Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz refused on Wednesday to say there was no betrayal from inside Israel involved in Hamas’ surprise attack on October 7, 2023. Speaking at a conference sponsored by the Ynet website and the Yedioth Aharonoth daily, Katz was asked about comments made this week by Sara Netanyahu, the prime minister’s wife, about the chairman of Israel’s Democrats party, Yair Golan, in which she hinted that he must have known about the attack in advance.
When asked about the issue on Wednesday, Katz, who is a affiliated with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, said that he doesn’t “consume the media” and “can only comment on what I know.” Katz said that Hamas officials had coordinated their attack with Hezbollah in Lebanon and with Iran and had applied a Hamas military plan dubbed Jericho Wall to overwhelm the Israeli army’s Gaza Division on the border, a plan that Katz said Israel’s political leadership had not been informed about in advance.
“What I know from the material I saw is that the failure is deep enough to explain what happened there.” But he explicitly refused to say there was no betrayal. The defense minister also claimed that in its war with Iran in June of last year, Israel destroyed the Iranian nuclear program and said that it has not been revived since. He had praise for the Israel Defense Forces and said that the IDF is prepared to attack Iran. “If they attack us, we will respond with great force, without depending on anyone,” he added, in an apparent reference to the United States.
On Monday, in an interview on Channel 14, the prime minister’s wife, Sara, hinted that Yair Golan, who is a former IDF deputy chief of staff, was part of a conspiracy on the morning of the Hamas attack, which began just before 6:30 A.M.
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“You’re a military man of such high rank, claiming to be a fighter on October 7. You were there early in the morning, already dressed and ready, at a very, very early hour, when others, such as the prime minister, didn’t know,” she said. When asked if there was a betrayal on October 7, she said she didn’t want to speak.” But she added that she “is not a party to any theories” and “does not know.”
She also demanded the establishment of a “real commission of inquiry” into the events of October 7. The Netanyahu government has resisted the convening of a formal state commission of inquiry appointed by the president of the Supreme Court.
The day after the interview was broadcast, Yair Golan sent Sara Netanyahu a warning letter demanding that she apologize within 24 hours and pay compensation to be donated to the survivors of the Nova music festival, where hundreds were killed on October 7 in the Hamas attack. If she failed to do so, Golan’s letter stated, he would sue her for 2.5 million shekels (about $833,000). Mrs. Netanyahu has refused to apologize.
Her husband, the prime minister, subsequently denied that there had been any “internal betrayal” on October 7.