he would prevent the massacre.
The Post had reported that former Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar had ordered his staff to update Netanyahu at 5:15 a.m.
With no sense of imminent emergency, his Shin Bet staff only carried out his order an hour later, at 6:13 a.m., sixteen minutes before Hamas initiated its invasion.
During those 16 minutes, Gil chose not to wake the prime minister, believing, along with the entire apparatus, that no large-scale threat was imminent.
Netanyahu: Everything would have been different 'if they had woken me'
"They were afraid that if they woke the prime minister, I would activate the air force, and I would wake the entire IDF, and I would not let anyone get close to the fences - because we would kill them immediately," Netanyahu claimed in his post.
"If they had woken me, everything would have looked different," he added.
Yonah Jeremy Bob and Elliot Kaufman contributed to this report.