Sullivan says administration never took its ‘eye off the ball’ on threats to Israel before Hamas attack

National security adviser Jake Sullivan said Sunday that the Biden administration had not taken its “eye off the ball” in regards to threats against Israel, defending remarks he made before the Hamas attack where he said things had quieted down in the region.

NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker played a clip of comments made by Sullivan just eight days before Hamas launched an attack on Israel earlier this month, where he said the time that he spends on crises in the Middle East is “significantly reduced” compared to his predecessors in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. During those remarks, he also said that the Middle East “is quiter than it has been in two decades.”

When asked how his assessment was “so far off the mark,” Sullivan said that he made those comments “in the context of developments in the wider Middle East region over the last few years.”

“And the two threats that I identified that were the most acute on my mind at the time were tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, as I mentioned, and the threat from Iran,” he said. “And so, yes, it is true that those two threats remained a real challenge to the long-term stability of the Middle East region, and we’ve just seen this absolutely tragic attack.”

“But at no point did the Biden administration take its eye off the ball of the threats to Israel,” he added.

Sullivan also noted that President Biden had met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu weeks before the attack “to discuss the security challenges facing the state of Israel.”

Both the Israeli and the U.S. intelligence agencies have faced criticism for failing to stop the planned attacks by Hamas, with both countries maintaining that they would assess how the attack wasn’t stopped at a later time.