The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has rejected calls for an immediate independent inquiry into the security failures that allowed the deadliest attack in his country’s history.
Speaking to Israel’s parliament, Netanyahu told lawmakers: “First, I want to beat Hamas.”
A spokesperson for Netanyahu said the Israeli prime minister is not seeking to dodge an inquiry but that “the government is completely focused on winning this war”.
“What people want us to do right now, they don’t want us to go into a dramatic internal investigation while our hostages are still being held, and so many soldiers have abandoned their lives to protect the country,” said the spokesperson. “Of course there will be an investigation, but right now we’re focused on winning this war.”
The Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, had last week called for the formation of a state-commission inquiry for the 7 October attacks.
“It must examine all of us: the decision-makers and professionals, the government, the army and security services, this government – and the governments over the last decade that led to the events of 7 October,” Gallant told a military graduation ceremony, reportedly to applause.
A video of the three-hour meeting at the prime minister’s office, described in the Israeli media as “tense,” aired on television shortly afterwards, showing a series of confrontations between the bereaved families and the prime minister, who rejected their demands for an apology over his role in the security failures.
Netanyahu appeared surprised when the families described how their daughters had repeatedly warned of an impending attack, despite widespread reporting in the months since 7 October describing how the spotters were ignored when they tried to tell their commanding officers of the risk.
One participant in the meeting told Netanyahu that her daughter had “just finished her on-job training. She started her stint as an observation soldier just the week before. She came home and told us, Mum … there’s going to be an invasion.”
The meeting marks the highest-level acknowledgment of the Israeli military’s failure to listen to the lookout unit in Nahal Oz, where dozens of soldiers were killed and others taken hostage on the 7 October, part of a unprecedented attack by Hamas and other militants on towns and kibbutzim around the Gaza Strip.
Human Rights Watch accused Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam brigades, and at least four other Palestinian armed groups of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during the assault, in which almost 1,200 people were killed and 250 people taken hostage.
In a new report, the rights organisation pointed to a broad pattern of attacks on civilians, which they said amounted to “war crimes and crimes against humanity of murder, hostage-taking and other grave offences”.
An Israeli air and ground campaign targeting Gaza in the months since has killed more than 38,000 people, with thousands more believed buried underneath the rubble.
Netanyahu has repeatedly resisted calls for an inquiry into the military and security failures that preceded the Hamas-led attacks, despite a string of resignations and apologies from high-ranking members of the Israeli security establishment.
Last week, a leading member of Israel’s Shin Bet security agency known only by the initial “Aleph” resigned, reportedly saying in his farewell speech he was leaving amid deep disappointment that his department had failed to avert the attack.
The Israel Defense Forces’ intelligence chief, Maj Gen Aharon Haliva, resigned in April, making him the highest-ranking official to step down over the attack. “The intelligence division under my command did not live up to the task assigned to it,” he wrote in his resignation letter.
Despite protests calling on him to resign, as well as demands from a wide spectrum of Israeli society that he apologise for the security failures of 7 October, Netanyahu has strenuously resisted.
“The prime minister has been very forthright about the failures that led to 7 October,” said David Mencer, a spokesperson for Netanyahu, when asked why the PM had declined to apologise.
“Israel is a democracy and in the past has always had very far-reaching investigations, no-holds-barred investigations into why things have happened … I think there is no doubt that there will be one of those no-holds-barred investigations, but the prime minister believes that this should happen after the war has been won.”
