Signs of impending Hamas assault weren’t treated with urgency by Israel, October 7 report finds
The first Israeli military commission into the Oct 7 attacks found military officials were blindsided by the Hamas-led assault after badly misinterpreting the militant group’s intentions and vastly underestimating its capabilities – even hours before the attack.
The first Israeli military commission into the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks found military officials were blindsided by the Hamas-led assault after badly misinterpreting the militant group’s intentions and vastly underestimating its capabilities – even hours before the attack.
Signs of an impending assault were everywhere. But even preparations by Hamas as blatant as militants activating Israeli SIM cards and moving its forces to designated gathering points on the evening of Oct. 6, 2023, weren’t treated with urgency by Israel officials, the report concluded.
Those officials believed Hamas was either doing a military exercise, preparing to defend from an attack by Israel, or potentially readying small pinpoint cross-border raids. The indicators were reminiscent of events over the past year, strengthening the misconception among military officials that nothing was out of the ordinary.
The findings, the result of the highest-level probe into the worst attack on Israel in the country’s eight-decade history, shed new light on the scale of Israeli intelligence failures and scope of Hamas’s planning.
Officials misread Hamas, dismissed planning documents pointing to an assault by the group and overlooked clues in the lead up to the multipronged attack that triggered more than a year of fighting and shook the Middle East.
The details will likely prompt further reckoning in Israel where no politician, and only a handful of military figures have resigned over the failings, though the report doesn’t apportion blame.
Israel missed crucial clues while looking elsewhere
Hours before the attack, senior military officials stayed up late into the night discussing suspicious behaviour by Hamas that day. Israeli military chief of staff Herzi Halevi told his deputies to gather more information for a briefing later the next day. No one thought time was a critical factor, Israeli officials said.
However, Israel’s top general in its north was summoned late that night to army headquarters in Tel Aviv. Israel’s military was preoccupied by a potential attack in its north by Hezbollah militants from Lebanon after months of tension with the group, making Gaza a blind spot that ultimately became an easy target for Hamas.
The Gaza rulers, who had lain low for two years after a weeks-long fight with Israel in 2021, took advantage that October Saturday, erupting over the border on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah when fewer troops were along the border than usual.
Hamas blew past Israel’s worst-case scenario
In gaming out an assault from Gaza, Israel’s military planners assumed a worst-case scenario in which Hamas tried to breach four to eight points along the border, the report found. In fact, the militants attacked nearly 60.
Hamas’s first target was the Israeli base responsible for the area around the Gaza Strip, where it killed the top commanders and wiped out Israel’s intelligence capabilities in the area. The strike left Israel blind for three hours as the broader operation unfolded and allowed waves of militants to cross the fence into Israel unopposed.
Militants had free rein to attack military bases, kill civilians at a desert rave and in agricultural communities. In total, 1200 security personnel and civilians were killed that day and 251 people were taken hostage. It would take 5½ hours to get reinforcements to the area and three days to fully repel the attackers.
“No one anywhere in Israel was able to say on 6.29am on Oct. 7 that Hamas is about to perform a major attack on Israel,” referring to the time that Hamas fired 1400 rockets into Israel to divert attention from its ground invasion. “There was no such person in our system.” Israel did have regular soldiers in intelligence and observers in the field who warned Hamas was planning an attack. But that information wasn’t enough to dissuade senior intelligence officials from the overall assessment that Hamas didn’t want a war.
Israel discovered Hamas’s plan years before the attack
Even after discovering in 2022 a Hamas plan to attack southern Israel, the country’s officials determined the document, named Operation Jericho Wall, was more an aspiration than an actual assault manual and that Hamas wasn’t interested in starting a war.
The theoretical plan for an attack on southern Israel had been approved by Hamas in 2019, and received operational approval in August 2021. By April 2022, Hamas was already considering dates for the attack, which was only known to a select few, but for which thousands of operatives had trained for years in preparation.
“We ended up with a strategy that collapsed on Oct. 7,” said a senior military official who briefed reporters ahead of a summary of the investigation’s public release on Thursday. The military hasn’t said when the full report will be released to the public.
Some in Hamas had planned a surprise attack against Israel in 2014, but were overruled, the probe said. A war broke out that summer and Hamas officials came away with little but an understanding that the next major conflict would need to start with a surprise attack, the Israeli officials said.
The origins of the Oct. 7 attack stretch back to 2016, with the rise of the group’s now-deceased leader Yahya Sinwar through the leadership ranks, the investigation said.
Israel had believed Hamas was focused on building a state in Gaza and trying to take control of the West Bank, before any major confrontation. That was true, the Israeli officials said, until Sinwar took control and reoriented the group toward a direct attack on Israel. But Israeli intelligence missed the strategic shift, the probe said.
Hamas launched the October 2023 attack, its own officials have said, after seeing the internal upheaval in Israel caused by a controversial plan to overhaul the country’s judiciary.
As the assault neared its crescendo, Mohammad Deif, the US-designated terrorist group’s military chief, called on all Gazans to grab any weapon they could and storm Israel, at which point thousands of civilians stormed across the border, looting and engaging in violence. By noon on Oct. 7, 2023, there were 5600 militants and civilians from Gaza inside Israel.
Israel was blind for hours as attack began
Starting at 6.29am, as Hamas fired rockets, 1500 fighters invaded. “We are at war,” an Israeli brigade commander said over the radio at 6.45am. The first hours of the attack were the most damaging and deadly for Israel because it had no eyes on the ground after its chain of command had been destroyed. Some soldiers and commanders drove themselves to southern Israel after seeing reports on social media about the attack but large-scale reinforcements took hours.
“The big challenge in those critical hours was to understand what was going on,” said a second senior military official.
Israel had one to two drones in the air at the time the attack began but lacked the forces on the ground. The military said friendly fire incidents were limited but wouldn’t specify a figure.
Hamas hoodwinked Israel which believed its own intelligence hype Hamas deceived Israel into thinking its priority was economic concessions to strengthen its rule over Gaza, the Israeli military officials said.
Hamas sat out fighting between Israel and another smaller militant group in Gaza following its 2021 battle with Israel. That led Israeli officials to assume Hamas had been deterred.
Crucially, Israel had misjudged how much Hamas thought Iran, Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel’s own Palestinian citizens would join the battle. Hamas ultimately never received the full backing from any of these groups, though Hezbollah launched rockets across Israel’s border, creating a two-front war that divided Israel’s forces.
Israeli intelligence lacked any real internal criticism of its thinking, an official said. In recent decades, military intelligence had strayed from the key mission of providing an early warning and become deeply involved in providing tactical intelligence for Israel’s wider military operations.
“The specific intelligence details that popped up during that night [of Oct. 6, 2023] weren’t strong enough to break a years-long conception,” said the official.
What’s the upshot for Israel?
The central takeaway of the probe was that Israel can’t allow threats to grow on its border, as it did with Hamas and Hezbollah.
The report recommends Israel establish an intelligence unit whose sole purpose is to evaluate warning signals, significantly increase the size of the military and beef up border defences.
The Oct. 7 survivors have been pushing for a formal state commission of inquiry, which would have more power to hold bodies or individuals to account.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the demand, saying Israel must first finish the war.
Dow Jones Newswires
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