National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby said Sunday on NBC News that the U.S. intelligence community has indicated that it was not aware of Hamas’ plan of attack on Israel.
The New York Times recently reported that Israeli officials received Hamas’ plans for its Oct. 7 attack more than a year before it happened, citing documents, emails and interviews. The Times reported that the document was circulated among Israeli military and intelligence officials, but experts dismissed the plan as one that would be too difficult for Hamas to execute.
In an interview on “Meet the Press,” host Kristen Welker pressed Kirby about the report, asking: “Was the United States aware of this intelligence and if not, why not?”
“The intelligence community has indicated that that they did not have access to this document. That there’s no indications at this time that they had any access to this document beforehand,” Kirby said.
“Should they have? Given how closely U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials coordinate and are supposed to coordinate intelligence?” Welker asked.
“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,” he added. “They have no indications at this time that they had any advanced warning of this document or any knowledge of it.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
