The chairman of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee has reportedly said Egypt warned Israel of the surprise Hamas attack three days in advance. Speaking to the media after a closed-door briefing for lawmakers on the issue, Republican Michael McCaul told reporters, "We know that Egypt has warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could happen".
Without revealing any 'classified detail, he asserted, “I don’t want to get too much into classified [details], but a warning was given,” adding that it was unclear at what level.
He claimed that the Hamas attack, which caught the Israeli forces off-guard, might have been planned a year ago. He added, “We’re not quite sure how we missed it. We’re not quite sure how Israel missed it.”
This comes two days after local media carried reports quoting an Egyptian official who claimed that Israel had ignored repeated warnings about the Hamas attack.
The Egyptian official, as reported by the Times Of Israel, said Israeli officials were focused on the West Bank [Palestine] and played down the threat from Gaza. "Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is made up of supporters of West Bank settlers, who have demanded a security crackdown there in the face of a rising tide of violence over the last 18 months," the official was quoted as saying.
“We have warned them an explosion of the situation is coming, and very soon. It would be big. But they underestimated such warnings,” another official told the Associated Press.