The National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby said Sunday on NBC News that the U.S. intelligence community has indicated it was not aware of Hamas’ plan to attack Israel.
The New York Times recently reported that Israeli officials obtained Hamas’ plans for its Oct. 7 attack more than a year before it happened, citing documents, emails and interviews. The Times reported that the document was circulated among Israeli military and intelligence officials, but experts dismissed the plan as one that would be too difficult for Hamas to execute.
In an interview on “Meet the Press,” host Kristen Welker pressed Kirby about the report, asking: “Was the United States aware of this intelligence, and if not, why not?”
“The intelligence community has indicated that that they did not have access to this document. That there’s no indications at this time that they had any access to this document beforehand,” Kirby said.
“Should they have? Given how closely U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials coordinate and are supposed to coordinate intelligence?” Welker asked.
“Intelligence is a mosaic and sometimes you know you can fashion things together and get a pretty good picture,” Kirby said. “Other times, you know that there’s pieces of the puzzle that are missing.”
“As I said, our own intelligence community said that they’ve looked at this,” he added. “They have no indications at this time that they had any advance warning of this document or any knowledge of it.”
Asked whether this was a failure on the part of Israeli and U.S. intelligence, Kirby said: “I think there’s going to be a time and a place for Israel to do that sort of forensic work.”
“I mean, [Israeli] Prime Minister Netanyahu has already spoken pretty candidly about this and calling it, you know, a failure on their part,” he said. “They’ll take a look at this at the right time. They need to do that. Right now, though, the focus has got to be on making sure that they can eliminate this truly genocidal threat to the Israeli people.”
NBC News has not independently verified the Times’ report.
