The Man Who Raised the Alarm Before October 7

On August 31, 2023, Yigal Carmon, a counterterrorism adviser to Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin more than a generation ago, published a warning on the website of his think tank, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). “Signs of Possible War in September–October,” said the headline of the article, written from Jerusalem in Carmon’s succinct, often brusque style.

Carmon, MEMRI’s 80-year-old founder, didn’t predict specifically that Hamas would instigate the war, or that it would begin on Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. But he stressed that there were increased rumblings and threats of a major operation coming from the militant chiefs in the Middle East that he and MEMRI constantly monitor through Arabic- and Persian-language media channels. “The leaders of the terror organizations have recently increased their threats of a comprehensive regional war, in response to Israeli threats to assassinate terror operatives and those who dispatch them,” wrote Carmon.

Carmon’s warning proclaimed that Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and other Iranian-backed proxy groups were acquiring and deploying increasingly sophisticated weapons and tactics that would compel a major Israeli reprisal. Those weapons “can cause a large number of Israeli fatalities,” Carmon wrote.

But that didn’t cause alarm in Jerusalem or Washington—or cause much reaction at all. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said the week before Hamas’s attack that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”