Eleven days before Hamas launched its October 7, 2023 attack, Egypt’s intelligence chief flew to Israel with a warning that the group appeared to be preparing for something far larger than the routine escalation Israeli officials had come to expect, according to a new report by The Atlantic.
Abbas Kamel, then director of Egypt’s General Intelligence Service, arrived at Ben Gurion Airport on September 26 aboard a chartered Cessna linked to Egyptian intelligence, the magazine reported. The aircraft remained in Israel for just over an hour.
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Kamel did not arrive with the date of an attack, a battle plan or intelligence describing how Hamas would breach the border less than two weeks later. What he reportedly brought was broader but urgent: a warning that the situation in Gaza was approaching a dangerous breaking point and that Hamas appeared to be preparing for a major operation.
The account adds another layer to a question that has followed Israel since October 7: not simply whether warning signs existed, but how many reached senior officials — and how they were interpreted.
A short visit with an urgent message
According to The Atlantic, Kamel urged Israeli officials to change course quickly and offer additional economic concessions to Hamas in an effort to reduce tensions.
He warned that without a shift in policy, Gaza could “blow up in your faces,” according to the report.
The magazine said it was not clear exactly which Israeli officials met Kamel during the brief visit, or what happened to his warning once the meeting ended. But officials from several countries who were briefed on the episode told The Atlantic that a visit by Egypt’s intelligence chief should itself have carried significant weight.
Egypt was not a distant observer. Cairo had long served as an intermediary between Israel and Hamas, maintaining intelligence and security contacts with both sides and playing a central role in previous ceasefire negotiations.
Kamel himself had been deeply involved in that channel. In 2021, for example, he visited Israel for talks on Gaza with then-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and other Israeli officials.
That history is part of what makes the alleged September 2023 visit consequential: the warning would have come from an official with direct access to both Israeli leaders and Hamas-related mediation channels.
Egypt had already said it warned Israel
The Atlantic report does not emerge in isolation.
Two days after the October 7 attack, an Egyptian intelligence official told The Associated Press that Cairo had repeatedly warned Israel that “something big” was coming from Gaza.
“We have warned them an explosion of the situation is coming, and very soon, and it would be big,” the official said at the time, adding that Israel had underestimated the warnings.
The same account said Israeli attention had been heavily focused on violence in the occupied West Bank rather than Gaza. Israel had moved forces and political attention toward the West Bank during a period of heightened attacks and clashes there, one of several factors later examined in debates over the intelligence failure.
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Netanyahu’s office rejected the Egyptian claims in October 2023. It said the prime minister had neither spoken with nor met Kamel since the formation of his government and described reports of a direct warning as “fake news.”
The new Atlantic report presents a different version: that Kamel physically traveled to Israel on September 26 and delivered the warning during a brief stop at Ben Gurion Airport.
Tzachi Hanegbi, who was Netanyahu’s national security adviser at the time of the attack, disputed that account when contacted by the magazine, denying that such a visit or Egyptian warning occurred. Netanyahu’s office did not respond to The Atlantic’s requests for comment, according to the report.
The warning was broad, not operational
That distinction matters.
Nothing in the new reporting suggests that Kamel handed Israel a precise intelligence package laying out an October 7-style assault. There was reportedly no date, no detailed description of Hamas’s intended routes into Israel and no operational warning matching the attack that eventually unfolded.
Hamas’s assault began on the morning of October 7, when militants crossed from Gaza into southern Israel by land, air and sea, killing roughly 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages.
The question is therefore not whether Egypt possessed the full Hamas plan. The evidence presented so far does not show that it did.
The question is whether Israel received enough separate indicators — from Egypt, from internal intelligence and potentially from other regional governments — that senior officials should have reassessed the assumption that Hamas remained deterred.
A second disputed warning — from the UAE
That question has grown more complicated in recent weeks.
Earlier this month, Haaretz reported that UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed had warned Netanyahu roughly 10 days before October 7 that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was preparing a major operation.
According to the report, bin Zayed warned that the move could lead to bloodshed and wider regional instability. Netanyahu’s office strongly denied the account, saying the conversation had not taken place.
Channel 12 later reported that UAE intelligence had also passed information to Israel’s Shin Bet about possible Hamas action before the attack, citing Emirati sources.
Those accounts remain disputed and should not be treated as established fact. But together with the Egyptian reporting, they have widened the debate over what warning signals existed outside Israel’s own intelligence system.
The larger intelligence failure
Israeli investigations and reporting since October 7 have already documented failures inside the country’s own security establishment.
Hamas had conducted training, prepared infiltration plans and taken steps to conceal the scale of its preparations. Israeli intelligence also held material related to Hamas’s broader attack concepts, while analysts and officers raised concerns before the assault. The central failure was not an absence of information alone, but how the available information was interpreted and prioritized.
The new Egyptian account matters because it moves part of that question beyond Israel’s internal intelligence collection.
If Kamel made the September 26 trip described by The Atlantic, Israel was not simply dealing with scattered technical indicators or lower-level assessments. A senior intelligence chief from a neighboring state with direct access to Gaza mediation channels had traveled personally to deliver a warning.
Whether that warning reached Netanyahu, how seriously it was treated and what — if anything — Israeli officials did in response remain disputed.
Three years after October 7, those questions are still unresolved. And as new accounts emerge from Egypt, the UAE and Israel itself, the issue is becoming less about whether warnings existed at all — and more about how many different warnings were received before they were recognized as pieces of the same threat.
Sources: The Atlantic; Associated Press; Times of Israel; Haaretz reporting carried by AP; Channel 12 reporting