François Picard is pleased to welcome Vivian Salama from Washington. An attorney and staff writer at The Atlantic, Salama has reported from more than 85 countries. Her latest investigation takes us back to September 26, 2023. As Israel's national security establishment gathered to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War and one of the country's greatest intelligence failures, Abbas Kamel, then Egypt's intelligence chief, made an exceptionally rare and discreet visit to Israel with a stark warning about the dangerous situation unfolding in Gaza.
Salama spent months reconstructing that visit, drawing on Israeli and independent flight data, sources on both sides of the Egyptian-Israeli border, and people subsequently briefed on the meeting. Her reporting establishes that Kamel spent approximately 67 minutes in Israel and met with senior Israeli national security officials. The central question is not simply whether a warning existed, but what happened to it once it entered Israel's political and security machinery.
Was there any follow-up? As one former Israeli official told Salama: “There is no world where top Israeli officials meet with the head of Egyptian intelligence and Benjamin Netanyahu is not aware.”
Egypt, however, was not the only source of warning. In the months and weeks before October 7, Israeli surveillance, intelligence and military personnel were themselves detecting unusual Hamas activity in Gaza, including exercises and preparations that bore striking similarities to the attack that ultimately unfolded. And, as Haaretz recently reported, the UAE's leader also warned Netanyahu of the danger from Gaza.
Yet the warnings did not produce an adequate response. Israel's subsequent military inquiries have acknowledged profound failures in assessing Hamas's capabilities and intentions and in recognizing the scale and imminence of the threat. Salama's reporting therefore opens a much larger question: how can critical information exist within a security system and still fail to become effective action?
With pressure mounting for an independent investigation into the failures surrounding October 7, Salama continues to piece together a story that remains unfinished: who met with Kamel, what reached Netanyahu and his advisers, and why did the warnings fail to prompt a stronger response?
