The U.S. was not aware of a Hamas attack plan in Israel’s possession that laid out the devastation of Oct. 7 more than a year before it took place, a top U.S. security official said on Sunday.
John Kirby, the National Security Council’s Coordinator for Strategic Communications, told NBC’s Meet the Press anchor Kristen Welker that the U.S. intelligence community “did not have access” to a document codenamed “Jericho Wall.” The 40-page document, according to The New York Times, outlined Hamas’ specific plans for the Oct. 7 attack more than a year out, but Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed it as too ambitious for the group.
“There’s no indications at this time that they had any access to this document beforehand,” said Kirby, whose remarks were the first confirmation from the Biden administration that it did not have advance knowledge of Hamas’ attack plan.
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Welker pressed him on whether Israel, one of the U.S.’ closest allies, should have shared the document in advance. The Israeli government has faced criticism over intelligence failures that allowed Hamas to launch the attack that killed about 1,200 people, though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to dodge such conversation until after the war.
“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. They have no indications at this time that they had any advanced warning of this document or any knowledge of it.”
