The US government was not informed in advance of the attack that Hamas planned to carry out against Israel on October 7, the director of strategic communications of the US presidency’s national security council, John Kirby, said yesterday on Sunday.

“Our own intelligence community has indicated that it has looked into the matter — it has no indication so far that it was alerted (…) or that it knew of the existence of this document,” Mr. Kirby told NBC television.

He was responding to a question about a New York Times report last week that Israeli intelligence had detailed information about Hamas’ plan to launch a large-scale attack about a year before it took place.

Israeli military intelligence was in possession of a roughly 40-page document from the Palestinian Islamist movement that detailed, point by point, an attack like the one carried out by members of its military arm, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, on October 7, with as a result of which some 1,200 people in Israel lost their lives, according to the report.

The document, which circulated in Israeli intelligence circles under the code name “Jericho Wall,” did not specify when the attack would be launched, but it did contain specifics about how Israel’s security measures would be saturated for to then raid military bases and cities.

However, the military leadership considered it an overly ambitious and difficult plan to implement, despite warnings from intelligence analysts.